Frankfurt The end of the SMS-Tan as a security procedure in online banking is taking a little longer than announced at the Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken. Actually, the procedure should expire by the middle of the year. The switch-off date has now been postponed to the end of September. The cooperative IT service provider Atruvia explained this on request.
The reason for the postponement of the switch-off date is given by Atruvia as “certain special circumstances” for some customers who are still dependent on mobile TAN use. It is about users with Huawei devices and certain corporate customers. “To give banks more time to transition these customers, the shutdown has been pushed back to the end of September.”
According to Atruvia, banks can decide individually whether they still want to use the procedure until the mobile tan, also known as SMS tan, is switched off on September 30th. In July, Atruvia still registered around 600,000 users of SMS-Tan. But many of them are inactive. At the end of 2021 there were still 1.7 million.
In principle, the Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken are sticking to the end of the SMS tan. Atruvia recently referred to security concerns that the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has been expressing for some time. “Tans sent via SMS can theoretically be intercepted by third parties. In addition, if the cell phone is stolen, there is the possibility that the tan procedure can be used quite easily,” Atruvia explained in February.
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The cooperative banks are currently introducing a new app-based procedure, “VR Secure-Go plus”, which works by means of direct approval without an extra TAN entry and has around 3.6 million users. It follows the previous app procedure “VR Secure-Go” with 2.7 million users most recently.
Savings banks are also postponing the end of SMS-Tan
The savings banks are also in the process of saying goodbye to the SMS tan – and they too will be completely out of business a little later than the IT service provider Finanz Informatik (FI) had announced a few months ago.
The German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV) said on request that the step should be taken this year. When exactly individual savings banks switch off the SMS tan procedure is up to them. According to the FI, the DSGV had originally recommended that the conversion be carried out by the middle of the year.
Most recently, fewer than 20 of the 360 or so savings banks still offered the procedure, the FI. In June there were around 200,000 users. At the beginning of the year it was 800,000.
Push tan is considered the most common procedure
The most common methods are push-tan – the savings banks’ “S-Push-Tan-App” is the counterpart to the cooperative banks’ “VR Secure-Go plus” – and photo-tan. In both cases, customers have to install an additional app on their smartphone.
With the push-tan, customers prepare the transfer in their banking app or in the online banking portal on their computer, then they open the corresponding app with a password or face recognition. There they can check and approve transfer data.
There are different variants of the Photo-Tan process. Anyone who prepares a transfer by computer must take a picture of a square with colored pixels on the computer screen with their smartphone – or a special reader. When banking via smartphone, there is no need to take photos – the information is exchanged between the apps in the background. The details of the processes differ depending on the bank.
The chip tan process is considered to be particularly secure. Customers need a so-called tan generator for this. Depending on the device, they have to enter a control number and part of the transaction data – such as the account number – into the tan generator by hand.
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