Ajay Gupta – Shaping California’s mDL Program and the Future of Digital Identity

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to The Future of Identity, a show that highlights the world’s most innovative digital identity ecosystems and the people behind them. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we’re the first identity acceptance network, helping businesses verify users 10 times faster through close partnerships with dozens of digital identity wallets. Today, I spoke with Ajay Gupta, Chief Digital Transformation Officer of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, about California’s mobile driver’s license program. From its launch to the current adoption and usage and future ambitions, I’m really glad that we got to do this episode, as California is really leading the way in terms of modern mDL programs. If you’re interested in accepting the California mDL, you’ll really enjoy the level of detail we get into on adoption rates, growth rates, which demographics are adopting faster than others, where people are using their mDLs today, the ratio of Android and iOS wallet downloads, and much, much more.

Riley Hughes: I was particularly struck by how bullish Ajay is on remote verification, or presenting the mDL online as opposed to in person, as something that’s already happening, and he expects to be the fastest growth channel for mDL use. This will also be an interesting episode for people who are working at other states or DMVs or governments, as Ajay gives advice on how to bring other stakeholders along, the ROI case for the California DMV, and some key ways that DMVs and governments can drive adoption among relying parties. I don’t think you can listen to this episode and think that mDLs are a fad or that they’re still a few years away, while there are still risks. For example, the program in California is capped at 5% of the population because it’s still a pilot. According to Ajay, there is a scenario where 15 million Californians have an mDL in just three years, which is 50% of the current driver’s license holders in California. Now, I hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, please share it with others who you think will benefit.

Riley Hughes: That’s by far the best way to signal to us that this content is worth producing. And now, to my conversation with Ajay. Ajay, great to have you on the podcast.

Ajay Gupta: Happy to be here.

Riley Hughes: So I wanted to start by asking, you know, to me, it just makes total sense that a DMV would do a mobile driver’s license, right? You issue physical cards. Why not issue digital ones? But I’m guessing that it’s really not that simple, given that, you know, there’s only 15 or so states who are doing something like this. I’m sure there’s a lot of stakeholders involved, and there’s probably much more than meets the eye to what I can see. So I guess I want to start by asking, why hasn’t every DMV already done this? Isn’t— Isn’t it just a no-brainer?

Ajay Gupta: I think the motivation of doing it is no-brainer. The effort of doing it is probably it. But also there is a perception part that we have to get around too. With the advent of, you know, digital services, e-commerce, etc., there’s a lot of good that has come in in terms of access to services, convenience, and there is a whole generation that’s expecting only digital services now. Having said that, that comes in with considerations around privacy, around data security, around data retention. So those are some of the things that policymakers like us are always concerned about. So, you know, like what’s happening in EU, what’s happening in the US, Canada, Australia, India, Singapore, you know, there’s many other places, Africa. It’s been, you know, some of those concerns are coming to the front, whether using such an identity would leave digital trace, etc. So those are some of the considerations.

Ajay Gupta: So while we know that we are filling in this bridge that has existed for a long time, where the digital services existed, but the identity verification was always using physical, like a copy of a physical passport, a driver license, created a big huge gap and a lot of fraud in the mix. This is filling that gap, but with that comes in some additional considerations because identity is sacred in our world, right, the world of the issuers, and we want to make sure that it’s used well and not misused. So those are some of the considerations. So while the motivation is there to bridge that gap, there is also a little bit of a concern on, are we ready to take that leap?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that makes sense. And so when you speak to the motivation there being a no-brainer, you know, I think about it, of course, from the consumer perspective. As you mentioned, like, it’s a fun thing for me to photograph my physical ID card and take a selfie or whatever. And it’s, you know, if I forget my wallet in my car, I would like to be able to still go to a happy hour or get through the TSA or whatever the case may be, right? So clearly, from a consumer perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Is there a no-brainer motivation, though, for the DMV as well? Or are you purely thinking about sort of making the citizen experience better? Does that make sense? Like, does issuing a mobile driver’s license solve a problem for the DMV, or is it just a way to better serve Serve the people.

Ajay Gupta: It’s both. We obviously are resident-centric, so I use the word citizen carefully because we serve our California residents. Not everybody is a citizen.

Riley Hughes: That’s good clarification.

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, and, but what is important for us, we are very customer-centric. In fact, our goal has been for the last five years to be providing best customer service in the nation, and not just across public sector. So it’s a pretty hefty goal, and so we do worry about our customers, the convenience and the access. Now, we also are very data-driven. We have these channels available. We have our field office channels. We got our kiosks. We got our business partners. We got mail, paper channel, and then we have online channel. We have assigned cost to each of those channels. What is obvious is online channel is the cheapest channel for us to serve our customers, to reduce the overhead associated with our services. And in these, you know, somewhat challenging times with budget constraints, it’s extremely important that we are able to give services in a most economical fashion. So that’s the incentive on our side. And as you can imagine, by providing highly identity, highly verified identity services, we can reduce the fraud because fraud has a cost associated as well.

Ajay Gupta: When we provide online services, we can nudge the customer towards the online channel better, and we feel safer doing so for providing highly sensitive services online, fully online, and reduce cost in the process and reduce any inherent hidden cost of the fraud as well. So that’s the incentive. On top of that, the resident in terms of access, right, there is access to our normal day-to-day residents, but also our homeless or disabled population, right, providing them services remotely where they have problem commuting. You know, average DMV to a customer’s address, a distance is 13 miles. And we have also calculated the macroeconomic cost of each mile is about a dollar with greenhouse savings, distance traveled, etc. So there is a lot of benefits of us reducing that gap with online. There is zero You know, distance travel, right? So those are some of the things that we worry about, and we obviously want to tap into the millennial population and Gen Zs and to make sure that they also get our services.

Ajay Gupta: We have remote services using AI and machine learning, where we are now able to do knowledge tests, etc. So this digital credential is just an advent of the same motivation that we have of providing the services that would have otherwise required you to show up in the field office, do it online.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And especially being so data-driven, it sounds like you’ve been able to calculate the ROI case and, you know, make the case that it’s interesting how that’s also beneficial for the DMV in addition to the resident. If there are other people from other states or DMVs or other agencies or something listening, whose agencies are not quite as data-driven and they don’t have maybe the concrete, you know, dollars and cents ROI case for doing something like this, are there any other benefits, tangible or intangible, that you’ve seen that have helped convince stakeholders that doing an mDL is a good idea and that the DMVs should do it?

Ajay Gupta: So in general, let’s start with macroeconomic benefits to a public sector entity like a state government, and then we narrow down to other state departments and then to the DMV. Macroeconomic benefits involve, like I said, providing services to people who don’t necessarily want to or can, you know, make a trip to the DMV. Also people who are impacted by fraud, right? That’s usually our most disadvantaged population as well. Seniors and people in lower socioeconomic status are actually more prone to fraud, online fraud as well. So it helps that particular cohort of the population, our disabled population, our unhoused, our low-income populations as well. So there is benefit to the state from that standpoint, both financial but also social benefits. In terms of other departments, right, not just DMV, other departments, as you can think of, if a digital credential, which is somewhat of a, you know, contentious term, federated identity, it’s sitting on your mobile phone, you can use it to get services. Not just at DMV, but other departments. In fact, other departments benefit as well.

Ajay Gupta: So if you’re not uploading your identity, you’re not paying third-party aggregators for verification and do risk assessment, et cetera, and get this highly assured level—you know, identity assurance level 2, arguably—you can get services cheaper. You can have better convenience for our population getting those public sector services. Now, if you look at commercial sector, opening bank account, getting services that require identity verification or age verification, that makes it easier as well. So it’s cheaper for the retailers, cheaper for the consumer, or bankers, et cetera, healthcare, financial sector, and getting services faster, right? So as you’re able to do things faster online, you’re able to avoid any song and dance with identity verification. So that’s the next level of benefit. And for the other DMVs who are listening in, beyond the benefits that I already talked about around nudging the customer to online channels, but also reducing fraud in the process, providing more access to services to our customers, there is back-office benefits too, right?

Ajay Gupta: There is reduction in paper as your services are moving online, as you are looking at less identity verification, et cetera. But also a lot of DMV use cases that have, say, need for electronic signature with a higher assurance level, for example, for title transfer and a few other things that require identity to be verified either by policy, by law, or just to reduce fraud. You can actually reduce that paperwork as well. So there is some back-office benefits, some front-office benefits in actually taking advantage of these services. And for those DMVs, because the big digital native wallet providers have kind of adopted this particular and encouraging DMVs to participate, it kind of creates, let’s call it, half work done. The rest of the work is still there, but you have sponsorship from the marketplace, so you’re not starting from scratch. Entities like California are willing to share the source code, the technology, whether it’s open source or not, that should give those DMVs a head start and reduce the friction.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. And it’s actually a good segue as well, because I do want to spend the bulk of our time digging in on the work involved, as you say, right, the actual mobile driver’s license rollout in California. So I wanted to start with the fact that the California mDL is a pilot, right? That’s the word that I see when I go into my Apple Wallet and I click to add a driver’s license. You know, I see a handful of states, and the California one says California mDL pilot, for example. So I wanted to understand, you know, what does this really mean? Is it just verbiage, or does it mean that relying parties and businesses, you know, can’t somehow accept it or depend on it, or is there a risk that it stops with a pilot and doesn’t actually go beyond pilot? Or I guess I wanted to dig into that and I’m curious if you could speak to that.

Ajay Gupta: So that’s a good question, and I love to answer that question to clarify. So pilot doesn’t make it temporary. A pilot has some limitations, but those limitations are not necessarily around any features that we are releasing. In fact, it gives us a little bit more freedom to try things out as we are figuring out, you know, how we create a privacy-preserving ecosystem around it, how we create the policies as what we are observing and learning, how we create the technology that’s meeting or exceeding the California’s strict privacy laws that we are really proud of. So in general, the pilot is merely limiting the number of mDLs that we would issue, which is limited to 5% at this point in time, and we are working with our legislature and others to see if we can increase it. But more to come on that. The important thing is that it’s only limiting total number, but we haven’t reached that number yet either. So, for example, in terms of unique mDL holders, so California is one of the few states in the nation who allow for multiple mDLs on as many devices as you like.

Ajay Gupta: You can have an iOS device, you can have an Android device, you can have two Android devices. We can give you mDL on each one of them, just convenience. We do believe that it’s still privacy-preserving. That is given the security and protections that we have, it does not reduce or make it any better or worse if you have it only on one phone versus multiple phones. So in general, that’s the only limitation. We are sitting at— Our limitation right now is sitting at close to 1.5 million Californians that we can, and I can tell you that no state has reached that number yet. We still have highest number of mDLs in the nation, so retailers and verifiers, relying parties, whatever you want to call them, if they are concerned about, well, is it going to stop? The goal is to not stop. We’ll still have the most number of people, just by density, to have mDLs, and we should be able to continue this momentum that we have created around adoption and move it now on the other side, which is the verifier and relying party side. That’s why we did the hackathon recently.

Ajay Gupta: So we’re very serious about expanding the footprint of use of mDL in the marketplace. So that’s the only limitation at this point, which we hope before we reach it, we are able to take the next step. So the pilot is mostly limiting number of users, not features, not platforms, not interoperability. In fact, we have the most aggressive adoption plan, I would say, in the nation in terms of the type of relying parties that we’re engaging with, goes from public sector, law enforcement, healthcare, finance, retail sector, which includes convenience stores, etc. In fact, our wallet, the California MD wallet, has multiple standards implemented, which is very much in line with the EU digital wallet architecture reference framework too, which has opened up doors for us using existing POS devices for in-person verification of identity and age. So that creates a little bit of an ecosystem and reduces friction for people to replace their physical devices too. So we are very serious about this whole adoption of mDLs within the limits of the mDL issuance, which we haven’t reached yet.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, and I want to dig in on that adoption plan as well in just a little bit. But while we’re on this topic of the pilot, I assume that limiting the mDL program to a certain number of issuances or unique holders or whatever is a way for the legislature or whomever kind of sponsored this to limit risk in some kind, in case something went wrong or whatever, or at least have an evaluation, see how it goes, and then determine what to do from there, right? That’s usually how these pilots work. Is there some metric or some success criteria or something that you’ve had in mind for this and, you know, that would unlock the next phase of growth beyond the current scope of the pilot? And then curious, how are you doing according to those, you know, success criteria?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah. So specifically for California, the metrics that we believe, and it’s something that’s still left a little bit, you know, to interpretation in terms of what that final metrics would be. But we do believe that some of the things that we want to share with the legislature would include things around how this particular product improves equity and inclusiveness of the services that we provide, which is why we have taken the journey that… That this particular wallet is not just going to be for air travel, right? It’s actually going to be used for day-to-day, like convenience stores, etc. And the technologies that we use are specifically calibrated for avoiding any gender bias, any age, any, you know, race biases, etc., for us to issue mDLs. But also on the other side, adoption, that we can create a space for this technology to be able to showcase that this is going to be highly popular and adopted by the market. On top of that, the biggest piece is privacy and security of our consumers.

Ajay Gupta: Like I said, California has the strictest privacy laws in the nation for our consumers, and we intend to honor or exceed those. So our goal would be to be able to showcase to the legislature that not only we have met the goals of making sure that we meet the standards that are not tracking or tracing the use of the mDL, which is why we have open source our relying party use case, but also open sourcing our wallet. But on top of that, we are also— so we have specifically picked the standards that allow us to make sure that there is no digital trail of the use of the mDL. We have made sure that the information, by open sourcing the wallet, it’s transparent and it’s available to the privacy advocates that in fact are true to our word. That’s really the motivation behind open sourcing a lot of work, which not only benefits other DMVs who may be interested in taking this journey, but also creates this transparent environment to make sure that we are true to our word in terms of privacy and security.

Ajay Gupta: So, and then in terms of the same privacy and security notion, we are also figuring out, and this may not be a quantifiable thing, on what are the policy that we want to put in place for around data retention of the digital data that are going to receive as part of the presentation of an online mobile driver’s license. Because the whole— well, one of the motivations of going this route is not just creating this highly, high assurance level digital credential, but also a— Selective disclosure of information. So you’re not always sharing your date of birth and address and other things, but with that comes in that are people asking for more than what’s intended for to conduct a particular type of business. For example, if somebody needs just age or just need to know your age, right, age 21, age 25, can you—are you asking for address also? So some of those things, you want to put policies around.

Ajay Gupta: So as part of this success metrics, we’re going to be able to put some policies together around it, or suggest or recommend policies to the legislature so that we can make sure that we are not only protected from the standpoint of the implementation of the mobile revolutions, but also the entire ecosystem of relying parties, how they would use the data and what they’re entitling.

Riley Hughes: Well, I want to transition now to the app itself. Originally being launched as the California DMV app, as opposed to what we’ve seen in some other states, like the Louisiana Wallet or the My Colorado app, right, which are not mDL-specific, but they have mDL functionality, right? They’re sort of statewide apps for other things like a hunting, fishing license or a concealed weapons permit or something else, right? And so the scope is more broad, as opposed to something like Utah, which just has an mDL app. So this is not being branded the California DMV app clearly is not a California general app. So I guess, how did that conversation play out, and what do you think are the pros and cons, and how did you land on this approach?

Ajay Gupta: So that’s a good question, and somewhat contentious in nature in California too, right, in terms of the jurisdiction, right? California, each department has its own jurisdiction, so DMV has their jurisdiction. We own the identity and the issuance of about 31 million unique identities that we have at this point in time. And then we have statewide, which is typically either state CIO’s office or government operations, et cetera. So they are really the ones setting the roadmap for statewide. We are actually in that roadmap already. So there is the roadmap around this initiative called Digital ID or Digital ID Roadmap. Where California mDL wallet—it’s not the mDL app, but mDL wallet—is part of that roadmap as well, with some sort of convergence in the future to be determined what that would look like. But let me talk about why we consider this a wallet. Very soon, we’re going to have additional credentials on this wallet.

Riley Hughes: Maybe I’ll jump in here, because this is actually my next question. So you mentioned calling it a wallet as opposed to an app. I guess, you know, beyond the mDL inside of this California DMV app, there’s also TruAge, and presumably other potential credentials could go in there as well. So I guess, have you thought about this, and what is the vision and kind of roadmap for how it evolves over time?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah. So we definitely, you know, like I said, you know, the previous question you asked was what was the motivation and incentive, right? Identity, issuing an identity credential to provide services to Californians online, right? That was one of the motivations. But we have other services online as well at DMV. So there is digital credential notion can be used for that as well. For example, a… vehicle as a credential, right? Not just identity as a credential, vehicle as a credential, which essentially has the information about your ownership, about your insurance, about your registration. We also issue disabled placard IDs. There is an identity required for that, so that is another place. We have a pretty exciting use case there coming up that actually combines Smart City and disabled placard services and DMV services altogether into one. We have occupational licenses. We issue occupational licenses like for dealerships and salesperson and dismantlers and traffic violator schools, etc., and a few more.

Ajay Gupta: The idea is to be able to add all of those things as credentials with their own life cycle and revocation strategy, etc., in the same wallet. It also creates a framework for additional services. Like, for example, we are working with California Office of Emergency Services and FEMA on putting in some sort of credentials on the wallet, which would essentially, after they prove their identity, they can now prove endorsements around what they have. So that could land on this wallet too. So essentially it creates this ecosystem, open-sourced for rest of the California or California government operations to take on and create a statewide wallet as well, which will happen at some point in time for sure. But that roadmap is theirs to follow. However, in ours, unlike these other wallets who are looking at identity, they’re looking at all kinds of credentials to land in the wallet, and also multiple types of credential formats. Like the ISO—for those of listeners who are familiar with these technologies—there’s the ISO mobile driver’s license credential, which is the more popular called mDL.

Ajay Gupta: Then we have verifiable credentials as well, which is what we use for our age verification via TruAge that you mentioned for convenience stores. And then these others are also going to be verifiable credentials as well. So it’s going to be a mix of multiple standards, and that’s That’s available in this wallet and a mix of a whole lot of credentials in the wallet. So there is more to come in that particular roadmap. And then we have dabbled with additional things like issuing temporary credentials for healthcare, insurance, eligibility use cases where you can request healthcare and get your healthcare benefits or credentials faster using identity verification services. So there’s much to come in that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s really, really cool. It’s really exciting. You know, I started my journey in the identity world in 2017 and had visions of, you know, wallets with all kinds of different credentials that could do different kinds of things and they’re interoperable with other services. And, you know, it’s been a long time coming, and it’s pretty awesome to hear about the roadmap and see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, on a lot of those, you know, lofty visions that we’ve had over the years in the identity space. And it sounds like you’re making a lot of them come to life, which is really cool. One question, one dynamic that the identity space has faced this whole time, and where I think governments are in a unique place to drive that vision forward, as you’re doing, is related to how the cold start problem inhibits a lot of companies from really taking off, right? And as a government, you are the authoritative source for a lot of these credentials, meaning, you know, in the chicken-and-egg problem, like you’re the chicken, right?

Riley Hughes: It’s like you don’t need to worry about the chickens yet, right? You can just sort of focus on the eggs at that point. But I’m sure that there’s pushback that you’ve heard before, right? I’ve had people say to me, well, nobody’s asking for a mobile driver’s license right now. And it’s like, well, it’s because nobody has one, and nobody has one because no relying parties accept them, and no relying parties accept them because nobody’s issuing them, and it just goes around and around. So did you have to get around this problem in California? Did you have relying parties lined up for some of these use cases before you started working on them, or do you have the luxury or, I guess, privilege of being able to just say, you know what, we’re doing it, and then let the relying parties come as you sort of blaze the trail ahead? Does that make sense?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, it does. It definitely is a chicken-and-egg problem. So we did definitely think about it, right? There has to be something in it for everybody. So we needed to create that story. For everybody, including our sponsors too, right? We are sponsored by the Governor’s Office and Department of Finance as well. In fact, it was Governor’s desire to get into that particular space because he saw the particular vision of, you know, this digital identity abusing fraud in the ecosystem and creating convenience. So it’s been a fantastic and fruitful journey. But in that sense, did, and we did worry about the egg, right? Us being the chicken or us being the egg. I don’t know. In that scenario, we did start thinking about it, and we did start to work. That’s exactly why we partnered with TruAge. It was one sure-shot way of getting into a market that already exists. TruAge is an age verification service that already exists with Convenience National Association of Convenience Stores, where recently they released the product on all Clovers across the nation, right?

Ajay Gupta: And also Verifone have the piece of software that’s been announced as well. So these are the POS vendors that you all may be familiar with, and then many more coming soon. So that was one of the strategic moves that we made. In addition to that, we are one of the largest online entities, right, with over, like, close to 36 million logins annually, half a million registrations monthly. We decided that we are going to be our own relying party to showcase to the world. So we actually, if you go to dmv.ca.gov, you can log in using your mDL.

Riley Hughes: Wow.

Ajay Gupta: We also enable our disabled placard use case where people, instead of uploading their driver license, they can actually present an mDL and get the exact same service. And we actually have done some additional work around change management there to make this whole thing similar to what we do today in the back office as well. So, you know, happy to talk about that some more if time permits. But in general, there is additional use cases, like we are our own relying party in the field office. If you go there, some field offices, limited, you can actually scan your mDL and get services instead of presenting your mDL. So we have become our own relying party too. But in addition to that, we have conducted multiple hackathons at this point. I’m focused on commercial entities, also government entities, as part of our overall adoption initiative to make sure that they get excited about it.

Ajay Gupta: We specifically open sourced a particular tooling that that’s called OpenCred, which allows you to plug and play, arguably, for an online website who can embed the presentation of mDL in it and start using it, so to reduce the friction. So we knew about this chicken-and-egg problem, and we took all the steps that we could think of to make sure that the market starts adopting it faster. We were very excited on what we saw at the hackathon. There is a lot of private sector entities with some really integrated and viable use cases already ready-made by the time they showed up in the hackathon, viable for the market. So it’s all happening. No belief some of those efforts that we made to get the adoption, even before we released mDL, they are coming to fruition.

Riley Hughes: Well, I can attest to that because we have customers who we help with their mDL acceptance, and so I can attest to that already happening as well. So it sounds like you didn’t just solve the one half and assume the market would come, right? Like, you really did take steps to seed adoption and encourage relying party adoption and accelerate it. I wonder if there—I don’t think all DMVs are that way, clearly, right? I think a lot of states have sort of said, Well, there’s a mobile driver’s license option, and they’ve kind of just left it there. And I think, you know, the adoption rates that we’ve seen in California can attest to how your efforts there have really helped drive adoption on the consumer and relying party side. So if there’s somebody from another DMV listening who thinks they could, you know, take one step toward encouraging the relying party ecosystem to adopt, maybe they don’t have the bandwidth for multiple hackathons and multiple kind of, you know, all the things that you’ve described, but they have bandwidth to do one thing.

Riley Hughes: What do you think would be the most impactful thing that they could do?

Ajay Gupta: That’s a good question. I would say what we did, and I, you know, depending on—we have actually surveyed the market, right? I don’t believe we are complacent on that we have it right. So we have talked to Arizona and Utah and Maryland, Colorado, Georgia. And, you know, in terms of what they are doing around adoption as well, I do believe, well, and then there is the private sector, public sector as well. For DMVs, I think for us to create space and justification because we are publicly funded entity, right? So we want to make sure that there is public service in all of this, right? The storytelling that we want to be able to do is focused on while commercial benefits are there and the market is going to, you know, been working with many different financial institutions. They have their own roadmap. They are getting used to it. We do believe we are going at a faster pace than those behemoth financial organizations, which is kind of funny because we are a state government entity.

Ajay Gupta: I do believe that to sustain funding and to sustain the momentum, those entities should focus on public sector use cases from relying parties, like other state departments, health and human services, employment, development, law enforcement. That’s the holy grail, right? Law enforcement, etc., to make sure that those departments can actually adopt a use case. It’s a longer journey, but it’s better storytelling, and it’s likely to get more sustained funding just because it has public service benefits at the end of the day. Outside that, entities that, like we’ve worked with, entities like TruAge or grocery stores or parks and attractions, right? Those, the commercial need that is already out there, creating a public-private partnership around those entities in the private sector is going to also keep the momentum going and keep the excitement going. You got to keep the public warm. You got to keep the legislatures warm. You got to keep the commercial entities warm around that, yep, they’re making progress, we’re interested and moving forward.

Ajay Gupta: And this hackathon was a good example, right? At the end of the day, people know that DMV is doing something about it. The state leadership, commercial entities, federal and government entities, they’re all very interested, including international entities too. So that gives us good ideas to improve our product, but also it just creates more exposure in the marketplace, so people keep coming for more use cases. And that’s really the win for us as people get As the demand, the perception of demand is created in the market.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, appreciate that. Do you think that remote verification plays into this at all? Do you think that that’s had an impact? Because most mDLs around the country are intended for in-person verifications, whereas the initial release, as far as I understand, of the California mDL from the beginning included remote verification, which is a little bit novel. Has that played a role in the adoption at all, do you think?

Ajay Gupta: Absolutely. In fact, that’s the most exciting part of it. In-person verification is expensive for the relying party to build out, right? So the ISO specification especially requires a specific reader, like with NFC, cameras, or a barcode scanner and Bluetooth to be available, which may not be there for POS devices that are out there, right, that typically have barcode scanners.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Ajay Gupta: So we did try to tackle that as well by introducing the VC-based verifiable credential-based issuance as well for each verification using TruAge and a few other use cases. So yes, online use case is what this is really truly built for, right? A digital credential for digital services. This benefit of not carrying a physical card in your wallet for in-person is a great benefit, but getting online services with high assurance of identity verification is really the lower-cost relying party use case that’s going to be adopted way faster than the in-person use case.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, and I can attest that when I go through a flow of using the mDL online, it is magic. It feels like magic, right, relative to other experiences that we’ve been through. It’s just completely—it’s maybe ten times faster and better than, you know, the next best alternative or something, right? And so as a consumer, it’s incredible. And so, yeah, I think I tend to agree with you there. So that’s helpful. Thank you. Well, I want to throw at you a couple of numbers because you are one—you mentioned being pretty data-driven. I think you’re one of the few states that is pretty consistently putting numbers out related to mDL adoption. So I’ll throw out some numbers. These are just data points that I’ve observed, and of course, feel free to tell me where these are off base or where my assumptions are wrong here. But I saw a number of like 600,000 unique identities, and then after the Apple Google Wallet launch, I saw— The adoption numbers, the next adoption number a month later was 800,000, right?

Riley Hughes: So I’m like, okay, I can assume some things about, you know, the Apple Google Wallet adoption there. And I also see, you know, there’s 1.3 million mDLs. issued, right, to 800,000 people. So I’m sort of thinking, okay, well, there must be, you know, either a few hundred thousand people had the DMV wallet app and then got it reissued on the OS wallet, or maybe are, you know, deleting it and then redownloading it later or something. But I guess what else would you add to my, or correct about my thinking about how I’m seeing these numbers play out? And what have you observed about how adoption is taking place?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, so some of the things that’s publicly available, I can share for no problem. Generally speaking, let me start with the ratio of iOS versus Android, which is sitting at like five to one or six to one. Generally, when we started our journey August of ‘23, and before we got Google and then Apple Wallet, we already had close to half a million subscribers to the, if that’s the right word, subscribers to the mDL. And then Apple and Google launched, and obviously they’re popular, and there is the ease of use there. It spiked the use. So now we are sitting at 1.4 million mDLs issued. There is an intersection, if you look at a Venn diagram, right, the big universe of all the mDLs, there is the California DMV mDLs, there is the Apple and the Google. There is about 30% intersection between Apple and California DMV users, meaning they first got the California wallet, but they’re getting the Apple wallet. Now there is benefits to both because we are adding additional services, like you already have TruAge, you’re adding vehicle credential and other things.

Ajay Gupta: Apple has the benefit of, for example, just convenience, but also they have services like Turo, right, that’s publicly available, that you can integrate app to app and things like that. Not in a, like, it’s not a standards-based, but it’s still an integration. And then Google may have, you know, something like that too. But also, more importantly for Apple, out of, let’s see, so… About one fifth of the Apple users also have gotten Apple on mDL, so Apple on mDL on Apple Watches. So therefore it double counts towards it, right? So you can have an mDL on your Apple Wallet, but you also have it on your watch, which, by the way, is very cool to tap onto the TSA reader. Yeah, I saw it. I’m like, yeah, whatever. Watch is a nuisance because it was technically, it was harder to implement because when you’re issuing, you’re issuing to two devices instead of one. And anyways, but it was really cool to watch, right? You tap and you consent and you’re done. No phone, right? That adds the duplicity, duplication between the issuers, right, in terms of your issuing token credentials to the wallet.

Ajay Gupta: So that double counts towards the 1.4 million. But our unique count is like, let’s call it 900K to 1.4. So that’s our ratio of unique versus total mDLs issued.

Riley Hughes: Well, that’s all really, really interesting and insightful. Thank you. Yeah, and a question of the DMV app or the dedicated app versus the Apple Google Wallet apps is really interesting because it seems to me that the operating system-level wallets are convenient for consumers to get the mDL through this kind of operating system they’re already using. On the other hand, so far the Apple and Google wallets have been pretty locked down, as you’ve mentioned, in terms of, you know, they’re not standards-based. They don’t allow you to really use it very many places or share it very many places unless Apple and Google are in the loop and aware. Do you think we’ll see that changing at all? I mean, do you as the biggest DMV have any leverage, influence that you could, you know, encourage them to maybe open that up a little more for the sake of the person, right, the usefulness of the credential? Or how do you think that’s going to play out?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, it’s a good question. And, you know, they are big and they like to do things their own way. Some make sense, but some make only commercial sense, right? For us, the biggest influence we can have is by creating a demand using our own wallet of a certain type of use case. And if that use case has a demand, they’re like, they’re going to come, right? They’re going to come and accept it. And that’s true with, like, for example— One of the native wallets is, and we were really concerned about this wallet selection strategy like two years ago. And we were able to influence some of that as well. So it’s a little bit open standard around that, which is coming as part of the ISO 18013-7 and digital credential API. So there are certain things we are able to influence because of the volume, because we are big. Not because we are influencing them directly, but because we have a strategy in place and we are demonstrating to the market that we can implement that strategy safely and viably, including some of the public sector use cases as well.

Ajay Gupta: So it’s very likely that the issuance of initial credentials, like for example law enforcement driver license, and then go, you know, you tap, but then you’re like, oh, registration also, right? You complete your block component. That’s not viable. Therefore, adding additional credentials on the wallet is only obvious in terms of making sure that it’s accepted by law enforcement. And then there’s other use cases around data transmission of the information that’s needed for law enforcement to finish the transactions. So there are things that we are doing to trailblaze and to showcase to them, to the digital giants, that this is a viable use case you should do, including supporting multiple credential formats as well. So let’s see how that goes, because EU is going in that particular direction, and California is there. We have a size, and so does EU. So hopefully that’ll influence those wallet providers.

Riley Hughes: Great. Yeah, that’s helpful. Well, you mentioned earlier about your adoption plan, and one of the things I wanted to ask you, since you’re, you know, so close to the ground truth on mDLs and the numbers and the data and everything, is just curious, how long do you think it will take until 15 million people in California have an mDL on their device, right?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah.

Riley Hughes: Which, in my estimation, is like roughly half the population. And then how long do you think it’ll be until there’s 30 million, right? Which is like most of the physical driver’s license-holding population having a digital copy. Like, how do you see that trajectory going? And maybe how does your adoption plan relate to that?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, this one is truly chicken and egg. In my mind, there is the initial enthusiasm, right? Oh, well, mDL is there, I want it. There is some use cases for air travelers, so as air traveler, like after the. native wallet adoption, usage at the airport, it’s still, I want to say, pretty mediocre, but it went up six to sevenx within a couple of months, right, at TSA. So we get information from TSA on how many people are using California mDL, and it’s now sitting at, actually I want to say, now thinking of it again, between like eight to tenx. So it has gone up. And that’s with only three airports who accept mDL at this point. Hopefully, actually in the next few weeks, and I don’t have exact date, 20 total California airports would have it. Even with the disadvantage of us not having the mDL acceptance by TSA at many airports, we’re still doing pretty well in terms of the adoption there, but the adoption in general is low. So that’s like very minuscule number, right? Number of people who download and number of people who end up using, it’s a fraction.

Ajay Gupta: So I do believe, though, with relying parties like us who are enabling easier services online using mDL, we are already creating that space for people to participate in, oh yeah, it’s there, you can get the services faster, download the mDL, it takes about two minutes to get it, right? I’ll do it. I do believe, to answer your question, I don’t think we’ll reach 30 million ever. And part of that is just age group adoption. I do believe about 20% of our people, 15% maybe, are over 70 and things like that, and so on. And we saw some interesting demographic that below 25 also the adoption is really low. The most adoption is between 25 and 62 in terms of the age group. So, you know, depending on the age group, depending on demographics, socioeconomic level, etc., it’ll never be 30 million. 15 would be our goal. And I do believe that we are gonna, as soon as the market, like financial sector and additional state departments start using mDL, it’s gonna take off, just like took off for TSA after that particular use case was easily available and we did some marketing around it.

Ajay Gupta: Yep, scan here and get your mDL in the next couple of steps, and they got it in place and they were able to use it. So I want to say, and this is obviously all subject to, it’s all speculation, all subject to like our ability to get out of the pilot or expand the pilot, et cetera, as well. I do believe year over year, three to five million mDLs growing till we reach the 15 million, and then it’s going to taper to depending on, you know, what’s going on, the next generation, how they like to use some of these and what the effort is, and hopefully we do this right so there is no bad publicity around it and people stop. You know, there’s a lot of considerations around that we have to worry about.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, so it sounds like you think there could be a scenario, assuming some of the things related to, you know, expanding the pilot and things like that continue to happen, but there’s a scenario where three years from now there could be 15 million Californians with an mDL.

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, absolutely, there is a scenario.

Riley Hughes: Well, that’s quite a scenario to think about, you know. I always close the podcast by asking people, what does the future of identity look like to you, right? What does the future of digital ID look like to you, and why does this matter for the world? So I guess in a world where there’s 15 million or more Californians with a digital ID, how do you think that looks and why do you think that matters?

Ajay Gupta: Well, it’s just culture at this point in time that’s driving this need and want and desire. People, you know, I observe my friends who just carry a phone and a little pocket in the back where they have a driver license and not even credit cards anymore. So they want to get rid of that driver license. They want to get rid of all plastics, they don’t even have to carry that sleeve, and it’s all on the phone. That’s what they’re interested in. So that expectation and the need is really going to drive this. They have, for some reason, a need to get rid of all plastic, and we are here to make sure that that happens. But more importantly, like I said, this need has been there, the gap between digital and physical world is what this is filling in, and I do believe this is what this digital credential is filling in that gap that has been there since like early 2000s when e-commerce took off really rapid.

Riley Hughes: Great. Well, I appreciate it a lot, Ajay. This has been… An awesome conversation. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while, and glad that we got to do it. So I appreciate you taking the time very much. If there are people who want to accept the California mDL, they’re relying parties, or if there are other people from other DMVs or other people who want to either get in touch or learn more about what you’re doing in the state of California, where would you direct them? What links should we add into the description of the episode?

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, so it’s the California DMV website. If you were to search for California DMV wallet on our website, you’ll be able to get to the right place. We have a couple of webinars. One is focused on mDL for commercial entities and mDL for governments. It talks about what a roadmap is and what we are doing. It also has resources for technical folks like the ICA roots and OpenID GitHub link and so on, and more upcoming information on what we are doing next, right? We’re going to continue to update it. I intend to add more statistics around geographical locations for businesses who are interested in physical presence. What is the density? Like our density is in Los Angeles and Bay Area, a lot of those adoptions. So those businesses may be interested because you’re going to have to deal with them sooner than later. So all that information is available on the DMV website. So search for California DMV wallet or CADMV wallet on the DMV.ca.gov website, and you’ll get all the resources you need.

Riley Hughes: Brilliant. Well, thanks again for coming, your generosity and time, and for what you’re doing for the people in California. I think it’s going to be really amazing how the next few years play out, and excited to watch. So thanks a lot.

Ajay Gupta: Yeah, it was nice talking to you, and let me know how your own journey at Trinsic is going in terms of the adoption with your clients.

Riley Hughes: Okay, yeah, will do. Thanks.

Ajay Gupta: Thanks.

Riley Hughes: Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this content, please share it with others who will benefit from it. I’ve been getting some great feedback on the podcast recently, and since we don’t do a lot of self-promotion or ads or whatever, sharing the word really is the best way to signal to us that the content is valuable and that we should keep doing it. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or X. @Riley P. Hughes, and visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the future of identity. You can also visit trinsic.id/podcast to subscribe to new shows and subscribe to the Future of Identity newsletter, where we’ll share the essential reusable identity news we rely on straight to your inbox.