Digital trust: Reflections on 2025 and outlook for 2026

2025 has been a pivotal year for digital trust with record levels of adoption for digital identity and biometric solutions supported by important state regulation that aims to make the internet a safer place, including regulation to restrict adult and age-inappropriate content to children.

Alongside this, 2025 has witnessed an explosion of AI driven attacks on digital trust infrastructure, leading to record levels of fraud. The availability of easy-to-use AI tools that create fake identity documents and generate deepfake videos are challenging identity verification and biometric authentication solutions. It is looking like 2025 has been a boom time for fraud. Based on reports from financial institutions and fraud prevention services, 2025 has seen an increase in both the volume and total amount of money lost to fraud. In the UK, criminals stole £629.3 million in the first half of 2025 alone across 2.09 million confirmed cases in the UK, a 17 percent increase in cases compared to the same period in 2024. Thankfully, the industry has stepped up and is counteracting these threats with tools that accurately identify people, detect fake documents and deepfake videos. These tools, in addition to solutions that detect injection attacks, are being deployed across the board and integrated into the workflow for important identity verification and  anti-fraud processes to ensure that the identity documents presented are authentic and in the hands of their legitimate owners.

As we head into 2026, it is vital that the industry gets access to reliable and up-to-date information on the latest developments in digital trust. To help you navigate through this, Biometric Update and Goode have teamed up to develop reports that educate and inform, allowing you to make decisions that best suit your business. Our reports of 2025 have covered the hot topics for the digital trust industry with detailed analysis of liveness detection, online age assurance, deepfake detection and digital identity verification.

Face liveness detection

During 2025, face liveness detection became a critical component of identity assurance, often matched with deepfake detection and, increasingly, injection attack detection.

In an age of ever-increasing AI-driven fraud, Visa said that the number of charges on its credit-card network blocked for potential fraud on Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024 surged 200 percent globally from 2023, with the card network attributing this increase to scammers using AI.

Online age assurance

2025 has been a pivotal year for biometric age assurance as a result of state legislation aimed at protecting children from accessing adult and age-inappropriate content. The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and Australian Online Safety Amendment (2024) have kickstarted biometric age assurance adoption with millions of people using the technology to prove their age to access social media and adult content. With more countries planning to implement similar law, including the EU and USA, 2026 will see more significant growth for this technology.

Deepfake detection

As deepfakes have become easier and cheaper to make, freely available through sites such as thispersondoesnotexist.com, the problem has reached crisis levels. The UK government says a projected eight million deepfakes will be shared in 2025, up from 500,000 in 2023. It has declared efforts to mitigate the growing threat from AI-generated deepfakes as an “urgent national priority” and “arguably the greatest challenge of the online age.”

Deepfakes have resulted in losses in the millions; in a notorious deepfake attack on a Hong Kong firm, deepfake executives injected into a video feed successfully prompted an employee to transfer $25 million to fraudulent bank accounts.

In response to the surge of deepfakes, the market for deepfake detection has exploded, and governments’ calls for innovation are becoming urgent. There are dozens of deepfake detection providers in the market, which are profiled in the buyer’s guide of the 2025 Deepfake Detection Market Report and Buyers Guide.

Digital identity verification

Digital Identity verification (IDV) establishes that a person is who they claim to be and is used in a variety of situations where it is either mandated by regulation or is essential in combating fraud.

2025 saw the IDV industry at a crossroads with the emergence of reusable digital identity verification, government-issued digital identity, and digital identity wallets and apps. This is reshaping the industry with traditional IDV suppliers partnering with digital wallet and identity orchestration solution providers. Announcements from Google and Apple for their support of digital identity credentials stored in their mobile wallets have shaken the industry and how these technology giants fit into the identity ecosystem will be an important consideration going into 2026.

AI threats to accelerate and clarity for how digital identity will look

Going forward into 2026, the threats from AI will only accelerate causing significant challenges for the industry. The groundwork for the industry response has been well and truly established in 2025 with standards, testing, and certification.

To counteract AI generated attacks, expect tighter connection between the many components of biometric enrolment and verification with liveness, deepfake and injection attack detection providing the assurance that it is a genuine live person and not a synthetic identity using AI tools to try and fool the system.

It will be a defining year for digital identity with the roll-out for the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet planned for 2026. Expect some hiccups along the way but the industry is eagerly awaiting its arrival and will be examining each turn of events in microscopic detail.

A key question for 2026, is how Big Tech fits into the digital identity ecosystem and whether it will mimic the dynamics seen with mobile payments by dominating the digital wallet – at least in the western markets.

Biometric Update and Goode Intelligence will continue their partnership into 2026 with the publication of market reports and buyers guides covering existing and new themes and topics. It looks like being another roller-coaster of a year.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  deepfake detection  |  digital identity  |  digital trust  |  Goode Intelligence  |  identity verification