Every property transaction in Australia still asks a client to prove who they are more than once, often to more than one party, sometimes within the same week. A conveyancer verifies identity to open a file. A bank verifies it again for the loan. A real estate agent verifies it again for the contract. Each repetition feels like an additional layer of security, yet the opposite is closer to the truth. Every time a licence or a passport is copied and passed along, another version of that document enters circulation, and another opportunity for it to be intercepted, misfiled, or breached is created. Security in identity verification does not come from asking more often. It comes from verifying once, to a trusted standard, and reusing that verification safely across every party that needs it.

Why repetition creates risk rather than removing it

The instinct to repeat identity checks is understandable. Each firm, agency, and financial institution is acting within its own compliance obligations, and each has genuine reason to confirm who it is dealing with. The difficulty is that these processes create a growing trail of copied documents sitting in email inboxes, shared drives, and filing systems across multiple organisations, each one a separate point of exposure. A client who completes a property purchase may have shared a full copy of their driver’s licence or passport with four or five separate parties before settlement, and once shared, that copy is effectively outside anyone’s control.

This is the distinction that came up repeatedly in InfoTrack’s recent InFocus conversation with the Honourable Victor Dominello, former New South Wales Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government. A driver’s licence is a credential, a proof of what a person is authorised to do, not a verified proof of identity in its own right. Using it repeatedly as a stand-in for identity means every transaction depends on a document that was never designed to carry that weight, and that becomes progressively less secure the more often it is copied and shared.

A regulatory shift that supports reuse over repetition

Australia’s identity framework is moving in this direction already, and the timing matters for the legal profession specifically. The Digital ID Act 2024 established a national accreditation scheme for digital identity providers, co-regulated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Under the phased rollout of the Australian Government Digital ID System, private sector entities become eligible to apply for accreditation from 30 November 2026, opening the door for verified digital identity to be reused across government and private transactions rather than re-established from scratch each time.

For conveyancers and property lawyers, this shift is directly relevant. Property transactions are exactly the kind of high-value, multi-party process that repeated verification was never well suited to, involving a purchaser, a vendor, financial institutions, and often more than one legal representative, each currently running its own separate identity check on the same person. An accredited digital identity framework allows that verification to happen once, to a consistent and regulated standard, then be reused with confidence by every subsequent party in the transaction.

What reuse actually protects against

The benefit of this model is not simply speed, although the efficiency gain for practitioners running multiple settlements each week is real. The more significant benefit is what reuse removes from circulation. Rather than a full copy of a licence or passport moving between parties, verification becomes an attestation, a confirmation that a specific fact has already been established, such as identity or residency, without disclosing the underlying document each time. This directly reduces the volume of sensitive information sitting across multiple systems, which is where settlement fraud and identity-related scams most often find their opening.

It also strengthens the profession’s position as the threat environment continues to change. Increasingly convincing synthetic documents and deepfakes make a single static credential a weaker basis for trust than it once was. A verification model built on accreditation and reuse can be strengthened with additional layers over time, in a way that a photocopied document simply cannot.

Preparing for a shift already underway

The property and legal sectors have already proven, through the shift to e-conveyancing, that they can absorb significant procedural change without compromising rigour. Verification that is reused rather than repeated is a natural continuation of that same discipline, applied to the step that begins every transaction rather than the steps that follow it.

If you’re interested to learn more about Digital ID, watch our on demand InFocus episode featuring Victor Dominello.

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