The California Department of Motor Vehicles hosted a community hackathon on October 1st, 2024 in Mountain View, California. Trinsic and Mitek Systems were selected as one of fifteen teams to participate in this first-of-its-kind event to demonstrate use cases for presenting a mobile driver’s license.
With several large financial institutions present like US Bank, TBD, VISA, and unnamed banks also participating, there is clearly market momentum for utilizing mDLs to verify users. Alongside financial use cases, there were also representatives from healthcare, cannabis, and agriculture industries who all showcased mDL verification. For the full list of participants you can view the CA DMV’s press release.
Trinsic and Mitek’s Use Case Demonstration
At the hackathon, Trinsic joined forces with Mitek to show how mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) can simplify driver verification in two scenarios. The first use case was to verify a driver’s license for a peer-to-peer car rentals company. Using an mDL, a person can easily prove their identity and verify their driving qualifications without needing to present a physical ID card. By scanning the mDL, the rental service can instantly confirm key details such as the driver’s license status, expiration date, and driving eligibility, reducing the risk of accepting a fake ID.
The second use case was for test drivers at car dealerships. These verifications happen in-person, allowing for faster onboarding of drivers and a more seamless experience. For test drives, the dealership can scan the mDL to verify the customer’s ability to drive without the customer needing to leave their driver’s license behind during the test drive.
Takeaways from the hackathon
With over a dozen innovative teams presenting their solutions, we caught a glimpse into the future of identity verification. Here were a few of the big takeaways about where the industry is heading:
- CA DMV Wallet will soon enable the issuance of other types of credentials into the wallet, alongside the user’s mDL. This is similar to Louisiana’s LA Wallet, and Colorado’s myColorado application incorporating additional utility into their identity wallets. This is a unique benefit to having a state-specific wallet versus using a device wallet like Apple, Google or Samsung which currently only support limited credentials.
- Participants demonstrated both in-person use cases for verification like proving your age in a privacy preserving way in a retail store, and remote verification scenarios like customer onboarding for opening a new account.
- Very little, if any, production deployments are in place, but high-frequency use cases in industries such as cannabis, healthcare, and travel could change this in the near future.
Conclusion
During the hackathon, Trinsic and Mitek showed how mDLs need to work alongside existing identity verification tools to gain adoption throughout various industries. As an identity orchestration platform, Mitek provides their customers with identity tools across the full user journey, while Trinsic augments this journey with digital ID acceptance of over 70 million pre-verified users.
As we’ve written in our mDL adoption ebook, initiatives like California DMV’s will be critical to promoting widespread adoption of mobile driver’s licenses. By bringing government authorities, private enterprises and technology vendors into the same room, solutions can be co-created that are better for everyone. We expect to see a virtuous cycle emerge where more businesses accept mobile driver’s licenses, thus more users are compelled to download their mDLs and the ecosystem can grow.
