Taiwan plans to introduce multi-use digital wallet this year

Taiwan is aiming to launch a digital wallet by the end of 2025.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs announced that it plans to launch a trial of a digital wallet that can hold several identification documents within the platform by the end of this year.

The digital wallet would be designed to accommodate citizen digital certificates, business certificates of corporations, and certificates of professional skills. In addition, the ministry would try to connect the digital wallet to other IDs, like driver’s licenses and national health insurance cards, Department of Digital Cooperation Director General Chuang Ying-chih said.

Chuang said the code for the program would be made public: “Disclosing the program code would allow the public to test and identify problems with the digital wallet and make it safer to use,” he said, as quoted in Taipei Times.

The digital wallet is intended to provide identity verification for both public and private sector transactions. The director-general said that banks and insurance companies welcomed the initiative as it would save them time and resources expended verifying the identities of their customers. Besides banks and insurance firms, supermarket and convenience chain operators were encouraged to participate in the trial.

The ministry said the digital wallet would be tested in a sandbox next month while a trial version is expected to launch in December.

The convergence of payments and identity in digital wallets

The uses for digital wallets are converging. On the one hand, they are designed to hold digital IDs, as seen in the growing use of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) in the U.S., while on the other, the likes of Apple Pay or Google Pay make smartphones a secure transactional device as digital wallet devices.

That digital wallets can have both capabilities is a growing trend, with observers optimistic about the prospect as the benefits of convergence could spur the kind of wider adoption digital wallet advocates have long been hoping for.

A white paper published by the EUDI Wallet Consortium (EWC) late last year outlined the complexity of extending digital identity wallets to payments. A blog post published by Fime shortly after EWC’s white paper argued that the ability for people to share other attributes via digital identity wallets are a major advantage alongside robust customer authentication capabilities.

“Undoubtedly, the digital identity wallet will become a pivotal part of our daily activities, reshaping how we manage payments and interact online,” the post says.

The transformation can be seen in India where so-called super wallets combine banking, payments, identity verification and financial services into a unified interface backed by Aadhaar, the country’s digital identity system. The ability of super wallets to provide frictionless financial transactions and digital identity credentials is changing how individuals and organizations interact with financial services in that country. “Super wallets go beyond traditional digital wallets by offering users full control over their financial digital identity and assets without depending on third parties,” Kavitha Kanaparthi, founder and CEO of Soulverse, told Biometric Update.

Article Topics

digital ID  |  digital payments  |  digital wallets  |  identity document  |  Taiwan