Palau Digital Residency ID - To Verify Identity for a Wise Online Account? (Field Report #24)

By Parviz Malakouti-Fitzgerald, Esq.

This article is part of our series exploring what exactly the Palau digital residency ID can be used for.

I made my 28th attempt to use the Palau digital residency ID (“the ID”) in June, 2025. 

I tried to use the Palau ID to confirm my identity to open an online Wise.com personal account. 

Result: Unsuccessful 

Explanation: I went to www.wise.com to confirm my identity for a personal account to be able to receive payments. As part of the KYC process, I was asked to submit a government issued photo ID, as well as a selfie photo. 

To upload an ID, I was presented with the following screen:

I selected the option for Palau as the country issuing the ID. For Palau, I was given the following options to choose from for the form of ID: 

No option for “Residence ID” was presented so I chose the option for “National ID” which I perceived to be the closest category to the Palau digital residency ID. 

Following instructions, I took a photo of the front and back of my Palau digital residency ID and submitted it. On the next screen, I was greeted with the following message stating Wise may need additional information because the ID isn’t issued by the country I live in:

The “country I live in” is referring to the fact that I gave an address to Wise that is outside of Palau, hence the mismatch between country address and country of ID issuance. This issue could possibly be alleviated if Palau ever starts offering physical addresses to its digital residents, as was discussed in 2023. 

In any case, I continued on to the instructions for taking a selfie. My selfie was accepted. 

Within an hour, I received the following email rejecting my ID “ because we couldn’t see your face or your ID details clearly in the photos you uploaded.”

I repeated the process an additional two times, taking clear crisp photos of the Palau digital residency ID, and being rejected an additional two times after submitting them. I then abandoned the Palau digital residency ID and submitted a regular United States driver license as ID, which was accepted. 

It appears to me that Wise.com’s way of rejecting a form of ID that is unacceptable to them is to state they “couldn’t see your face or your ID details clearly in the photos you uploaded.”

This attempted use case of the Palau digital residency ID for confirming my identity for a Wise.com online personal account has therefore been unsuccessful. 

I’ll continue trying to use the ID, and report the results here on Malakouti Law.