Is there a United States law requiring digital ID for bank accounts?

1. What “digital ID” means here — and why definitions matter

“Digital ID” is used loosely across reporting to mean everything from mobile driver’s licenses and biometric passkeys to decentralized wallets and verifiable credentials, and that lack of a single, accepted legal definition is central to why no single U.S. law currently mandates one for banking; coverage of trends and technologies shows rapid evolution but not a settled regulatory requirement ^{[5] [6]}.

2. The federal picture: proposals, reports and absence of a mandate

Congressional work has urged federal attention to digital identity — for example, the Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023 generated committee reporting — but the legislative record accompanying that bill explicitly stated it would not change existing law as reported, underscoring that proposals so far are about study and coordination rather than imposing a national legal requirement that banks must accept digital IDs ^[1].

3. States, industry model bills and private standards are filling the gap

States are moving more aggressively than the federal government to recognize and pilot digital ID schemes, and model policies from groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council propose frameworks for digital-asset and identity-adjacent banking activities at the state level, but these are model policies and not a uniform federal mandate forcing banks to use digital IDs to onboard customers ^{[7] [2]}.

4. Voluntary codes, industry pressure and regulatory encouragement

Industry coalitions and nonprofits are drafting voluntary codes of conduct and best practices — for example, the Better Identity Coalition’s draft code — and regulators and commentators are signaling that once the government or consensus bodies define usable standards, private financial institutions will likely accept those credentials for account opening; that dynamic could make digital IDs functionally required in practice without a legal compulsion ^{[3] [4]}.

5. International deadlines and technology trends that shape U.S. practice but not law

European law under eIDAS 2.0 mandates national digital wallets for EU citizens by 2026, and tech vendors and banks watch these global moves closely because interoperability pressures can affect product design in the U.S.; however, those international mandates do not create U.S. legal obligations and U.S. reporting frames the EU timeline as an influence rather than a domestic legal rule ^{[8] [9] [10]}.

6. Practical effect: banks may require stronger digital verification without a statutory mandate

Financial institutions are already deploying biometric and behavioral verification tools and monitoring fraud alerts from agencies like FinCEN, which encourage robust identity verification in practice; reporting shows regulators and vendors expect industry uptake once national standards emerge, meaning customers could see widespread digital-ID-based onboarding as a business or regulatory expectation even in the absence of a binding statute that explicitly requires a digital ID for every bank account ^{[5] [4]}.

7. Bottom line and caveats

The bottom-line: no current U.S. federal law requires a digital ID to open a bank account; the landscape is instead shaped by state laws, model policies, voluntary industry codes, and evolving technology that together may produce de facto requirements over time — reporting sources document these trends but do not identify a standing federal legal mandate ^{[1] [7] [3] [2]}. This analysis is limited to the provided reporting; if a specific state statute or a new federal law postdating these sources exists, that would need to be checked separately because the sources here focus on proposals, pilot programs, and emerging standards rather than a single, nationwide statutory obligation ^{[1] [4]}.