Dynamism of digital ID adoption defies easy description

Trinsic counts over 5 billion digital IDs issued around the world so far. But they are highly fragmented between public and private-sector issuance and management, open and closed source code, and a lack of mature common standards to allow them to interoperate. From the standpoint of relying parties in general, they don’t all count.

CEO Riley Hughes presented key findings from the company’s 2025 Digital ID Adoption Report in a recent webinar.

Hughes began by reviewing his belief that identity verification processes that today still largely depend on ID document scans and selfie biometrics can be improved upon. Using digital ID instead can reduce the time needed from around 50 seconds to 5, with much better user experience. But further, it can avoid the cat-and-mouse game that has evolved between fraud attackers and IDV providers, with technologies like liveness detection and injection attack detection (IAD), by delivering information directly from the source.

The opportunity this presents for Trinsic, he says, is largely found among businesses and scenarios where the friction involved in document-based verification is not considered worthwhile, such as those with lower assurance requirements than KYC checks.

“What that means is there are more scenarios now that will be eligible for fraud reduction and more surface area for reducing things like identity theft,” Hughes explains.

Countries like India and Estonia are obvious digital ID standouts, but Trinsic identifies the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Brazil and the Philippines as markets where the opportunity for businesses to use digital ID is exceptional, with low entry barriers.

How to count digital IDs

The current situation is dynamic, with a number of new digital ID initiatives that have low totals but high growth rates, and others that have stronger adoption, but have paved the way for their own replacements. Those replacements may be more privacy-preserving or digitally native, Hughes observes.

Mapping digital ID adoption to geographies is difficult, too, as for example Yoti has millions of downloads, but how many are in the UK and how many are in France is not immediately available information, he says.

And what counts as digital ID adoption? In some cases, people signing bank accounts are issued a digital credential by default.  Issuance, in that case, does not seem like enough to qualify as adoption, or even necessarily “coverage.” Some eIDs are only useful for a particular government service or set of services. For Trinsic’s purposes of identity acceptance, they are not included.

Adoption stats around the world

Trinsic is now tracking 282 digital IDs, or digital ID ecosystems. They are split between government issued “eIDs,” reusable “reIDs” issued by the private sector, and bank-led digital IDs.

North America accounts for 48 schemes, with 177 million ID-bearing people between them. This figure represents 69 percent of the adult population, Hughes says. While people often think of the U.S. as behind on digital ID, he notes that ID.me is the largest privately operated digital ID network he is aware of, and its user base is almost entirely American.

More than three-quarters of Americans live in states that have mobile driver’s licenses active or in development, but the number who have them so far is closer to 2 percent. The largest number of American mDLs so far are held in Apple Wallets. The landscape remains fragmented, however, in terms of where they are at in the process, standard compliance and what digital wallet is used.

Europe has 89 digital ID schemes Trinsic is watching, with 372 million users combined, not counting government ID cards or bank ID accounts. Europe is turning towards more open standards for digital ID with eIDAS 2.0 and EU Digital Identity Wallets, Hughes says, but oversight and governance considerations leave questions around how the business models and user experience will work.

There are 34 digital ID schemes in Asia that Trinsic is tracking, but between them they include 2 billion people, or 40 percent of the continent’s adult population. There is some fragmentation there as well, though Hughes points out that the Philippines PhilSys started out with a certain conception, and has since evolved to align with how digital ID is being handled internationally. That makes it easier to count as reusable identity.

Sixteen schemes in Africa cover 294 million people, or 37 percent of the adult population. But the divergence between digital ID adoption in places like Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia and those without national ID deployments is striking when presented as a color-coded map.

In the Middle East, 10 schemes have reached 130 million people, or 59 percent of adults.

Like Singapore’s SingPass in Asia, UAE Pass is widely adopted and used, but does not appear amongst the most-adopted by raw numbers, because the countries are small.

South America has 14 schemes Trinsic is following, with 308 million people signed up, or 47 percent of adults.

Oceania has 14 schemes as well, with 32 million people combined, or 82 percent of adults. Most of those people are in Australia. That does not count ConnectID, since it is connected to the banking system.

Global digital ID schemes not tied to a particular geography make up the remaining 26 schemes. Several of these are decentralized or Web3 IDs.

A comparison of last year’s figures shows a significant increase, with Trinsic counting double the number of digital IDs in Africa and South America, and over 200 million more between Europe and North America. But the more significant point may be one that Hughes raises repeatedly when explaining the numbers: as they roll out, digital IDs are changing.

Article Topics

digital ID  |  digital ID infrastructure  |  digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  reusable digital ID  |  Trinsic