Robin Tombs talks UK digital ID with Trinsic as Yoti passes 23M global downloads

A new episode of the Future of Identity podcast, hosted by Trinsic’s Riley Hughes, features a conversation with Robin Tombs, co-founder and CEO of Yoti. The discussion comes as Yoti marks a milestone: last week, it surpassed 23 million global downloads, 7.8 million of which are in the UK.

Writing on LinkedIn, Tombs says “there are some very noisy opponents of digital ID wallets, but increasingly there are many millions of individuals who voluntarily choose to create and control their unique identity details in an ID wallet such as Yoti.”

In his talk with Hughes, Tombs covers Yoti’s journey from startup to becoming one of the world’s most widely adopted digital identity wallets, and muses on the digital ID debate currently raging in the UK.

Although the company was founded in 2014, its origins go back to 1997, and the path to the present involves online bingo, gambling fraud, Spartan races, and a realization about identity verification: online ID can’t just rely on knowledge. Enter biometrics, digital credentials, and, eventually, reusable credentials.

“The logic of people owning their own data makes a lot more sense to a lot more people now than it did back in 2014.”

Tombs says young people were the first to see the value in the digital ID, but that it took time for relying parties to catch up. Meanwhile, the company knew it had to take the time to ensure it would be private and secure.

Of its 23 million downloads, some 5 million have happened in the last year. And Tombs expects the momentum to grow, as digital identity becomes more established in the mainstream.

In effect, though, it has been a steady uphill climb, from a cold opening in which the market for digital ID was practically nonexistent, up a mountain of regulatory requirements and public distrust.

Now, with proof of age being required for adult content sites, social media firms, vapes, and all manner of other age-restricted online access, reusable digital identity is coming into its own, as legislation, culture, and technology converge.

Trust is the bottom line

The largest remaining hurdle – indeed, the hurdle of all hurdles, for digital ID – is the trust issue. “You can’t promise to the world that they would never, ever have any risk at all of being breached. Even if you think you’ve done everything possible to make it as secure as possible, which we believe we try to do, we can never promise that. So we have the challenge of trying to reassure people that your information will be safe with us. And it’s safer to have it with Yoti than to put it into tens and tens of other sites that may need that information.”

Tombs says it’s still a significant challenge to win that trust. But on the other hand, people live more and more of their lives online, and want ways to do it that are convenient, safe and privacy-preserving.

“I think the next few years are much brighter. More and more people understand the benefits, more and more companies are thinning, how do we do this, and there are more and more businesses that want to accept reusable ID.”

That said, the situation in the UK remains complex. Tombs cites the same deep-rooted cultural factors that David Crack, chair of the Association of Digital Verification Providers (ADVP), has pointed to. And the government’s swerves on Right to Work (RTW) checks have complicated things further, inflaming distrust and causing headaches for digital identity providers like Yoti that are certified under the digital verification services trust framework.

Then there are the dominant operating systems: Google and Apple. Governments, says Tombs, aren’t keen on having two companies control the entire global digital ecosystem. National digital ID schemes may be a way for them to curb that trend, to preserve customer choice, competition and innovation.

This can leave companies like Yoti in the middle. But, says Tombs, that’s where the people are, too.

“A lot of citizens, I believe, want to have an easier way of proving who they are and protecting themselves from fraud.”

Meanwhile, a whole new market has just opened up for the company. In offering a proven facial age estimation tool among its suite of orchestrated services, it finds itself well positioned to answer the recent call by the U.S. government to make age assurance a baseline requirement for AI.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital trust  |  reusable digital ID  |  Trinsic  |  UK digital ID  |  Yoti