2025 Digital ID Predictions: What’s Next for the Industry?

Chapters

• 0:00 — Opening and introductions

• 4:33 — Introduction to digital IDs

• 10:40 — Highlights from 2024

• 22:22 — 2025 anticipated digital ID launches

• 31:55 — Trinsic's 2025 digital ID predictions

• 42:07 — Q&A

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Okay, well, excited to be here. It's, like I said a minute ago, great to see everybody in the, you know, all the attendees. I know we had a lot of people register who let me know that they couldn't make it, but they wanted to register to get the recording. So if you're, you know, watching this, glad that you're watching it. And we're going to talk about what digital ID launches we think people should be watching out for in 2025. So if you don't know me, I'm Riley Hughes. I'm one of the co-founders of Trinsic. And a little bit of context about what we do is we help companies do identity verification much faster using digital IDs, right? So the norm today with identity verification, you know, is some form of sort of upload a document, take a selfie, match the selfie, you know, against the photo in the document, and verify a user's identity that way. And that, you know, works fine, but it's high friction.

Riley Hughes: And if a user's already done an identity verification like that and has a digital ID on their phone, right, then, you know, if you can use that to get through the flow much faster, then why wouldn't you, right? And so that's sort of the insight that we kind of started with. And then, of course, if the user doesn't have a digital ID, no worries, just fall back to your existing kind of identity verification process that you already have. So the reason we care about the digital ID launches in 2025, and the reason we maybe have a perspective on this or have some things to share, is because our whole business is essentially as an aggregator of various digital ID methods. So we go out and try to build connections and partnerships with as many Reusable ID or digital ID products as we can. And then we sort of build them all into a platform. You can think of us maybe like a gateway, right?

Riley Hughes: Like in the same way that as a user, I can show up to an e-commerce store, and regardless of whether I have a physical Visa card or a PayPal account or a Shop Pay one-click checkout or whatever I have, right, there are payment gateways that allow companies to accept whatever payment method I come with. And, you know, similarly, Trinsic allows you to sort of accept whatever digital ID a user comes with, right, so far as we can accept it. And we can talk about some of the restrictions and some of the challenges there. But, you know, so of course, because this is our whole business, we pay close attention to the digital IDs that exist around the world, as well as, you know, which digital IDs are coming online in which geographies and things like that. So what we want to do today is, you know, we already did a little bit of introductions, so, you know, we'll jump into the highlights of 2024 and sort of what happened in the last 12 months.

Riley Hughes: Then we'll look ahead a little bit to what we expect to happen in 2025 and some of the kind of launches and trends that we think people should be paying attention to. And then we have some predictions for next year. I'm not ready to sort of ink these, you know, or set them in stone just yet, but I want to float out some ideas that we're having and get your feedback on those in the Q&A. And of course, in the Q&A, you know, any questions you have, want to dig into more deeply, we can do that as well. And then on the call here, we have Kelly and Zack from the Trinsic team who are going to be kind of monitoring the Q&A portion of the of the meeting. So feel free, as you are listening, if you have questions about anything, feel free to drop them in the Q&A. And if it's something that can be answered over text, then Kelly or Zack will be happy to just answer it directly there. And if it's something that either of them think that I should highlight or answer live, then they will, of course, flag it for us to cover in the Q&A.

Riley Hughes: So feel free to just put as much Q&A in that section as you want throughout. I won't be answering questions live throughout the meeting until the end, but if they can be answered over chat, then they will be answered as quickly as possible. Hope that made sense. All right. So, to continue on the kind of introductions path, I think it's helpful to frame the discussion because when certain people think of digital IDs, different people have different things in mind, right? So I want to be clear about kind of what we mean by that. And I think there's sort of three big buckets of digital IDs, and of course there's probably others that don't fit perfectly in this framework, but there's really three big types of digital IDs that you'll see around the world. The first one, we call them internally eIDs, which stands for electronic IDs. These are government, sort of what a government would normally be doing with paper, they are doing electronically, right? So it is a government-led or government-issued digital identity credential. And you can break that down even further.

Riley Hughes: Some of these are done using a mobile app or a wallet, right? A lot of mobile driver's licenses, for example, fit in this category. Another type of government-led eID are government sort of identity databases, where a person needs to sort of present an identification number, an eID card, some biometrics, etc. And then the relying party, or the sort of business that's verifying the user's identity, sort of makes a call out to the government database and sort of checks the ID number and the biometric and everything, and sort of gets some feedback as to whether that user is really who they say they are. And then the last one are card-based eIDs. These are sort of physical cards that contain digital verification, basically, right? Physical cards that allow you to scan a chip or maybe a QR code on the back of the card, which again calls back to a government database and allows you to verify that that user is who they say they are, according to the government or the source of truth. The second category of digital ID is we call them internally reIDs, which is short for reusable identities.

Riley Hughes: And we use this shorthand because it's sort of similar to eID, right? So we have eIDs and reIDs. ReIDs are private sector reusable identities. These are sort of most often derived from a physical government ID. So, you know, CLEAR is a good example of this. When I go through the TSA line or the CLEAR line at TSA in an airport, to enroll, I have to upload a passport and a driver's license, and I have to give them government-issued IDs, and then they do their own processing and their own method of then issuing me a CLEAR identity, right? And that CLEAR identity is based on several inputs that CLEAR used, one of which being a physical government-issued ID card to give me this identity. So things like CLEAR and Airside fit into this category, and self-sovereign identity wallets, decentralized identity wallets usually fit into this category as well. And then the last category is bank IDs. And I think this is its own category, really, outside of reIDs, because there's really two distinct types.

Riley Hughes: And depending on your kind of appetite, there's— the other aspect of this is that bank IDs usually are very heavily regulated, or banks are heavily regulated. So in some countries even, they are so heavily regulated that it is almost difficult to distinguish basically a bank ID from an eID, right? I mean, obviously it's not an eID. It's still a bank ID. But given how close the regulatory and private sector kind of interplay is, I think it's kind of a middle ground between the purely government or purely private sector kind of Wild West type of digital IDs. And there's two types of these as well. There's apps or wallets that are given to you from a bank, and then there are sort of open banking connections, right? So I can get redirected out to my bank to do a login. And if I can log into my bank and, you know, then I can prove that I have a bank account and that I was KYC'd or something, right? Versus a bank ID app where the bank is actually issuing me some type of credential in an app that I can use to share. So we're going to talk about a lot of these here on today's call.

Riley Hughes: And as we go through the various geographies, it's important to note that each geography does things differently. So if your business is international, right, or you're expanding into different geographies, you'll want to account for these different things. And likely, you know, you may have an approach that you are familiar with or that you want the world to adopt. I definitely have, you know, versions of these that I think are better than others personally. But it's important to just remember that different— You know, different cultures and populations do things a little differently. They have different requirements, and if you operate in multiple geographies, you'll want to have a solution that kind of accounts for those variations. So with that, here were my predictions from 2024, or for 2024. And, you know, you look through some of these. It's funny. This first prediction: 50% of states will have announced a mobile driver's license, is telling. You'll see in our predictions for 2025 that we're predicting that 50% of U.S. states will actually have a mobile driver's license live.

Riley Hughes: And so I think this one, you know, the prediction was pretty accurate and I think is on track. I think if you, you know, I'm not going to go through all of these, but if you kind of look through these, you can kind of see where we thought the world was going over the last 12 months. And, you know, I think it's safe to say that the world's come quite a long way since last year. I think this really was the year that mobile driver's licenses became undeniably relevant, right? And I think perhaps part of that was because of California and how they, you know, they're obviously the most populous state in the U.S., one of the largest economies in the world, and their mobile driver's license program is pretty robust, right? It supports both in-person and online. It supports both its own app and OS apps like Apple, Google, etc. So, and they publish adoption numbers regularly and engage with the private sector in things like hackathons. So there's already usage of mobile driver's licenses in California despite, you know, relatively low adoption. So.

Riley Hughes: And then again, all the launches that have happened this year, you know, indicate that there's more of that on the way. So I think mobile driver's license a year ago was everybody would have basically said, we're watching it and we'll see. And I think now, you know, feel free to let me know if you see things differently, but I think now you talk to folks and the conversation is much more, you know, much more like, not only are we watching it, but we are planning around this, right? We're expecting this to be relevant soon and we're planning for it. Same thing goes for eIDAS. I think a year ago, people knew that eIDAS 2.0 was a thing and was going to happen. sometime, and people were kind of thinking, okay, well, that's coming in a few years or whatever. I think now, with the Implementation Acts getting pretty specific about technology and timing, and with large-scale pilots showing, you know, what this can look like for the economies in question, I think, again, people are planning for it. Large companies are saying, well, we got to accept these, so we better figure it out.

Riley Hughes: And I think that that's a major driver as well. It's related as well to decentralized ID launches because of kind of overlap in technology or philosophical sort of approach to these, and national ID systems, I think, continue to get adoption as well. I think the other one is that private sector reusable IDs have been very big this year. I'm not sure whether that is because of some of these other factors, right? Like perhaps there are private sector companies that perform identity verification regularly, and they see how quickly mobile driver's licenses are getting adopted in states where they exist, and they see, you know, eIDAS while it's on the way, and there's a sort of, you know, we better do something here too kind of an attitude maybe. But this has definitely been a year where I think a year ago, reusable ID was something people were thinking about for sure. But the networks that have reusable IDs in 2024 chose to push those pretty hard, and we'll talk about some of those.

Riley Hughes: And then just more online platforms adding identity verification was another thing that we saw a lot in 2024. So to dive into— A little bit more into some of these, you know, now mobile driver's licenses are in development for 75% of Americans. And, you know, that's kind of crazy to think about. I mean, we're still a very, very far cry from 75% of Americans with adoption, right? And like I say, we're basically at, like, you know, what we predicted here of 50% of states will have announced a mobile driver's license. Like, we're basically there. But more states than that are actually sort of developing or piloting or something perhaps in a pre-announcement state. And this is the year where remote verification of mobile driver's licenses became a reality with the ratification of the ISO 18013-7 specification. Plus, the first sort of states to offer remote verification. I mean, some other states did it earlier in a non-standard way, but essentially California, when they rolled it out, they rolled out remote verification before the specification was officially ratified.

Riley Hughes: They did it in a way that was based on the draft, so, you know, it wasn't totally out of left field or anything. But then we see how California, you know, I just recorded a podcast with one of the leaders in the DMV there who's driving this, and, you know, he talked about remote verification being one of the biggest and most impactful drivers of mobile driver's license adoption, both in terms of sort of why consumers might want to use it, as well as what businesses are interested. You know, the private sector is interested in consuming it, right? The next one is, you know, eIDAS. There are four large-scale pilots. There's 350 private companies that are sort of involved here, and there's a lot of kind of back and forth and input from the private sector. Different member states are doing things a little bit differently. For example, Germany, you know, has this sort of competition going on, which is pretty interesting to watch, with, you know, private sector companies creating wallets.

Riley Hughes: You know, that the government is kind of driving this, like, market-based competitive process to iteratively explore what these could look like, and other countries are doing things in various ways as well, which is really interesting to watch and is obvious that it's on its way, despite, I think, not being all the way there yet. Decentralized identities rolling out across, you know, various places. You have in Buenos Aires, they have QuarkID, which we can talk about just a little bit more later. Bhutan is a very small country, right, that was able to move quickly on a self-sovereign identity, sort of decentralized identity offering for all the citizens, and it's, I think, pretty impactful there because they were able to do it so quickly and roll it out. And then in Canada, there's, on the other hand, been working on it for a long time, but any person now can go in and get a digital credential from the government.

Riley Hughes: I mean, as you can see, the navigation bar on this website is, you know, it's not exactly like it's being, you know, pushed to all the citizens right away or that it's, like, sort of super widely adopted just yet, but it is something that is live that people can engage with, and that indicates just sort of future, more of that to come, right? And as people get it and people use it. You know, it'll be easier to get over time and accepted at more places over time. National ID systems are growing as well. So in Nigeria, the national ID number, 115 million people have obtained it. There's 90 million Filipinos now registered in their system. Obviously, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and many other places report very high adoption rates and growth rates of their respective national IDs, right? And these may be more like eID databases or something where there's a— central database where individuals get some factors, right, some authentication factors that they can share with a relying party to get the digital ID verification done, like a number and biometric.

Riley Hughes: But these systems have been growing rapidly, and of course these have been in the works for some time, but really, really seems like have matured and taken off in 2024. And then private sector reusable IDs, I think this is one of the most interesting ones to me because of how fast they're growing. I mean, Clear, I think, added something like 10 million users to their network in 2024, from 17 million people to 27 million people, something like that. I mean, I maybe, you know, I don't maybe have the latest numbers, could be more, but still at least 10 million people added to their network, up from 17, right? And from a growth rate perspective, I mean, that's a very high growth rate, especially for a company that is already a widely adopted scheme. ID.me is another one that people look to as a leader in the reusable ID space for good reason. I think they obviously in the United States have the largest network, and perhaps from a private sector reusable ID network perspective, they may have one of the largest in the world.

Riley Hughes: I think this is largely driven by their contract with the IRS, right? Most Americans, in order to file their taxes, need to obtain an ID.me wallet. That's how I first got my ID.me wallet, for example. You know, that one contract really drove a lot of that adoption. And then, of course, ID.me has expanded now into a lot of other use cases, and they're trying to find more places where people can reuse their identity, making, you know, sort of driving utility of that identity. And then, you know, Plaid and various other private sector reusable IDs are also growing very quickly. You know, Persona is another identity verification company that recently rolled out reusable ID as sort of default for new customers, right? So if you're doing identity verification there, then you're sort of inheriting, or you're automatically enrolled in their reusable ID generation kind of process.

Riley Hughes: So there are a lot of—there's really a lot happening here in the private sector that I think is really interesting, especially because when you compare it to something like a mobile driver's license, these private sector schemes are adding in additional signals, doing additional checks. They may have a shared fraud network or, you know, additional data sources that they're bringing in, behavioral biometrics that they're bringing in. They're bringing in really a full solution to solve fraud for companies, where something like a mobile driver's license, right, it is a very high assurance. You know, you can be pretty sure that this is the right person holding it, but it's only that piece, right? It's only the ID, and these companies offering, you know, more than just the ID, plus being, you know, very easy to use and a very good user experience, I think will continue to see success in the private sector reusability market. And I think, you know, a lot of people underestimate the value of the user experience wins that you can get with private sector reusable IDs.

Riley Hughes: And not only that, just, you know, in the last month, you know, two more have launched reusable ID products, right? And again, if we went to the month before that, we probably would show two more, you know, on top of that. But it seems like, you know, every couple of weeks there are new reusable ID launches from the private sector. And, you know, more platforms requiring verification. Uber and Airbnb both recently launched out consumer, like end-user verification, and LinkedIn rolls out passport verification and has been doing this in partnership with Clear and Persona and different companies around the world. So 2024 was a year of a lot of change in the identity space. And I think 2025 is going to be a year of even more change, and change in a good way, right? Exciting change. So let's talk about some of the digital ID launches that we're expecting to see in 2025. First thing, you know, I think we'll see mDL expansion in the U.S., of course, and of course we're going to dive into each of these. We're going to see mDL, and particularly that specification and that approach go global.

Riley Hughes: eIDAS, I think, will continue to grow, but we think that individual government digital IDs will go live faster than the sort of broad eIDAS 2.0 will. I think, you know, more national ID databases, things like that, more trust frameworks, and decentralized ID, I think, is going to continue to grow and be an important thing to pay attention to as well. So when you look at mobile driver's license launches by year, 2024 is really the year that I mean, and if you kind of look at the, if you drill into these, right, New Mexico was originally in our 2025 list. They launched early. They launched last week, so we sort of pulled them forward a little bit. And Hawaii was very recent as well with Apple Wallet. So we pulled them forward as well once they launched. And I'm sure these states will, both these states launched with Apple Wallet. I'm sure they'll have other things they support as well over time that will probably come in 2025.

Riley Hughes: But, you know, what this chart looked like a month ago was basically, you know, another three or four states launching in 2024 and then a whole bunch of them launching in 2025. So our expectation has been that we would see, like, 2025 would be the year where mDL crosses that threshold from, you know, early adopter states into, you know, now it's the norm. And what we're seeing is actually even an acceleration of our original expectation, with, again, a handful of states launching even faster than that. Of course, California launching at the very tail end of 2023. And so I think you could say that, you know, you could argue that the bulk of California's sort of adoption and everything happened here in 2024 as well. And I think beyond just the U.S., I think, you know, we're expecting this mDL approach to be more widely adopted in other geographies around the world as well. Hong Kong, Australia, Ecuador, you know, are doing things here.

Riley Hughes: We are aware of other geographies, you know, that are doing things here as well, others in Asia, others in Europe as well, actually, in addition to kind of the eIDAS 2.0 stuff, there are member states and jurisdictions there that are kind of doing both in parallel. And in Latin America as well, there are other countries that are piloting mDLs there as well that are not maybe announced or sort of super public yet, but that are underway. In Europe, despite kind of most of the attention going to eIDAS 2.0 and the EUDI Wallet and things like that. There are already government-issued digital ID wallets that are being piloted or launched or explored in various parts of Europe already, like, you know, not waiting around for the legislation or the final deadlines or things like that, but that are kind of being proactive about it. And so we have kind of a few screenshots on the slide: Italy, the Swiss eID and wallet, and then North Macedonia, you know, in this slide deck. But, you know, I think we expect to see more of this in 2025.

Riley Hughes: We're going to be watching out for individual member states of Europe that kind of get out ahead of the official timelines of eUDI and get things in the hands of users rapidly. I think it's worth noting that there are already, you know, Italy already has a widely adopted, you know, eID scheme, right? And several of these countries, you know, several countries in Europe already have widely adopted eIDs that are related and that are working on sort of future-proofing or things like that, right, in anticipation of the eUDI work. So we expect that, you know, that'll continue to happen and that even the existing digital ID wallets that are there will continue to get strong adoption as well as kind of move in a direction that is, you know, move in the direction of where the puck is going, so to speak, right? All right. In terms of National IDs and digital ID databases, as well as just other digital IDs. We can see there's lots of, in a lot of emerging markets, digital IDs are rolling out. And, you know, these are some examples of digital IDs that we expect to launch in 2025.

Riley Hughes: And I expect that, you know, beyond just the kind of, you know, at the highest level, kind of emerging markets, right, we'll see a lot of these following suit to what's already happened in 2024 with places like Bhutan, for example, and places following the kind of leadership of the EU in terms of how they approach this. And so I think we'll see, you know, continue to see adoption of these government digital ID databases in parallel with wallet-based or app-based approaches as well. I think trust frameworks are really important, especially in a world where consumers have a lot of choice with regard to digital ID. I mean, if there's one ID scheme that monopolizes a given geography, then, you know, maybe you don't need a trust framework to guide you because you just, you got one choice. However, in a world where consumers have choice, these types of trust frameworks are really, really, I think, valuable. And so we're watching out for these schemes or trust frameworks, and we're paying close attention to how these different ID networks are governed and accepted around the world.

Riley Hughes: So decentralized ID is an interesting one. Obviously, Trinsic's background is, we, you know, we're sort of, we're born and raised in the decentralized ID world. And we're still, you know, very close with a lot of the people there and still paying very close attention to, you know, how that all plays out. But I think what we see happening is that, especially in geographies where there are, again, some form of maybe another form of digital ID, like a government eID database, adding a wallet-based approach on top of that is something that I'm expecting to continue to happen in 2025. So here we see an example of that with a company building a wallet-based approach on top of Indonesia's government eID database. This is a use case in... Hong Kong, and we already mentioned this Buenos Aires QuarkID approach. But I think what we expect is that as these get traction in a single space, the geographies that surround it, that sort of interact with that jurisdiction will begin to adopt similar protocols, right?

Riley Hughes: So one example of this is QuarkID, where they started in Buenos Aires, in that one place. And now this is a screenshot from their website. You can see all the places that are now piloting and using the same protocol. And by the way, QuarkID is a protocol. It's an approach. It's a particular flavor of decentralized ID, we'll say, right? In the same way that, if you're familiar with the space, in the same way that, like, Aries is a flavor of decentralized ID, right? QuarkID is a similar kind of bundled package of protocols that one could sort of pick up off the shelf and adopt. And it's now being used in a bunch of places in Latin America. We saw this as well with a company called Zada, which got strong adoption in Myanmar, and then companies around in the sort of broader economic zone, or that shared a lot of commerce with Myanmar, including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. Zada was able to expand its reach into surrounding countries based on the adoption that they had in the one place. So I think that's a common thing that we'll start to see as well.

Riley Hughes: Okay, now let's get to, you know, predictions and kind of where we, you know, what we think will happen in 2025. And again, these are not my—I'm still, you know, working through some of these. I think the goal here is to air these predictions out and get feedback on them, and then I'll probably kind of etch them into, you know, ink and put them out into the world later this month or something. But, so the first thing I think we'll see is more businesses accepting digital IDs. Now, I'm biased because I think this is what we spend all day doing at Trinsic, right, is helping companies accept digital ID methods for verification alongside their existing verifications which use physical ID documents to verify users. But I think this is substantiated pretty directly with public announcements from very large companies that talk about this. If you look at Uber, you know, they recently announced a partnership with Clear. And as you can see in their UI, they basically give users an option.

Riley Hughes: You can either get verified with a government ID and selfie, or you can verify, you know, with your Clear account. And they say in their announcement that they are also adding new verification options, you know, of course starting with Clear, but they're starting with Clear, right? It's not sort of exclusively Clear. The goal is to give users choice and optionality and improve user experience, conversion, fraud, things like that, by offering additional digital ID verification methods. I think Amazon announced this as well. I guess they didn't really announce it. They talked about it at an event, and then it was picked up, it was covered by Biometric Update. So they basically mentioned that they are planning to start accepting digital IDs like mobile driver's licenses and European national IDs presented from mobile wallets, and they're doing it in 2025, right? And I think it would have been probably reasonably hard to make the argument to do it in 2024 because of just where adoption was. But now it is not that way.

Riley Hughes: I mean, it is now, I think, totally reasonable to start accepting these IDs from certain geographies which have strong adoption. And, yeah, this other underlined that, you know, doubling down on digital credentials, you know, obviously already supporting physical credentials for verification, but then doubling down on wherever there are digital versions for verification, it's, you know, being the preferred option. So I think we're going to see a lot more of that in 2025. And of course, we think that that's why we're betting our company on it. That's why we've built the product that we have. But worth saying nonetheless. The next prediction is that not only, you know, last year we said, okay, we think half the states in the U.S. are going to announce a mobile driver's license. And so far we're on track. I think that that slide that I showed had 26 states on it. Well, now we're going to say, you know, that at least 25 will have a live mobile driver's license. And this prediction maybe have a sort of 80, 90% confidence in.

Riley Hughes: The second part of this, with remote verification, is maybe slightly lower, you know, confidence interval on the second half of this sentence, right? But there is absolutely a world, right? We've talked with every state, every vendor, everybody who is doing a mobile driver's license, right? And there's absolutely a world where remote verification is supported by every mDL implementation in the U.S. by the end of 2025. I think it's not, you know, it's not 80% probability, but You know, there's definitely a path for that to happen. And this is just such a massive unlock. Using a phone to prove your ID in person is good, right? Like, I've used my mobile driver's license to get through TSA, and I like it. But at the end of the day, I have my phone in my pocket. I also have my ID in my pocket, right? And TSA especially says you still got to take your ID. So it's not really that much of a difference.

Riley Hughes: But when you can share a mobile driver's license online for verification, I recently had to do a transaction online where I had to, you know, photograph the front and back of my ID, photograph my face, submit those photographs to the third party that this particular vendor was using, and it took me a little bit of time. I think there was a glare on the image or something, and, you know, fortunately I can't really grow a beard, so that wasn't an issue. But if I had sunglasses or a hat or something, you know, looked very different from my image, that could cause issues. But when you have a mobile driver's license that it's already on your phone, that you can click a button, takes you to the mDL, and you can share it in five seconds, as opposed to the process that it takes to verify remotely with a physical ID, it is an absolute game changer for people and will totally drive mobile driver's license adoption. So I think there's incentive broadly, you know, by everybody to support remote verification.

Riley Hughes: I think it just needs to be done in a kind of way that is fully kind of above board and is accepted by everybody. And I think the new DASH 7 standard of the DASH 7 part of the mDL specification is going to unlock that. Okay, the next one is that government digital IDs, which are currently restricted to government use, will open up for private verification. I mean, this is a trend that I think people should be paying attention to as well. There are, I mean, there's precedent for this in various places where, you know, I think... I'm trying to remember the example, but anyway, you know, a place where the government kind of instituted a government-verified login or a government-verified ID that was used to do taxes and to, you know, engage with various government departments. And then after two years, it opened up to the private sector, and then, you know, the private sector was able to do it as well. We are going to be releasing a podcast episode soon with BankID Sweden, which we recorded about the early days and adoption of that particular eID.

Riley Hughes: And the first major use case that drove adoption there was tax, like filing your taxes, right? And of course now that is open for everything. I mean, everybody from a gym to airline, you know, is accepting BankID Sweden in that country. And so I think, you know, there are places, you know, Spain, Greece, you know, various other places where the government has some form of digital ID that's only useful to do government services. And the thing to pay attention to is when those things start to open up to private companies, like I think that that's going to unlock a lot overnight, right? Because you already have adoption, you know, you already have some level of adoption. You're not starting from scratch. And that's going to be really, really interesting to watch. The next prediction is that eIDAS 2.0 and the EUDI stuff is going to take longer than most people think. I am a bull on the EUDI sort of approach. I think it's going to be awesome, but I do think it will be slower than The stated timelines.

Riley Hughes: And despite that, I think that individual member states will launch early and launch versions of wallets that are directionally aligned and that people should be paying attention to that I think maybe are not explicitly eIDAS 2.0 wallets or something, but that are things to pay attention to nonetheless. And like I mentioned earlier, existing eIDs that kind of shift the approach in this direction is another thing to watch out for. And then the next one being, I predict that we've seen so many of the identity verification vendors launching reusable ID products or supporting reusable ID in some form. And I think that by the end of 2025, it's going to be rare to find document-based identity verification companies that don't offer a reusable ID product. I mean, you know, it's just once you verify, tapping a button that says, Remember me for next time, or, Yeah, I'll save the result of this verification to a wallet or something, is, I think, pretty obvious. It's a pretty obvious move for them, and it's a pretty obvious user experience win for the users.

Riley Hughes: It looks like it's working pretty well for the companies that are doing it so far. And so I think it's going to be rare to find ones that don't touch that by the end of 2025. Of course, there will still be some, but I think it'll be rare. And then the final thing is that private sector reusable IDs, including those identity verification companies, will be aggressive on building their networks. I mean, we already see this this year with CLEAR going from Like I say, 17 million identities to, you know, over 25 million identities. I mean, that is very fast growth. I think, you know, I don't see any evidence that Clear plans on slowing that down, nor do I see evidence of other reusable ID networks that are in that same field slowing down either. So I think that aggressive growth and aggressive network building is only going to continue, and it's going to be really interesting to watch. Okay. Those are our predictions. That is what I think people should be paying attention to in 2025, and the digital IDs that are I think, likely to launch in 2025. I hope this was, you know, useful to you.

Riley Hughes: Now, what I would ask you to do is go into the chat—or not the chat, the Q&A—and drop your thoughts and questions there, and we can, yeah, we can go from there.

Moderator: Great. Riley, we have a couple questions already, so I will pop them over to you. What are the major risks to users when using decentralized ID, and what protections are being utilized to mitigate those risks?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, good question. So, you know, I think the major risk to most digital ID schemes—I don't think this is unique to digital or decentralized ID—is that once it's very easy to, like, once it's very easy and fast to prove who you are, I think a lot more places are going to request that you prove who you are, right? Right now, you don't really have to upload a physical government ID document at that many places. I mean, now you've got to do it on, you know, LinkedIn and Twitter and, you know, to—I mean, it's still a lot of places. I mean, there's tens of millions of people doing this every day around the world. But, you know, it's not that many places. I think, you know, when you have digital ID that you can share in five seconds and it's high assurance and— You know, and widely adopted, I think a lot more places are going to ask for it. So the risk there is that you end up sharing—like, privacy ends up worse with decentralized ID than it does without it, right?

Riley Hughes: Because even if decentralized ID is privacy-preserving technically, if everywhere you go you're sharing, even if it's all zero-knowledge proofs, but you share your name with a lot of places you go, right? I mean, then the ability for these companies to correlate you based on your name or correlate you based on your date of birth and some other little, you know, data points about you is, I think, the risk, right? So I think the solution to that risk is that—it's really related to regulation, frankly. I mean, I think you just need regulatory bodies to require that people don't ask more than they need. That doesn't solve it entirely, right? I mean, I think there's things that you can do about correlating people in the background and things you can do with regard to data brokers. There's things you can do with, you know—I mean, but a lot of these come down to regulatory kind of actions to mitigate that. Yeah, there's one other thing I was going to say about that that I don't remember now, so apologies for forgetting the second half, but if I remember it, I'll come back to it.

Riley Hughes: Okay, I can see I have the—well, actually, yeah, Kelly, if you want to read that, might be easier than me trying to track the questions here.

Moderator: Sure. The next one is, do you see CLEAR's growth slowing down with TSA's touchless ID?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that's a good question. I think, I don't know CLEAR's business that well, right? I mean, I don't know that much more about CLEAR than I think the public knows. I mean, we are partners with CLEAR. You know, we have customers that use Trinsic's acceptance network to accept verified IDs from CLEAR's network, right? Accept users from CLEAR. So we do have some, you know, I do have some insight there, but not that much, right? Not that much more than everybody else. So I don't know how much of CLEAR's growth comes from TSA versus other channels. But if I'm reasoning here from first principles or whatever, or just from, you know, what I can see from the outside, I would think if the majority of CLEAR's growth came from TSA, then the growth rate would have been higher from like 2011 through, you know, 2002 or something, right? I mean, I think we would have seen faster growth, even if we just zoom into 2020 to, you know, 2023 or something, they would have grown in the way that I'm describing.

Riley Hughes: And I don't know if, I could imagine a world where most of their growth came from new people walking to the kiosks at the airports and signing up, especially when there's other options now like TSA PreCheck and other things. So I think if I'm, again, just reasoning from the outside here, I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of CLEAR's Growth is coming from their remote verification options. If you look at their solutions, they have a product called Clear Verified, which is a remote verification option. This is what LinkedIn uses to verify people on LinkedIn. It is, has nothing to do with—I mean, I shouldn't say nothing to do with, but it is not—I mean, you enroll virtually in a standard IDV process by uploading your ID, taking a selfie, and doing all that. So, in, you know, to answer your question directly, no, I don't think Clear's growth... is going to slow down due to any changes that TSA is planning to make with regard to what kind of ID methods it accepts.

Riley Hughes: I think Clear is going to keep growing fast, and I think because, I'm willing to bet that most of their growth is coming from remote verification traffic, which I do not think is going to slow down. I think it's going to only increase with, you know, with AI and other tailwinds that are causing that to increase. So, yeah, but that's a good question.

Moderator: We had another question about access to the slides. I just wanted to say that once we wrap the webinar, we will make sure that this recording gets online. So stay on the lookout for an email with the link to the recording so you can kind of review what you have gone through here. But that was all the questions we had in the chat box here, Riley.

Riley Hughes: Great. Well, I am, you know, happy to engage with people over, you know, email, LinkedIn. I always still say Twitter, but I guess it's now X. But really, probably email. Email, LinkedIn are the best places to reach me. I think, you know, happy to dive deeper into any of these things. And part of the reason we do these webinars and put Our research and our kind of perspectives out into the wild is because usually when we do that, people tell us where we're wrong, and that's always great. So, you know, to the extent that we missed something or were off the mark at all on any of these points or predictions, you know, let me know. I'd love to get your feedback. And if you are operating in any of the geographies that we talked about or doing identity verification today, I'd love to talk to you about how you can accept these types of digital IDs as a part of your overall identity verification stack and as part of your identity verification process. You know, we slot right in alongside existing tools to add a step in the process where you can accept digital IDs.

Riley Hughes: So please get in touch if you're interested in talking more or have any feedback for us. And with that, Kelly, I think we should end and, you know, give everybody a few minutes to get to their next things.

Moderator: Great. Well, thanks everyone for joining, and happy almost 2025.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks all for coming.