🫂 Worldwide Initiatives of Digital ID
A number of companies and governments are making headway in this field:
- China Mobile has entered the digital ID market by presenting a mobile authentication system that is used by over 62 million users. Over 450 million daily transactions are executed on the platform offering a range of authentication capabilities across different commercial applications.
- In India, the government’s digital ID platform, Aadhaar has now been linked to around 558 million bank accounts. The platform was launched in 2009, and since then over 1.18 billion biometric accounts have been created.
- Biometric technology is also popular in Pakistan. The popular platform NADRA works with banks, mobile operators, and others. The biometric data kept in their databases helped in managing the payments of flood relief to 2.4 million families.
- In Estonia, the Digital ID service manages the public and private interactions of 98% of the population. This encapsulates everything from eVoting, traveling within the EU, health insurance, e-prescriptions, public transport, voting, proof of ID, and taxes. In all, there are over 700 applications on the platform.
Other initiatives are initialized across Europe, including the Single Digital Identity. Countries like Canada, Austria and Spain are also heading in this direction. They highlight the role that telecom operators can play, something which is important for widespread acceptance. For financial institutions, identification and verification have always been crucial elements for financial services. Banks alone are now spending over $1 billion a year on different ID management solutions.
What is really important, when interacting online, is the validation that others do (identity providers or validators) of the attributes that we share to prove our identity.
The level of given assurance to interacting parties, whether they are individuals, businesses, or governmental institutions, becomes more intense, a higher degree of veracity is required. This happens because confidence is crucial in trade relations. This is the reason why identity providers with a high level of assurance, like public authorities or financial institutions, will be the leaders of the future ID markets