Networks aim to make digital identity truly reusable in 2025

Reusable digital identity emerged as one of the most prominent trends of the year in identification and fraud prevention. But the CEOs of three of the leading players in the nascent reusable ID market suggest in conversation with Biometric Update that 2024 was more of a precursor than the technology’s break-out year.

Select ID Chief Executive Officer Nick Mothershaw tells Biometric Update in an interview that a similar conversation at the beginning of the year would likely not even have used the term “reusable identity.”

Trinsic refers to its value proposition as “identity acceptance,” and Liminal has forecast a major market opportunity for “identity acceptance networks,” which support the extension of digital IDs along different axes.

“There are lots of different words to describe what we’re doing at the moment,” Mothershaw observes. “I guess we’ll all settle on one consistent one in the end.”

Trinsic Co-founder and CEO Riley Hughes says he was not that optimistic about his company’s prospects for meeting its short-term revenue goals when we spoke at Identity Week, but “we’re in a different world now.”

A conversation that has been confined to identity industry insiders for some time has finally gone beyond them in the past 12 to 18 months, Yoti CEO Robin Tombs tells Biometric Update.

Goode Intelligence identified the trend towards reusable identity in an October 2023 report, citing the influence of COVID on how people access services. Tombs echoes this point at the close of 2024.

Regulations that required right-to-work and other identity checks were amended to enable remote processes out of practical necessity. They also had to provide some degree of confidence in the authenticity of the identity provided. That meant adopting an approach that aligns neatly with trends in digital ID standardization and storage on mobile devices to unlock a concept which had long been considered an ideal to aspire to.

“There was lots of logic that one day users would be keen to have reusable ID just as you have one passport to get into 200 countries ideally, rather than maybe apply for 200 visas every few years,” he says, but the same insiders who saw the concept’s value were acutely aware of the inherent challenge of a two-sided market.

The volume of both consumer users and relying parties must be sufficient to provide value.

Hughes is unable to pinpoint the exact cause or causes for his company’s sudden change in fortunes, suggesting perhaps it reached “enough features or enough users that it crossed some threshold.” Whatever changed, it reversed his concerns about hitting the startups 3 and 6-month revenue goals.

“It’s been a kind of a crazy last few months trying to make sense of all this,” he says.

Earlier in the year, Hughes says he had a lot of conversations that concluded with “’call me later’ type stuff.”

How many is enough?

The need for scale is what motivates Trinsic’s network model and Select ID’s market model, which Mothershaw says could be described as a network. Yoti provides its own digital ID, which is part of Trinsic’s network, and is also part of the UK Post Office’s Easy ID and Lloyds Bank’s Smart ID. Each is certified to the UK government’s Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF).

Select ID is launching with three digital identity providers, who are currently going through testing. It is also currently in talks to add others, Mothershaw says.

The first use case is UK financial services, and the service will launch with a single relying party in production. Select ID’s backers include Visa, Northern Trust and Barclays, however, it is in talks with a couple of “fast followers,” and has a list of around 30 qualified prospects, according to Mothershaw.

Select ID is looking at addressing other use cases in the future, “having built for the gold standard of financial services both in terms of identity proofing, authentication and data delivery, it’s now easy for us to dial that down, and say, ‘well actually now, we just want to do age.’”

The urgency with which it does so will depend somewhat on the outcome of regulatory decisions currently being made, such as whether to bring the PASS scheme into the scope of the DIATF. Similarly for online accounts, the whole UK is waiting on Ofcom.

Like Select ID, Trinsic is currently focused on a single use case, in its case replacing identity verification with ID document scans and selfie biometrics.

“If they do, it will be faster and more secure. If they don’t, no worries, just fall back and just use the existing doc scanning thing that you were already doing. You could imagine using eIDs and mDLs for a thousand use cases,” like log-ins, but cost is too high for that right now.

New regulatory requirements, such as for age checks, and business models are continuing to alter the market, however.

Governments around the world are split on how to best establish digital identity ecosystems, but have mostly been won over to the importance of having one, in one way or another.

“There’s lots of governments now thinking either we need to do this as a state solution or a choice between a state solution and private sector, potentially frameworks,” Tombs says.

Businesses may have been more aware of the looming shift, as they are more likely to read trade publications. With digital identity crossing over into the mainstream consumer press, public awareness and understanding are increasing, and could finally lead to sufficient demand on both sides of the market.

Trinsic targets financial services companies that can integrate its network to be among its early customers, but it’s customer base differs from Select ID’s in that it targets the digital service providers that serve the whole user lifecycle with holistic solutions, like Mitek, which Trinsic partnered with for the California DMV use case hackathon.

Some American relying parties have told Trinsic: “call me when you get to 150 million in the U.S. market.”

Relying parties can provide a fast and convenient user experience through digital identity even on the way to those kinds of numbers, though.

“You can get really, really good user experiences even if only 5 percent of people have a thing, as long as you try to only show the option to the 5 percent who have it,” Hughes points out.

In some cases, reusable identity does not require a network at all. Tombs gives the example of a company granting a contractor access to a secure building or area in the form of a digital ID.

“You don’t need a network. You do need a business that recognizes its more efficient to do that then you know have a piece of paper at the door and check their ID each time they turn up,” he says.

Delivering on promises of improved user experience will generate positive reviews and the sort of organic adoption that scales the user base.

How soon is now?

User experience is largely a matter of speed.

Trinsic says it enables identity verification ten times faster than the document scan and face biometrics process. Mothershaw expresses Select ID’s benefit in the context of the regulations and policy elements, the contracts and due diligence that must be in place, along with the technology.

“We’re looking at dealing with those layers of complexity on behalf of our relying parties, so that they don’t have to worry about that,” he says.

And while the enterprise relying party use case for reusable digital identity noted above may yet be a significant market opportunity, the largest potential for transaction volumes and revenue appears to be on the consumer side. Changes in regulations, standards, and other factors have already opened up use cases that did not exist a few years ago.

About one-third of the 100,000 people per month who complete UK right-to-work checks with Yoti already do so with a reusable ID, according to Tombs. But “as is often the case in business ecosystems,” he adds, relying parties will expect to implement multiple providers, not just for reach but to give their users choice.

“Reusable IDs absolutely need to join networks,” Tombs says. “Even the most popular ones will see the logic.”

There are other potential benefits for relying parties adopting reusable digital ID as well. “It’s not just about ID verification,” Tombs explains; “some of the value is, if you’re spending a couple of hundred pounds acquiring a customer, if you can get that customer to not fill in the registration form, and instead, touch the button and fill in 80 percent of that form with verified, correctly spelled information, directly into the back server, that is a super-valuable thing.”

And speed and simplification are also associated with higher conversions, he notes.

Yoti has long seen age as a “key initiator” for reusable ID, Tombs says, although it may be proven through a different provider for in-person retail checks, “where there’s no money to be earned,” than online interactions.

“It doesn’t sound the most important thing in the world in terms of how you can cleverly do reusable,” he says, “but actually if it’s going to be the thing you need to do every week as a young person, or even as my age, if I’m going to the supermarket, I don’t want to be the older person waiting still whilst the light is on, somebody has to come over and check me out. I’d rather get a reusable ID and whip through.”

This is where the value proposition for lower-assurance use cases for reusable digital ID is found, in accelerating interactions which are carried out repeatedly.

The volume of users is also different at lower levels of assurance.

Hughes points out that of the total number of digital identities in Trinsic’s network that are verified to identity assurance level 2 (IAL2), where the company’s current value proposition lies, is approaching 100 million. But one of the ways that number could grow is by increasing the assurance level of those who already have an ID that can be reused. Hughes estimates over a hundred million people have Aadhaar and DigiLocker, but no mobile driver’s licenses that would raise their digital ID to IAL2, for example.

Getting any kind of reusable ID into people’s digital wallets may be the busiest onramp for consumers, therefore.

“That will be the initial way that lots and lots of young people will end up getting reusable IDs,” Tombs says, “and because businesses will then want to benefit from those people proving age over ID, they’ll accept reusable IDs.”

Cross-border interoperability is a challenge for regulated markets, because even as digital wallets and the credentials that they store are standardized, policy differences remain.

Bilateral agreements between trust schemes in neighboring jurisdictions like the UK and EU may be feasible, but Mothershaw cautions they do not represent a path to global interoperability. Trust frameworks and regulations will have to “align, accept, or adapt” to each other. Adapt is most likely, Mothershaw believes, with service providers like Select ID facilitating the process.

“The identity providers who in the end prevail, and are able to work in different geographies, will be pretty sophisticated,” he predicts.

As mDLs become useful for more different types of interactions with more relying parties, and the ecosystem matures, Hughes sees the potential market for reusable digital IDs continuing to expand. “When its ten times easier to prove your identity,” he says, “it’s going to happen ten times more.”

While Select ID is taking its time to get its demanding first use case right, there is a sense of urgency to be ready for the expanded adoption of reusable ID.  Looking ahead to 2025 and 2026, Mothershaw says “there’s a number of waves in different sectors that will break at slightly different times. It’s likely we’ll get a whole cascade of them, so we want make sure we can serve as many of them as possible.”

Tombs similarly sees policy and popular opinion catching up to technology.

“Over the next 2-3 years, as long as governments begin to actually introduce these regulatory changes so that compliance offices in certain sectors and businesses in other sectors can both benefit from reusable IDs, and that the industry increasingly makes it easier for them to do so, and makes it more networked for the consumer, I think it’s a foregone conclusion,” he says.

Those who do not execute on their strategy for fitting into the reusable identity ecosystem within that time frame, he warns, may find they are too late.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  fraud prevention  |  IAL2  |  identity acceptance  |  remote identity proofing  |  reusable identity  |  Select ID  |  Trinsic  |  user experience  |  Yoti