The regulation does not require either. It requires that you know who this is, to a standard you can defend later. Everything else is implementation, and much of the friction in bank onboarding is implementation rather than law.
A qualified identification establishes identity to the standard a court starts from. The same identity can then sign the account contract, keeping the evidence in one audit chain.
What that changes: the applicant finishes in one sitting, the evidence is one audit chain rather than a folder, and the country-specific AML extensions that make a European rollout awkward are handled per market rather than per project.