FIDO’s Andrew Shikiar predicts the triumph of wallets in 2026

At the annual Identity Identity & Policy Forum, it’s a tradition for Andrew Shikiar, CEO of the FIDO Alliance, to reflect on his predictions from the previous year and offer predictions for the coming one. 2025 was a pivotal year for FIDO: passkeys – FIDO’s raison d’etre in recent years – finally became a mainstream authentication method, marking a long-term win for the Alliance.

In his keynote, FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar estimates over 4 billion passkeys are now being used to secure sign-ins around the world. “That’s a massive number considering we introduced passkeys in 2022.”

Shikiar’s speech runs through his record on predictions he made at the beginning of 2025, and comes out looking pretty clairvoyant. Major banks have deployed passkeys. “I stood here last year and said 2025 will be the year of passkeys and banking,” Shikiar says. “I was kind of eating my socks on that until around Q4, when all of a sudden basically every major bank in the U.S. passkeys for sign-up.”

The tech has found greater uptake for payments, including in deployments by Mastercard and the Pix payment system in Brazil. Deepfakes have driven a boom in enterprise security, as deepfake job applicants become a pressing issue – what Shikiar calls “the North Korean IT worker challenge.”

“I can tell you that our vendor community is extremely busy trying to address this challenge of remote workers, fake remote workers being hired and onboarded due to weak remote identity verification systems and schemes they have in place.”

Finally, identity wallets have continued to move toward the center of the conversation, as the EU approaches its end-of-year eIDAS deadline for member states to offer a digital ID wallet to citizens.

The landscape is becoming harder to predict, as generative AI tools enable the industrialization of fraud at scale. Shikiar notes a 4151 percent increase in malicious phishing emails since Q4 of 2022, when ChatGPT hit the streets. Nonetheless, Shikiar again offers his thoughts on what the industry is likely to see for the rest of 2026.

First off, deepfake attacks will continue to fuel highly personalized phishing attacks at scale. Second, the momentum on passkeys will continue, as the authentication tech becomes more embedded in enterprise and everyday use. Agentic AI will be a major factor, as agents are granted more responsibility and businesses must address how to integrate authentication into agentic workflows. And the foundation for the digital wallet ecosystem will be fully established, as the EUDI Wallet mandate comes into full effect, and Europe begins the next stage of transition to digital wallets.

Now is the time for digital credentials

“While I think it’s fantastic that passkeys are on their path to ubiquity,” Shikiar says, “it’s important to note that passkeys are only one part of that identity life cycle. And it’s really important to think about the account creation aspect – and this is where we start talking about digital credentials more broadly.”

Indeed, the success of the passkey brings with it the question of what comes next, and FIDO has found its answer in digital credentials.

“Digital identity, digital wallets, digital credentials – these are not new concepts,” he says. “Many of us have been talking about this literally for decades now. The challenge hasn’t been lack of vision or lack of will. I think the challenge has come down to lack of industry coalescence and fragmentation.”

“It’s a fragmented ecosystem that has impacted ecosystem capabilities, ecosystem utilization and adoption, starting with the fact that there’s multiple standards and protocols out there that are all very good and well intended and effective, but conflict with each other.” The “acronym soup of standards,” as Shikiar calls it, creates confusion.

From the EU digital credential landscape to the emerging U.S. mobile driver’s license (mDL) ecosystem, there is a need for certification guidance to ensure successful development and rollout of digital identity wallets and digital identity infrastructure. FIDO says they’re on it.

FIDO asked industry stakeholders if they thought the Alliance, taking what it learned from passkeys, might be able to offer the same value in the case of digital credentials. “And the feedback was universally yes,” Shikiar says. “Let’s get to work, right?”

That, he says, is what they did, pointing to a December announcement made in conjunction with the OpenID Foundation, W3C, ISO, with other standards bodies, “saying that FIDO is intending to add value to the digital credential space, their first deliverable being a wallet certification profile.”

“So that’s where we’re focusing as we look at digital credentials.”

Article Topics

certification  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  FIDO Alliance  |  verifiable credentials