Can BankID spread its footprint outside of the Nordics?

With over 8.6 million users, BankID is considered to be the most widely adopted voluntary digital ID scheme on Earth.

The identity service, developed by Swedish banks, may soon grow its footprint beyond Scandinavia: The firm listed itself in the EU’s official journal for electronic identification in January, mandating foreign public services to add BankID as an identification method within 12 months.

The question is now whether BankID will be able to repeat its success outside of Sweden.

Among adults in Sweden, the platform now has a penetration rate of 99.7 percent, according to Jonas Brännvall, Head of International Expansion at BankID Sweden. The executive spoke about the history of development and key features that made the digital ID platform so popular on the Future of Identity podcast.

“I don’t think end-user adoption is the only thing, but it’s like a tipping point,” he says.

In Sweden, the platform received a push from the introduction of digital tax returns, the rise of peer-to-peer payments and the country’s move to a cashless society. Today, BankID offers approximately 7,500 services.

“If we look at it from a transaction perspective, bank and finance are the biggest, and the payment use case is, of course, the biggest,” says Brännvall. The public sector, on the other hand, accounts for less than 10 percent of the number of transactions.

Services are available from 20 different industries with retail becoming one of the growing ones. These services are the backbone of the whole digitalization of Sweden while BankID is simply the enabler, according to Brännvall.

“We work extremely hard to protect our end users. We work extremely hard on user experience, inclusion, all of this stuff, the ecosystem,” he says. But for the platform to flourish it needs system integrators because they are the ones meeting companies and helping them to integrate, adds Brännvall.

A large part of BankID’s task is preventing fraud. The company collaborates with banks, authorities and other organizations, especially to protect senior citizens which are the weakest point in the system. The platform performs the “whole life cycle of digital identity,” including remote onboarding by scanning ID documents and biometric comparison. A risk engine scores transactions to evaluate the likelihood of fraud.

“It is extremely crucial to do the onboarding right in a secure way,” says Brännvall.

BankID is run by the company Finansiell ID-Teknik BID, which in turn is owned by several banks. In January, Martina Skande took over the helm of Finansiell ID-Teknik as its new CEO.

Skande is the former CEO of proptech company Hydda and has worked in the financial sector for companies such as Qliro, Santander Consumer Bank and EY.

Article Topics

BankID  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital inclusion  |  e-ID  |  Finansiell ID-Teknik  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  Sweden