Digital IDs Hold the Promise of Increased Trust and Accelerated Verification

Digital IDs, also known as e-IDs, are picking up momentum around the world, prompting organizations to develop new verification strategies. 

The IDs provide convenience, high assurance of a person’s identity and, in many cases, compliance with verification regulations. But before organizations can verify people with digital IDs, they face the challenge of complex contracting and integration with multiple issuers that have different nuances and partnership requirements.

Trulioo Electronic Identification simplifies that process, enabling organizations to connect to a network of digital ID issuers through one contract and one integration.

What Is a Digital ID?

Digital IDs are issued by governments or the private sector and allow people to control online access and permissions with reusable credentials across services. The one-time application process can be rigorous, which is why digital IDs provide high assurance.  

Once people have a digital ID, using it is simple and convenient. Generally, all they have to do is perform an authentication step, such as scanning biometrics, for a low-friction, trusted process that provides powerful protection from account takeover and other types of fraud.

A digital ID’s convenience, efficiency and security simplify processes such as opening bank accounts, applying for government services or accessing private platforms.

The Digital ID Landscape

There are many different digital ID systems at varying levels of maturity and adoption.

Many national digital IDs issued by centralized governments, such as India’s Aadhaar, have widespread adoption. In the U.S., states such as Arizona and Florida have started issuing digital IDs.

In Europe, digital IDs are central to the EU Digital Identity Wallet Act, which is in pilot projects and can “ensure universal access for people and businesses to secure and trustworthy electronic identification and authentication by means of a personal digital wallet on a mobile phone.” Canada also is addressing innovation in digital identity with the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework.

Federated digital IDs issued by private-sector consortia, such as MitID in Denmark, have also grown rapidly.

The 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Identity Verification predicted the path for digital IDs in the coming years.

“There will likely be no single ‘winner’ in this race for portable digital identity adoption,” according to the guide, “but instead a patchwork of competing and complementary schemes for many years to come.”

The Challenges Around Digital IDs

The digital ID experience for users can be simple and convenient, but that isn’t necessarily the case for organizations that verify people with those credentials.

First, organizations face the hurdle of contracting and integrating with a broad array of digital ID issuers around the world. Those issuers put organizations through rigorous screening to meet privacy, security and compliance requirements. 

Second, digital IDs aren’t universal, which challenges organizations to determine when to prioritize verifying people with digital IDs, when to focus on other methods and how the different verification types work together. 

A powerful strategy can involve blending the methods in a single onboarding workflow that automatically routes people to the most efficient verification technique based on location, demographics or a variety of other preset rules. That approach enables organizations to verify people with digital IDs in areas with widespread adoption and focus on other methods, such as data matching or document verification, in other regions.

How Trulioo Electronic Identification Helps

Trulioo has a long history of partnering with a diverse network of data sources around the world and excels at managing personally identifiable information and meeting security, privacy and compliance requirements.

Trulioo provides a full suite of verification capabilities that, when paired with Electronic Identification, gives organizations the flexibility to blend services and quickly adjust to any verification requirements anywhere in the world. Companies gain access to all those services with one integration, rather than facing the challenge of integrating with issuers and data sources around the world.

“Recognize that for many years you will need to offer both identity verification and accept assertions from portable digital identity solutions,” according to the Gartner guide. “There will not be a clean switch from the former to the latter.”

Trulioo positions organizations to make a clean switch in verification services in a single onboarding workflow, whether it involves data, documents or digital IDs.