The downside is that the "help" will probably just consist of funneling more taxpayer money to large shareholders and execs, while banks figure out ways to dodge liability without actually solving the problem.
Maybe banks have to bleed more (Reg E mostly protects consumers from this fraud exposure) before they’ll come willing to regulators asking for it. If that’s the path to success, it’s a shame but not surprising.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/8215...
https://fcw.com/articles/2021/08/12/infrastructure-digital-i...
“A draft version of the Senate infrastructure bill, which was obtained by FCW, included $500 million for the Department of Labor to institute a grant fund to supply states with digital identity proofing tools that are compliant with National Institute of Standards and Technology to combat fraud in unemployment insurance benefits.
In addition to the program administered by the Labor Department, the draft legislative language called for the Office of Management and Budget to develop a plan for federal digital identity verification, including an inventory of current efforts and a study of the feasibility of establishing a governmentwide system that provides equitable access to users of government services and protects privacy. There was talk in the administration and in the Senate of adding $3 billion in funding for governmentwide identity solutions as part of the infrastructure bill.
Instead, the entire section on program integrity covering the digital identity grants program and the OMB policy push was removed from the bill before it came up for a vote and was not offered in any of the amendments that came up as the bill was debated on the Senate floor.
The White House and various Senate press offices by and large did not respond to emailed questions from FCW about what happened with the digital identity section of the bill.”
[0] It obviously is for government departments.
The government (and not private corporations) tracks births, deaths, immigration, emigration, and of course it chooses to issue identity paperwork.
In general the closest commercial entities like banks can do is identity matching. So e.g. maybe Bank A asks you "Hey, do you have, like, a mortgage? Who with?" and you pick Bank X from the list of six options and OK, either that's a lucky guess or you know that "you" have a mortgage with Bank X.
This is pretty poor, it's something, but it's not very much, it's up there with Facebook's "Here are some pictures of people, which of them is your friend?" which of course falls down when either: You "friend" people you don't actually know and wouldn't recognise; or your "friends" don't like Facebook having accurate photo data and intentionally mislabel random other people or things with their name...
And as with the Facebook thing it breaks in surprising and hard to reproduce/ demonstrate ways. Maybe you think of this as your Big Bank mortgage, but if you check the small print it's actually a Different Bank mortgage, that Big Bank are re-branding, and so you just picked wrong.
So yes, in practice government is where this would get solved, if you've any appetite for solving it.