2025 Landscape of Global Digital ID Adoption

Chapters

• 0:00 — Opening and introductions

• 5:24 — Introduction to Trinsic and Digital IDs

• 18:50 — Digital ID landscape

• 20:05 — North America digital ID schemes

• 27:07 — Europe digital ID schemes

• 31:00 — Asia digital ID schemes

• 34:55 — Africa digital ID schemes

• 36:43 — Middle East digital ID schemes

• 37:40 — South America digital ID schemes

• 39:59 — Oceania digital ID schemes

• 41:40 — Global digital ID schemes

• 43:02 — Global opportunity zones

• 47:40 — Q&A

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Zack Jones: We'll give it a few minutes for everybody to get up and running in the webinar, and then we'll probably kick it off, you know, three or four minutes after the hour, maybe five minutes after the hour or something like that. So, yeah. What's new, Riley? What have you been up to?

Riley Hughes: Oh, I apparently have been shaving less frequently. Just like, you know, when you see yourself in the Zoom mirror for the first time of the day or whatever, you know, these thoughts come up. Started mountain biking this summer, which has been a lot of fun.

Zack Jones: Nice.

Riley Hughes: Almost fell off a cliff this morning at like 6:30 in the morning, and so there's nothing to wake you up in the morning like a little, you know, adrenaline hit. So I'm feeling energized and ready to talk about digital IDs.

Zack Jones: Cool. That's awesome. Just while folks are still joining and trickling in here, we're going to be busy over the next month or so with some travel and conferences and things like that. So Riley and I are both going to be in Phoenix at the beginning of next week for the AAMVA International Conference. So if anybody that's here will be there as well, send us an email or a note on Slack or something like that. We'd be happy to meet up, grab coffee. We're going to do, yeah, we have a presentation on Monday afternoon about some of the use cases that we're working on with Trinsic. And then Riley, you're going straight from AAMVA to Identity Week. Is that right?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I will be in Identity Week in DC. I should probably do like a LinkedIn post about it. I've seen some others do that, so I'm gonna make a note of that. It's a good reminder. But yeah, I will be— At Identity Week next week as well. So if you'll be there, hit me up. Would love to catch up.

Zack Jones: Awesome.

Riley Hughes: I remember, Zack, when you, you know, we were talking about you joining Trinsic, and I was pitching you on this big self-sovereign identity vision. And now look at you. You are going to speak at a DMV conference. How do you feel? Is this what you thought was going to happen?

Zack Jones: Yeah. It's, yeah, thrilling. It's a height of technology. Yeah, this is, yeah, it's exciting stuff. We've never been to this conference before, so we're excited, and we think we'll come back. This is the international conference, so we'll get updates on the mobile driver's license developments globally, right? So there's sections to talk about what other countries are doing with mobile driver's licenses, as well as what's happening in North America and in the U.S. across all the, you know, the 50 states and Puerto Rico. But then there will be updates on, like, the Australian mobile driver's license ecosystem, as well as a number of other countries that have kind of signaled support or are moving for supporting, you know, the ISO standard for mobile driver's license. So, awesome.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, and as much as I tease about it being a DMV conference, I am actually extremely excited for it and to hear those updates. You know, it's funny how that goes.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Cool. Well, it seems like we have a number of people here now, so we can get rolling with introductions. I'll kick it off and then pass it over to Riley. So my name is Zack Jones. I lead Trinsic's, you know, product partnerships. So I'm in charge of working with the different digital ID providers that Trinsic supports, identity wallets and reusable ID networks and bank IDs all around the world. So I stay very closely plugged into, like, new developments and launches, as well as user adoption and growth across the world. And then, you know, we have a pretty comprehensive internal database of over 250 different digital ID networks that we're tracking with their adoption and other data about them. So this webinar will be kind of a You know, a summary of what we're seeing. This is considered an update based on some other things that we've published about a year ago in a similar webinar that we did last year. But this is an update on that, and I'm sure there will be a bunch of questions and follow-up, so you know how to reach us.

Zack Jones: And I'll join back in on camera at the end for questions and answers. But until then, I'll let Riley take it away.

Riley Hughes: Great. Thank you, Zack, for setting the stage. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, and I will hit the slideshow button. Okay. How are we looking, Zack? Did I do the right thing?

Zack Jones: Looks good. Yep. All good.

Riley Hughes: Great. Yeah, you never, I don't know, it seems like I've done this a few times, so I should be more familiar with how this stuff was going to go. But yeah, glad that this is working. Glad to be here and talking about digital ID adoption. You know, when I started in the digital identity space in 2017, I was an employee at Sovrin Foundation, and adoption was the name of the game. It was like, none of this stuff we're working on matters if this doesn't get adopted, right? And that has been my refrain for years and years and years, right? And I think at the time it was focused specifically on verifiable credentials. Trinsic started as a verifiable credential platform or a decentralized identity platform, and over time has evolved into a digital ID acceptance network, which we will talk about probably further. But, you know, the common thread through all this is related to adoption, and so I'm excited to talk about Excited to talk about this and. jump right in.

Riley Hughes: So the purpose of the webinar, as Zack said, is to cover the, sort of share what we're seeing as far as digital ID adoption around the world. I will note that, you know, we are still learning things every day, right? We just recently got a request for a geography of a small country that had a very high adoption digital ID that was like, oh, we didn't, we weren't tracking that one, right? So we're still learning on all this stuff and we're still progressing. And part of the reason we do these webinars is to get feedback. So I'm excited to hear from you as much as we are to share what we have seen in the market. As far as what Trinsic does, when I say we're a digital ID acceptance network, what I mean is that we help companies accept digital IDs alongside physical IDs, right? So normally for identity verification, it is done via a picture of a plastic ID and a picture of, or video of, a selfie. And, you know, this has some challenges, right? This is not a perfect process. It takes time.

Riley Hughes: It's not a great UX, especially when there's like bad lighting or, you know, my driver's license is in my car or, you know, I forgot to take off my glasses or my hat or whatever, right? There's all these edge cases that make it difficult. And with AI progressing so rapidly, there's sort of a cat and mouse game being played where, you know, the fraudsters get better and so then the document authentication engines need to get better and then the deepfake models get better and so then the liveness detection needs to get better and we sort of— You know, are in this race, and it's never going to be perfect because fundamentally it's translating something from the digital world into the physical world. Wait, reverse that. It's translating something from the physical world into a digital format and trying to authenticate a physical thing using digital software, and that's always, you're always just going to lose something in that translation.

Riley Hughes: And, you know, I think our belief is that identity verification tomorrow is, you know, as simple as double-click the button on your iPhone or whatever. This is a screenshot from Apple's website, but there are dozens and dozens and dozens of digital IDs and wallets that work in a very similar way, where it's a one-click experience for users to share the information that they want to share when they need to directly from the source. And so this is just for a little background. Like, when we thought about doing this and entering this market, you know, a year or so ago, this was like a little whiteboard that I made. So apologies that it doesn't look very clean. It wasn't intended to be, but it sort of still represents what I think this game-changing opportunity is to shift toward digital IDs.

Riley Hughes: It means that, you know, although if there's two dimensions that we can map out here, one being the requirement for fraud prevention and the other being the requirement for strong user experience, the sort of status quo of identity verification using physical ID documents is really, you know, it's very well suited for this sort of long end of the curve where, you know, you really want to have a high assurance, you know, or you really want to make sure that this is the right person, and you're willing to endure some friction in the process to get to that outcome. But I think that the opportunity for digital IDs, where friction is so much less, is it just expands the market much more. So scenarios that historically maybe would not have chosen to do document verification will choose to do digital ID verification because it's so much less friction. And what that means is there are more scenarios now that will be eligible for fraud reduction and more surface area for reducing, you know, things like identity theft and other, like, things that really have an impact on people's lives.

Riley Hughes: And so if you look at the landscape of digital IDs, they're, depending on how you want to count it, extremely broad. And so what I hope to do today is kind of give us a couple of frameworks, you know, this being one of them is just, you know, there's so many digital IDs out there and the space is so fragmented, right? There's some that are open standards, others that are closed, right, proprietary networks, some that are private sector operated and others that are public sector operated. And we're lacking common standards to, you know, make all these things talk to each other. And I think hopefully over time those standards mature, I believe they will. But in terms of where the market is right now, it remains very fragmented. And so Trinsic's product is an attempt to solve this by basically being the bespoke aggregator or integrator of all these different digital IDs. This is a little bit of an older, you know, we could update this image because the coverage number is much higher now. But conceptually, you know, we integrate into whatever.

Riley Hughes: Standard or whatever non-standard way is available to connect to each digital ID, and we aggregate that into one API and one contract so that our customers can accept whatever digital ID the user might have. So in terms of this webinar, you know, we're going to talk about a bunch of geographies around the world, and we're going to talk about adoption of digital IDs in those places, but it's important to note that although digital IDs, you know, in some cases, some types of digital IDs are early in their adoption cycle and are relative, like on an absolute basis, have a low number of users, the growth rate of those digital IDs is very high. And then in other cases where digital IDs are widely adopted, there are really interesting trends where there's sort of next generation digital IDs that are riding the, you know, on the back of that that will give users new ways to share their ID and often in a more privacy-preserving or digitally native way.

Riley Hughes: And, you know, figuring out adoption and talking about it, especially in a webinar like this where you want to be, like, I don't know, simple, it's hard. And it's hard too if you're a product person trying to consider how these digital IDs map to your product strategy and which geographies you should be prioritizing and all of that, right? You really want to understand the adoption information to understand where the juice is worth the squeeze, so to speak. But figuring that out is complex for a couple of reasons. So I'm going to call a couple of those out right now because as we dig in, these will just be helpful things to understand and probably will preempt some of the questions we'll get. And should have probably called this out earlier, but feel free to drop questions in the Q&A portion and we'll get to them. You know, drop them in at any time and then we'll sort of queue them up and address them in the Q&A portion. But, you know, feel free to ask any questions about these.

Riley Hughes: But when we talk about digital IDs, We talk about, we use this word provider or an identity provider, and that sort of represents an ID wallet or a scheme of some kind, right? So consider Google Wallet is what we would call an ID provider, and then the mDL inside of it is what we call the digital ID, or the ID pass inside of it is what we call the digital ID, or the bank-issued age verification credential is what we consider the digital ID, right? So there's no perfect abstraction here, but that's kind of how we talk about it, and so just for terminology, that might be helpful to keep in mind. The next thing is that oftentimes people think about eIDs or digital IDs mapping to geographies. And while there certainly is correlation, you know, between ID providers and geographies, the correlation is not perfect, and the relationship really, like if you want to map this stuff out, you really do need a many-to-many relationship to model how these things relate. So, you know, BankID Sweden, that is available in Sweden, right? It's a Swedish eID, and that's one-to-one.

Riley Hughes: But there are other eIDs in Sweden, right? And, you know, if you look at something like, I don't know, the Netherlands, you've got like iDIN, which is very much a Netherlands-focused thing, but you have DigiD, which has coverage in the Netherlands and in the UK, right? So you don't, we can't do a perfect mapping, and especially when we talk about adoption, if we think, you know, something like Yoti, you know, has maybe 10 million downloads or something, but that's split between the UK and France, and, you know, I haven't necessarily broken out every single provider. You know, I don't know how many of those are in France and how many are in the UK or something, right? And so some of this is You know, estimates, and we try to do our best to add nuance like that in these adoption numbers. But, you know, for that reason, they'll never be perfect. And then when we talk about adoption versus coverage, there's this, you know, some forms of proving your ID digitally, such as with a bank account online, mean that sort of anyone with a bank account can do it.

Riley Hughes: But does that mean that literally anyone with a bank account should be counted as adoption numbers for that scheme or that provider? I don't know. This is a definition. It's like a semantics question, but we at Trinsic sort of split these things out. And so in some of the numbers that you'll see, they exclude certain eIDs where the adoption number would basically be everyone or something, right? Or because it's not that useful to just see the number as just like everyone. And so, yeah, coverage versus adoption makes this complex. And then the final thing is just how to evaluate edge cases here where, for example, you know, there's maybe an eID in Ireland that is only used for authenticating to the government systems, right? And it's a sort of like a reusable identity across different government services. But is that really an eID if it's only usable by internal government services, right? Or in the U.S., there's, you know, login.gov, right? Is this a reusable identity? Yes. Is it Does it have adoption? Like, yes. But is it useful beyond just those government agencies? No.

Riley Hughes: So how do we kind of think about that? That is, you know, something that we think about sometimes. And then again, when the credentials inside the digital ID or the digital IDs themselves are credentials that represent something adjacent to the core identity document. So I guess what I'll say is that the scope of what we're talking about here are ones that represent, going back to the original framing of the conversation, that represent a substitute for an ID document, right? And maybe not a perfect substitute, but at least there's enough overlap that we can consider them, right? So something like a student ID credential, right, or something like that perhaps would not be in scope for what we're talking about here. So again, it's complex, but we'll do our best. So if you have questions or you want me to expand on something or add nuance, please, you know, don't hesitate. Okay, well, let's jump in. There are 282 digital IDs that we are tracking, and we talk about them in terms of three different types at the highest level, right?

Riley Hughes: There's eIDs, which are led by governments, reIDs, which is reusable IDs that are private sector-led, and bank IDs, which are sort of generally bank-based. But conceptually, this is like the bucket for sort of maybe it's private sector, but they're very heavily regulated or they're very heavily influenced by government-set regulations, such that it is a sort of hybrid of maybe purely government-led and, like, purely private sector, right? So usually these are bank IDs, but things like FTN in Finland, you know, is like a bunch of banks and also a telco sort of-based ID, right? Which these all will probably fall in this camp. And so these are our own. Internal ways of referring to these things, right? So there's no—not saying that this is like the industry standard way, but just this is a way to think about different types. So if we want to jump in to North America, we are tracking 48 different digital ID schemes or ID providers, which cover 177 million people, which is about 70% of the adult population.

Riley Hughes: So, you know, a lot of people think about North America or the United States as being, like, behind with digital ID, right? A lot of people look at places like Canada as being ahead in digital ID. But I think if you double-click and look at the actual adoption, there are networks such as ID.me, which is the largest private reusable ID network on Earth that I'm aware of. And that's primarily, you know, a United States-focused network. And then other private networks like Plaid, Clear, and Airside, you know, have developed significant user bases in the United States of reusable digital IDs. And then there are also a variety of mobile driver's licenses, and the United States is sort of leading out in terms of the number of kind of mDLs and different mDL wallets that exist. And certainly the, you know, probably the geography with the largest total population who's eligible for mDLs. Apple Wallet right now is the wallet with the most mDLs in it that we're aware of. It's sort of crazy to think about.

Riley Hughes: Seventy-six percent of Americans live in states where mDLs are either active or in development. This is not a, you know, niche thing at this point. 41% live in states where mDLs are active. So this is like, you know, 41% of Americans with a driver's license are sort of eligible for mDLs. And I think the number who, you know, actually have mDLs is closer to something like 2%, right? So it's, but that number is growing really quickly. So if you look at launches by year in terms of states, you can see that, you know, Louisiana, you know, starting out early here in 2018, and then starting around basically post-COVID with Arizona kind of leading the charge in 2020. And then you start to see a cascade of additional states launching. Really picked up last year, and I think toward the end of the year, we'll see quite a few more launches of mDLs, with Montana just recently launching their mDL here in 2025. So by the end of the year, we are predicting that there will be 29 states issuing mDLs.

Riley Hughes: And I think most people, when they talk about this, they, you know, they sort of refer to a number around half that, right? They might think there's maybe 15 states or something that do it. And, yeah, just interesting to note that, like, the growth rate here is, I think, the thing to pay attention to. So if you look at where the mDL implementation is across, you know, I mentioned that 41% are eligible or something, you can sort of break that down even further and sort of where. Where in the process, you know, are they with their mDL implementation? And if we look here, this is a map from AAMVA. You can see the sort of breakdown in terms of where there's a public key issued and/or where there's an interoperable implementation. In the United States, there are 16 or 17, 16 or 17 different mDL wallets. That's a lot. I mean, it's, it's, it's, and many of these support different modalities. Some support different credential types. Not all of them are fully spec compliant, you know. ISO 18013 credentials.

Riley Hughes: And certainly not all of them support things like remote verification or online presentation of the ID. So within this, if we go into sort of break it down by state and also by which wallets are supported in which state, you get to a pretty beautiful matrix here of, you know, showing basically the fragmentation. And so obviously the companies leading in terms of wallets are, you know, Apple Wallet has more states than any other, and then IDEMIA also has a dominant position in terms of the number of state wallets that they support and enable. And then, you know, there are six states who have their own wallets that they have either developed themselves or in conjunction with a vendor. And so our original projection was that, you know, based on our—and I think we made this prediction in about a year ago, maybe end of 2024, or maybe mid-2024, actually, I think, so call it a little over a year ago. Our projection was that in the aggressive scenario, there could be 100 million state-issued mDLs by 2026. And so if we look now and we think, okay, where are we tracking toward that?

Riley Hughes: We have basically— 16 months until the end of 2026. And, you know, I think we are not quite on track for 100 million mDLs. However, conceptually, basically the conservative case, I think, is a bit closer to where we're at. We're maybe a little under this conservative case here, where, you know, again, growth rates, maybe even despite starting from a low basis, when the growth rate is high, you know, things grow a lot faster than we maybe expect. So these are the standards in the U.S., or at least in North America primarily, that are really in focus. And it's just important to distinguish between, you know, the 18013-5 being the primary standard for in-person use cases and -7 for online use cases. And there are a variety of, like, interaction methods with these, right? So just because a wallet supports the -7 spec doesn't mean that it supports the same interaction profile as maybe what another wallet does. And so, again, it gets even more complicated when you dig into it. Okay, that's what we've got on North America.

Riley Hughes: Again, please drop questions if you have them, and I'd love to get to them. But let's move on to Europe. So in Europe, there are 89 digital ID schemes, about double of what we're tracking in North America. And those digital IDs cover 372 million people. And that doesn't even count the, again, eID cards or bank ID. Solutions where the user authenticates to a bank account, such as IDIN in the Netherlands or, you know, the bank ID in the Czech Republic, or, and so forth. So there's even, you know, quite a few more that are qualified eIDs, if you wanted this number to be even higher. And that covers, you know, about half of the adult population. And obviously, if you drill into the geographies with high adoption, you know, much more than half in those. So the largest networks being FranceConnect, SPID in Italy, DIA in Ukraine, and DigiD in the Netherlands. Most eIDs today in Europe are based on the sort of eIDAS 1.0 framework. And I think, you know, eIDAS 2.0 and the EUDI get a lot of attention, rightfully so, because that's what's sort of coming and that's where the market is moving.

Riley Hughes: But it would be a mistake to sort of focus only on the future and not notice what's out there today. And I think what we see with technology adoption over time is that generally the future is very heavily influenced by what exists today, because things with existing distribution and adoption tend to be in very good positions to, you know, capitalize on new technologies because they can just roll them out to their existing user base, right? So, yeah, definitely something to watch. You know, this is a map of adoption rates, and so while a geography like, you know, the Ukraine, right, the adoption, like the population... Number is quite high. The adoption rate is a little lower, so it's like still has a lot of users, but maybe the adoption rate is not as high as, you know, places like the Netherlands or, you know, Denmark and that sort of thing. Okay.

Riley Hughes: Well, let's, I think maybe one thing I didn't mention here on the EUDI that I maybe spent more time on on the mDL side, but can just touch on here is that the expectation of the next generation of eIDs in Europe is that they will be based on more open standards like verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers, you know, and so forth. And so, you know, and those will allow people to hold their own identity credentials on a device that they carry locally and share them more freely. However, there are additional sort of governance layers on top of that that will limit who can request what types of things from wallets, and there will be additional governance and legal implications on top of the core sort of technical interoperability that will need to be solved, including things like, you know, business models and, you know, user experience that I'm really interested to, you know, watch play out. Okay, let's dive into Asia. In Asia, we're tracking 34 digital ID schemes covering 2 billion people, right, which is about 40% of the adult population in Asia.

Riley Hughes: And we double-click on some of the largest networks there. Aadhaar is, you know, I think the largest identity system on Earth, covering something like 1.3 billion people. And DigiLocker is a sort of cloud-based locker, or call it a wallet if you want, which can hold a digital copy of your Aadhaar card along with other cards such as your PAN card and even a digital driver's license. And so DigiLocker in India has about 450 million people who use DigiLocker, and so it's a very popular service in India. Dukcapil in Indonesia is a government database that has, you know, broad coverage, as well as PhilSys in the Philippines. And, you know, many of these, such as Dukcapil and the PhilSys system, you know, have this sort of foundational layer of being a government-backed biometric registry. And then they also have now digitally native ways of presenting the same data that's in the government database, but just in a more wallet-based way or something, right? In a way that more of us would consider as like a true kind of digital ID, right?

Riley Hughes: So with PhilSys, the eGov app, for users who have the eGov app on their phone, they can get a copy of a digital national ID on their phone. And when they share that digital national ID with someone, that third party can then validate the signatures there against the PhilSys system, right? So this is a good example of a system that was established, you know, with one paradigm in mind, and then evolving that system to match kind of the way the world is going from there. So it's a really interesting example of how it's not like one or the other, right? This is not like, and, you know, you can start with something like PhilSys, for example, and just check against the database, and then as users sort of upgrade their, you know, their form factor, that they can share that core source, authoritative data source data through, you know, companies can kind of adapt with it. Yeah, and then Bangladesh and Japan.

Riley Hughes: Japan, my number, the noteworthy thing about Japan is they're the first, this My Number card, I think, is the first outside of the United States to be able to be issued into the Apple Wallet. And so that's an interesting development, and I think a lot of people are, you know, keenly interested in how that evolves as well. And so, yeah, if you look at sort of adoption rates, and I think this is filtered, you know, has some filters on it, right? But if you look at adoption rates, you'll see that obviously, you know, Bangladesh, or sorry, Aadhaar in India is, you know, clearly, you know, really high adoption, right? And I think another one to note here that wasn't on this list is SingPass, which is an example of, you know, it's certainly government issued, but is very widely used and is, again, in a similar way as many of these others, much more of a user-in-the-loop kind of model and has very, very high adoption as well. Okay, going to Africa next, we're tracking 16 digital ID schemes covering close to 300 million people, or 37% of the adult population there.

Riley Hughes: So the largest networks there being the NIN in Nigeria, the South African national ID, the Kenyan national ID, and Fayda in Ethiopia. Here is sort of a map of those adoption rates as well. And I think the thing to note here is that Uh, it's, um, the, you know, as we've gone through each of these sort of continents, right, we see a little different model, right? Like the U.S. has a little different model than, like, Europe, which is sort of based in the eIDAS 1.0 model, which is different than Asia, which has these government registries and so forth. So I think, you know, each geography, you know, kind of does things in a little different way. And I think Africa and Asia as well have a history in technology of sort of leapfrogging, you know, and going right to, you know, the stuff that's proven to work, right? So I'm really interested to see what comes out of Africa in the next handful of years. There's some really interesting developments with, you know, kind of taking some of the things that have worked in terms of national ID deployments.

Riley Hughes: Trying to remember, Moisep, I think, is the name of one, and as well as, you know, the sort of playbook from Bhutan, which has deployed a self-sovereign identity system to citizens in Asia, and sort of applying that in Africa. Really excited to see what comes out of Africa in the next handful of years. Looking at the Middle East, there are 10 digital ID schemes that we are tracking, which cover 130 million people, or 60% of the adult population, the largest being in, you know, Pakistan. Kuwait Mobile ID is an interesting one. I think UAE Pass, though, is probably the one we hear about most because it's similar to SingPass, despite the sort of absolute population number of that geography not being as large as many of the other ones. The digital ID system is very sophisticated and very widely adopted and well used, right? So it's an example for, you know, other geographies in terms of how a digital ID can be incorporated and used. Yeah, and so this is a map of adoption rates in the Middle East as far as what we are tracking.

Riley Hughes: And now if we look at South America, we see 14 digital ID schemes that we're tracking, which covers 308 million people. Or 47% of the adult population. This is driven, I think, in large part by Brazil, which has the CPF number and a well-adopted sort of lookup against registries of people and CPF numbers. That covers, you know, over 100 million people right there. And then there are things like the digital CNH in Brazil as well, which are associated to a CPF number. And then I forget the other ones, CIN maybe. Oh yeah, that's listed on here. I should have just read the slide. The CIN is another sort of next-generation ID in Brazil, which is linked to a CPF number and will be able to be verified digitally as well. So, yeah, and if we look at adoption rates, there are a handful of Latin American countries too that are experimenting with next-generation digital IDs, we'll call them, such as in Buenos Aires, there's things like the MIBA, I think, or M-I-B-A.

Riley Hughes: I guess I should double-check on how that's pronounced, but basically it's, you know, Buenos Aires government-driven, you know, where you can get your digital driver's license on your phone in the form of a verifiable credential. And places in, for example, Peru that are experimenting with digital verifiable credentials for things like driver's licenses and others. So, you know, this is another geography that's learning quickly from things that are happening in the rest of the world and is very motivated by, you know, economic growth, which is really driven, you know, by strong digital ID systems as well. If you want to kind of double-click on that, you know, this is, I'm sort of repeating from a discussion we had on our podcast with somebody who's really involved in this market and is, you know, sort of articulates well, what are the drivers of digital ID adoption in Latin America?

Riley Hughes: Okay, and then looking at the Oceania sort of region, we're tracking 14 digital ID schemes covering 32 million people, the largest of which are Digital ID of Australia Post, MyGovID, which is another Australian method, and then some of the digital driver's licenses in Australia are really compelling. The New South Wales one being the one with the highest adoption. However, that one is not fully, like, it's not that all the users who have it have one that is spec compliant and interoperable, but it still is, you know, still can be used for things, right? Which is sort of interesting and is moving in an interoperable direction, as well as RealMe in New Zealand and the NID in Papua New Guinea. And so looking at adoption rates, Australia is really high, right, especially when you consider the breadth of the different types of digital IDs.

Riley Hughes: Another one that's noteworthy here would be ConnectID, which is not included in this list just only because it is a method that requires you to sort of authenticate to your bank or other sort of identity provider in their network to prove your ID, right? They don't have a wallet themselves, but they are, you know, similar to these other bank-based IDs in other geographies, you know, well used and a really important player in the digital ID ecosystem of that geography, despite the fact that for the purposes of this presentation, we've, you know, focused our Our look at ones where, you know, we excluded those from the sort of adoption numbers, but, yeah, interesting one to watch. Okay, and then there are some digital IDs that are not scoped to a geography, but that are global inherently. And so there's 26 of those that we're tracking: networks like VeriFly, Fractal, Civic, Wallet ID, HyperSign, and others. Many of these are sort of decentralized identity ones or reusable IDs focused on the Web3 ecosystem.

Riley Hughes: And, you know, cryptocurrencies and blockchain is inherently not geographically bound. And so I think a lot of these that you see here are focused on that as well. And then there are others that— are really global in nature. I would call out Microsoft here, where, you know, the Microsoft Entra platform is obviously Microsoft's an American company. They do a lot of business in North America, but they also do a lot of business around the world and have intentions and ambitions of being more global. So then if we zoom out and we look at all the adoption rates, right, I mean, you get the function we use to sort of color code these, you know, gets weighted by the highest adoption geography, right, being India with Aadhaar. But then, you know, looking across a really good portion of the world has digital IDs that are growing in adoption every day. And so you might look at this and it's like, okay, well, there's a lot of, you know, what do we do about this?

Riley Hughes: I think what we recommend doing often is focusing on where there's, you know, the opportunity is really good, right, where there's basically reasonably high adoption, people use the digital IDs a good amount, right? So the people are used to it, and where there are not too many legal or compliance hurdles to overcome to begin to allow users to adopt these eIDs, right? So, for example, in Norway, in order to accept BankID Norway, your business needs to have a bank account with one of the Norwegian banks. And so, like, in order to start doing that, unless you are based in Norway and happen to, like, bank with a Norwegian bank, establishing a new banking relationship with a bank in another country is, like, a reasonably high hurdle to get over, right? So we don't typically say, Oh, start there, right? We typically say, Hey, start in Brazil, where you can start accepting the, you know, digital CNH, which is the digital driver's license, right away. And this comes from an e-book, which we have called Opportunity Zones, and we can talk more about that in just a bit.

Riley Hughes: So in summary, you know, digital IDs are growing rapidly around the world. We recommend people start where, you know, with certain geographies where it's easy to get started. I would add the United States to this. I mean, although mDLs are relatively low in adoption right now, you know, the delta in user experience and the growth rate, I think, really justify, you know, starting an investment earlier. Also because despite the market being fragmented, there are ways to solve that and make the user experience really good. And that, you know, this is what Trinsic exists for, right, is to help companies verify their users much faster with lower friction using digital IDs from whichever geography or, you know, type they're coming from. And so if you want to drill in deeper, we have a couple resources that I'll point out here. The first one is the subject of today's webinar. It's this adoption report where we take a lot of, you know, what we shared.

Riley Hughes: Today really was taken from this report, and we'll sort of keep this report updated every, you know, few months or so based on what we've seen the latest adoption information to be. So that's a good report. I believe you'll get an email with the adoption report in it after this webinar, if you've registered, which I guess if you're here, you have registered. And the next ebook that I point out is that opportunity zones that I mentioned, right, that this kind of goes into each geography, right? It zooms into, like, the Netherlands, and it's like, okay, here's what you got to know about starting in the Netherlands, right? Like, here's the compliance requirement, the, you know, why we think it's a good place to start from a few different angles.

Riley Hughes: And then we also have a report on mobile driver's licenses specifically, where we dive really deep into just mDL adoption and, you know, which wallets exist in which states, you know, and which ones are spec compliant and not, and all of that, and, you know, what presentation methods are supported by which ones, and we sort of, you know, take it a level deeper. And then finally, we have a podcast where we talk to the builders of these ecosystems and, you know, the people behind these networks of digital IDs and really just talk about the lessons learned and adoption information and so forth. So we've spoken to people from, you know, IDEMIA, which powers 10 of the states' mDL projects, and we've spoken to the California, you know, the California and people behind the California mDL and the Louisiana mDL, which, and other guests, which have been really insightful, some of whom I noticed are here on this meeting today. So if you were a guest on the podcast, Big shout out. Appreciate you for joining us there.

Riley Hughes: And if you haven't checked out the podcast yet, I encourage you to do it and give me feedback of, you know, who you'd like to hear from next. Okay, is that it? I think that's it.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Yeah, great job, Riley. That's all for the planned content here, so we can hop over into the Q&A. Thanks, everybody, for submitting some questions to get this started. Again, we do have, yeah, we have, you know, 10 or 12 minutes here, so if you have other questions, we'll try to get to as many as we can. I think the one that I want to start with is one of the questions said, What are the different struggles that you see on each continent when trying to plug into different identity schemes into Trinsic's acceptance network, and do you notice any patterns?

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, I think I do notice patterns, right? I mean, I think probably the largest pattern or tension is that there are, like, identity data is really, like, identity is about access, right? So no matter what you're going to do, you need to prove who you are. You know, like the KYC requirement, obviously in banking or something like that is a given. If you're going to rent a car, it's a given. If you're going to, like, stay at an accommodation, it's a given. If you're going to work, it's a given, right? So, like, to do anything in life, people basically need to prove who they are to do it. And so you want these digital IDs to be really accessible and useful in lots of places. However, the counterbalance to that is that this is, like, some of the most sensitive data about people. And if it gets in the wrong hands, then, like, the wrong people could, like, impersonate the right people, you know what I mean? So, and maybe not if the digital ID system is built in such a way to prevent that, but suffice to say this is very sensitive data.

Riley Hughes: So I think the pattern that I notice, the struggle that exists throughout the world is this tension between governments or private entities entrusted by government or whatever to make the digital IDs widely accessible and useful, and also Kind of lock them down and protect the users and prevent misuse and oversharing and stuff like that. And so some, and in many geographies, I would say very blunt instruments are used to solve for the second point, right? For example, in order to use SingPass in Singapore, you need to have a legal entity in Singapore, right? So that obviously, you know, has its merits. There's a reason they did that. You know, they don't want people, maybe foreign adversaries or something, phishing their users and stealing their users' personal data through the SingPass MyInfo solution. But it means that an international company like, I don't know, Airbnb or Uber or PayPal or whatever, I don't know, those companies probably have Singapore entities by now.

Riley Hughes: But, you know, many, many, many other foreign companies that interact with Singaporean users can't use it yet unless they go open an entity in Singapore, which is a very high barrier to entry, right? So this tension, this balance is, I think, the biggest pattern. And I think the solution that works well to this is just something that is, you know, many of these schemes have a broker model where there is a broker like Trinsic or other local brokers who do the KYB and do, like, basically the vetting of approved use cases and things like that, and kind of help to enforce some of the rules, but also in a way that's more scalable and makes it more accessible to more businesses. So I think that that has been a model that's proven to work reasonably well in a lot of countries. Thanks for the question.

Zack Jones: Great. Yeah, good question. Just quickly, I'll answer this question about, will the deck be available? Essentially, all the data from the deck will be available in the report that you'll get sent out after, right? So, and other slides there are kind of accumulated from different other reports as well. So essentially, all the information that was presented will be available either in the report, and then we'll also post the recording on YouTube as well. So everything that you saw here, you could revisit and rewatch. Awesome. Okay. I think this is an interesting question about skepticism of digital ID. So, given the inherent skepticism of digital identities and privacy in certain countries, do you support and believe in the no phone home movement will assist in driving adoption and innovation? Or maybe another way of thinking about this or asking this is like, how do you balance the skepticism of digital ID and privacy with also the push to, you know, drive adoption and utility for digital ID?

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, this is a good question. I like your reframing, Zack, because I'd like to reserve comments on the no phone home movement for a written post where I can express more nuance. I'm not a signer of that movement for a reason, but I am a big supporter of not phoning home. So it's sort of a, like, I have a nuanced point of view on that that I can, I will, I plan to, you know, express more fully at some point. The short answer is, I think just incremental progress is still progress and it's still good, and a lot of You know, alternatives to digital IDs, such as taking a high-definition photo of the entire identity document and biometric and sending it to a third party for processing, are much worse from a privacy point of view than, you know, incremental, you know, imperfect digital IDs, I guess. So, but yeah, so the question of, like, inherent skepticism of digital IDs versus kind of adoption, I think really what needs to exist is, I think governments have a really important role in enabling the ecosystem to evolve.

Riley Hughes: I think if there are strong regulations in place about, because ultimately I don't think like, there are risks to user privacy, and there are things people are skeptical about that are legitimate, that are not technical problems, that are, you know, they are, like, things that can be solved through rules and regulations, but not necessarily through technology. And so I think governments have an important role to play in establishing those guardrails, and I think that ultimately digital IDs have to be useful, right? I mean, there's even people who are skeptical of things like the Real ID in the United States, for example, right? It's a plastic ID, but they're skeptical of it or whatever, right? And so these things will always exist. I think the key is just they've got to be useful. And I am skeptical of Google, but I still use login with Google every single day because it's useful, and that tradeoff, I guess, has been worth it to me. And I think a lot of people are the same way with all kinds of services.

Riley Hughes: And so I think the key is making things useful and having appropriate safeguards in place, probably from governments, to sort of guarantee that the downsides are mitigated, or the potential downsides.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Great. That's a good one. Let's see. One question. That I, yeah, that kind of came up, I think, was when people are thinking about adopting digital ID, given the fragmentation and the variability between, you know, reusable IDs, government-issued wallets, bank IDs, government databases, like how do you think about a, like, level of assurance on kind of a global scale if you're talking with a vendor who is verifying users from dozens of countries and we, you know, support dozens of different sources of identity, but they don't necessarily all map to each other super cleanly. How do you think about that?

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Nice, easy questions here. Thanks for the group for lobbing me softballs. No, I'm just kidding. I mean, yeah, no, it's just really complicated, right? Like, I think fundamentally the trustworthiness of a digital ID, I think, is a function of two things primarily. The first one is how strongly, how strong was the, like, vetting of the user before, or the proofing of the user before the identity was issued, or in other words, how strongly provisioned was the digital ID? And then there's the later step when the user uses the digital ID, how strongly does the wallet or the scheme or whatever authenticate the user, right? Authenticate that it's the same user using it today that was original, to whom it was originally provisioned, right? So I think every single one of these levels of assurance frameworks around the world use these sort of two inputs, but they classify things into buckets very differently. I will also add there's usually a third variable here, which is like the evidence, like what is the credential that was used, right?

Riley Hughes: Like using a bank statement is different than using a Chip-based passport, which is different than using a picture of a plastic ID, which is different than using an mDL. And these are, and like, and so there's sort of the evidence that's used, and then the two kind of factors of provisioning and authentication. And so I think if you break it down into its, like, atomic units like that, you can start to reason about different levels of assurance across the world. And then that, I think, solves for a lot of it, and you can kind of abstract some of the level of assurance stuff. The other part that's harder to abstract is the fact that some countries have regulations that say it has to fit into this box, and in the other country it's got to fit in this other box. And maybe the variables underneath those boxes are different. And so then you can't just use one abstraction that kind of covers everything. So I think there's, like, the level of assurance part, and then there's, like, the compliance with government-required level of assurance boxes part that both need to be considered.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Awesome. Good one. Maybe one last quick one to finish it off. Do you think a country will drop issuing physical documents altogether and move everything to digital format or a wallet? If so, what's the timeline of that happening?

Riley Hughes: I think if a country does that, it will be—this might sound bad, maybe I shouldn't say it like this—but it'll be for, like, attention, right? I mean, I think, like, some country is going to want the headline of, like, We're doing it all digital or something, right? And I think, like, the first one to do it probably will be that. I could be wrong, but I bet you it will be, you know, there will be some PR angle to the first one to do that. So I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think, like, the first ones to really, like—when will this start happening? For, um, for like, I don't know, what's the word, like, I don't know, concrete reasons like that, are just like physical IDs are just irrelevant now. I don't know, when will countries stop issuing legal tender or like minting coins or something, right? I mean, it's like, I think it's hard for me to imagine physical ID documents going away.

Zack Jones: Yeah. The passport's the challenge, right? Because then you could, even if you mandate legally that you accept digital within the country, the second you travel out of the country, the passport, you kind of need some, you know, way for the foreign country to accept that. I will say—

Riley Hughes: Yes, 100%. I will say that this will only happen once we are sort of all cyborgs and we have, you know, computer-brain interfaces and chips embedded in our bodies that can store cryptographic material to allow us to present digital credentials through, you know, brain-computer interfaces that whatever. And I think that that future is not guaranteed and also not close. So that's how I'd answer that.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Great. Well, we are at time here, so thanks everybody for attending. Thank you for your questions. Any last closing words, Riley, before we wrap up?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I just want to say again, thanks for all the questions here, and apologies that there's more we didn't get to, and happy to follow up. I mean, Zack, I don't know if you've made notes of some of these, but some of these look like—

Zack Jones: Good ones to follow up with afterwards.

Riley Hughes: So we, you know, plan to do that. And please reach out asynchronously, you know, if you, you know, want to talk more.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Thanks, everybody. We will follow up with the recording and the details. Thanks.