Digital ID Opportunity Zones for 2025

Chapters

• 0:12 — Introductions and session goals

• 3:50 — Research scope and geography selection

• 5:05 — Digital ID evaluation criteria

• 9:33 — Green zones in Europe

• 15:16 — Green zones outside Europe

• 24:07 — Yellow zones and adoption trade-offs

• 38:58 — Red zones and access barriers

• 47:19 — Current digital ID opportunities

• 49:52 — Follow-up materials and audience questions

• 54:17 — Integration roadmap and interoperability

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Zack Jones: Great. So welcome, everybody. I think we could at least get started with introductions. I'm Zack. I lead the product partnerships function at Trinsic. Since we're building a very large identity acceptance network, we're partnering with, you know, dozens of, like, identity wallet providers and identity providers globally. So I was very close to a lot of the, like, the research that you're going to be seeing Riley present today, and we'd love to get your feedback on everything shared. This is a very challenging and, like, kind of subjective activity in some way to make recommendations about, you know, where people should think about adopting digital IDs. So this is a draft, and we're sharing it kind of early access with a select group of people that have showed up today and inviting, you know, feedback and participation as well. So we'll have the, like, the Q&A will be active throughout the session here.

Zack Jones: We'll have time at the end for, you know, answering as many questions as we can get to, and then we'll send out a follow-up as well with the content that was shared and a recording afterwards. So that's a little bit of framing, and then I'll kind of pass it over to Riley to lead the session here.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, thank you, Zack. All right, let me share my screen, and then I just want to echo, you know, something that you said. So I'm just going to walk through the e-book with the group here, and, you know, to basically echo something that you said, you know, we're really interested in feedback. I think there's no faster way to get smart about something than to be somewhat wrong publicly. Right. So to the extent that we, you know, share something that is, like, sort of not right, you know, I'm sure that a lot of you will let us know, and that's what we're banking on. That's what makes us smarter. So it's an uncomfortable position to be in there, you know, throwing out, you know, sort of our thoughts and learnings and opinions and whatever, you know, into the wild. But that's why we do it, right? So we can get smarter faster. So appreciate everybody who's here. And, yeah, of course, we'd welcome any feedback. The topic of the webinar today is digital ID opportunity zones in 2025, right?

Riley Hughes: So meaning, right, like this could be, like, the things that you see here could be very different in 2026 because different markets around the world, different digital IDs are evolving quite quickly. And, you know, this is subjective stuff. So, you know, keep that in mind. Keep in mind that, you know, the timeline and the subjectivity. The other thing I'll say is, you know, the opportunity, what we find is outside of the hype. There's a lot of hype in digital ID. It's a very, it's a really fast-moving, dynamic space with a lot of innovation. And especially with, you know, regulations around the world, which impose, you know, certain forms of digital ID which are coming online at various paces in different parts of the world, you know, it's easy to look ahead at the three- to five-year timeline and see kind of where the opportunity seems like it will be. And that sometimes is different from where the opportunity is today.

Riley Hughes: And so this is kind of a fun dynamic to look at, like, where is the opportunity right now, and kind of, you know, we want to factor in those growth rates into the recommendation as well, but— But yeah, it's a fun, it's a fun, you know, experience. And this is based on, you know, analysis of over 230 different identity schemes around the world. And so, of course, 230 identity schemes across, you know, 100-plus countries, this could be a very long report, depending on, you know, if we wanted to cover everything. So we have, we're not covering everything. We've chosen to cover basically five different geographies that fit broadly into these categories, right? The first one is, you know, colored with green means that we recommend these geographies as high-opportunity zones for adopting digital IDs. The yellow category are ones where, you know, if it's strategic for your business or whatever, these could also be good places, but there's maybe some trade-offs with them.

Riley Hughes: And then the red ones are ones where, you know, they may not be the best places to start unless it's, again, really core geography or really strategic or whatever. And so, you know, the last thing I'll say when talking about these—well, let me go to this next one. You know, here's what goes into each of these recommendations. So the first one is the adoption rate, right? In a large population country like the United States, you could see digital IDs like CLEAR having 30 million members, which, by the way, represents less than 10% of the U.S. population, right? So that's a low adoption rate, but a very high adoption number. There's not a lot of digital ID schemes on planet Earth that have 30 million-plus people in them. So... You know, adoption rate is important to consider. I think the assurance level of the digital ID, you know, how secure is the sort of onboarding or proofing or creation, as well as how is the authentication into that digital ID done on an ongoing basis.

Riley Hughes: Those things factor in, and, you know, basically the stronger assurance, the identity, the more sort of we're ranking it highly in these categories. The third one is usability for the private sector. There are digital IDs all around the world that are used all the time by citizens. for things with their government that are not usable by private sector companies. So those are excluded from this list. Things like login.gov in the U.S. or, you know, DigiD in, you know, the Netherlands or whatever are not included here. And then the next one sort of goes along with the assurance level, right? It's sort of the user experience. So with the assurance level, we're thinking, you know, how secure is this thing? User experience means, you know, how convenient is it to use? And this is a relative thing too, right? Like in some geographies where people are really, really used to using these, it may seem like it's not the smoothest process for somebody in another geography. But if it's a good user experience for the people in their locale, then it scores highly in our rankings.

Riley Hughes: And then the last one is regulatory openness, right? How friendly are the regulations to companies from other geographies, right, global companies verifying these IDs, right? And so as you can see, let's see, this first one is, yeah, the use case. This is another good caveat, which is basically there's a lot of things that you could use a digital ID for, and the thing that we're most interested in is scenarios where normally a global company would ask a user to present a physical ID document, right? Upload a photo of your passport and your selfie to verify. And so that's the use case. And basically what Trinsic does, what our business is, is an ability to basically check to see if the user has a digital ID before asking the user to upload a copy of their physical ID. So... You know, some digital IDs may be, you know, useful for a number of things, but the sort of primary thing that we're focused on in the context of this conversation is the, you know, can you use this digital ID in place of a document scan, right?

Riley Hughes: And, you know, before we jump into the sort of all the things here, as we've gone through this, there's quite a few caveats, quite a bit of framing that we've done, right? Because some of the, you know, things might be surprising here. The other thing to remember is every company is different. These are recommendations for companies. These are certainly not judgment calls on individual countries or anything like that. And because every company is different, you know, there could be a provider that we rank as red because, generally speaking, across the universe of global companies, it's not maybe the best geography to start with. It doesn't mean that that's, you know, not a great geography for somebody else or something, right? So this is the challenge of making generalized recommendations. Okay, I think I've given enough framing and caveats and that sort of thing. Let's jump into the actual, you know, the actual recommendations. And by the way, please, you know, light up the chat if you have thoughts or questions.

Riley Hughes: You know, send your remarks there, and, you know, we'll be happy to answer them throughout. And then, of course, at the end, we can spend some time answering some questions also. Okay, so let's start with the green zones. These are the areas we recommend people start with. If you're, you know, a global company operating across, you know, 200 geographies or whatever, these are places that often make sense to start with. Yellow zones are ones that are maybe a little bit, you know, if it's a strategic or important geography, you know, it potentially makes sense, but maybe not always the first. And the red zones are, you know, ones that are maybe harder to start with. And as you can see, we've tried to sort of cherry-pick, you know, if we're going to pick five places, might as well pick, you know, a handful from different parts of the world. So that's what we've tried to do here. Now let's dive into some of the green, you know, the countries we ranked as green. So the first one is the Netherlands.

Riley Hughes: Netherlands has DigiD, which is primarily a government-based thing, and then iDIN, which is sort of a bank-based identity network that's widely used by the private sector. And because it's a bank-based identity network, and because the usage of it is so prevalent, and because it's so sort of accessible for the private sector, we ranked it as green. So the other piece of this is that the Netherlands has a reasonably high population, as opposed to, you know, places, you know, some other European countries with high digital ID adoption rates. Netherlands is, you know, high economic activity zone, you know, a reasonably high population for its, you know, small geographic size, relatively speaking. And the user experience is pretty good, right? Users basically deep link into their banking app, consent to share their data, and then the data is transferred to the relying party. From a regulatory perspective, right, it's important to comply with GDPR, but it's not like there's a ton of extra... onerous terms or data processing requirements that are imposed on companies to use it.

Riley Hughes: And it's also certified under the eIDAS framework, and it meets a level of assurance of substantial, which is, you know, pretty solid from most things. And it may be able to, Zack, you could maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, but it may be able to reach level of assurance high under some scenarios as well. But sort of generally speaking is considered LOA substantial. All right, I'm going to keep moving. And if you have questions on any of these, just shoot them into the, you know, Q&A portion, because that will be, again, where we spend a good bit of time. So. let's see, either into the chat or the Q&A, if that's— yeah, I see the Q&A. Okay, yeah. So yeah, Q&A is probably easiest, but whatever works. All right, the next one is the neighbor of the Netherlands, right? Denmark here. Denmark's primary digital ID scheme is called MitID, and it is used universally, right, by people young and old. I think the age of 15 is when people can obtain this. You know, I have a family member who lives here in Denmark who moved there from the U.S., and he, you know, got MitID right away.

Riley Hughes: And I texted him and asked him about it, and he's like, Obviously I have this. I mean, I can't do anything without it, basically, right? And yeah, he loves it. He's like, This is great. I wish America had something like this. And so, you know, the user experience generally is pretty good. It utilizes push notifications and QR scanning to allow people to, you know, proceed through these verifications. It's widely used by the public sector and private sector and meets a level of assurance high under the eIDAS framework, so generally is considered a very high assurance form of eID. And in terms of regulatory openness, it does require international companies to have a legal entity in the EU. However, provided that, you know, I think most international companies doing a lot of business there will, you know, it's likely to have that, we, you know, we put Denmark here in the green zone. All right, coming to the next one are the Baltics.

Riley Hughes: So Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, we sort of bundled together as one group because the eIDs across these are—there's overlap in the eID apps and approaches that people use there. So these eID apps are—there's a couple of them. One is called Smart-ID, the other is called Mobile-ID. And Smart-ID has roughly 3.3 million users across the three countries, which is about 73% adoption across adults. And then, of course, there's other people who use some of the other ones, such as Mobile-ID and so forth. So these are also high assurance, you know, good user experience eIDs that are widely usable by the private sector and which are open to international companies verifying from them. I think, you know, as Trinsic, we support these eIDs, and we have—yeah, it's easy to onboard people, right? And, you know, it's easy to consume. So these are solidly in the green zone from our perspective. The next one is Brazil. And Brazil is green, I think, you know, it maybe has a different set of trade-offs than some of the other geographies we've talked about there in Europe.

Riley Hughes: But the population is really big, and I think the need is really high. So from an adoption rate perspective, there is a CPF number assigned to each person. The CPF number is, you know, really high adoption, but of course verifying a user using a— You know, an identifier, even if it's, you know, considered sensitive information, isn't of the highest level of assurance, right? So there are other mechanisms as well within Brazil to verify people, including their digital driver's license, which is called the CNH, or that's the sort of acronym for it, which has over 80 million users. There's also a newer form of digital ID called the CIN, which is the new form of basically national ID, as opposed to the kind of digital driver's license, which is done on a more local basis. And the national ID, which still is issued by the provinces, but is driven from national regulations, is also digitally verifiable via government-run APIs. And these verifications can be done using a user's biometric, right?

Riley Hughes: So it's sort of, you can get the digital driver's license data, you can submit that data to the government database along with a biometric of the user, and you can validate that the sort of attributes all match and that this, you know, the user coming is indeed the same person that was issued the driver's license. So although Brazil's ecosystem doesn't have maybe as formal regulations as, like, the eIDAS regulations in Europe, it does offer flexibility in terms of those APIs to allow people to sort of tailor the level of friction and the level of assurance needed to verify somebody from Brazil, right? So this sort of speaks to both the assurance level point and the user experience point. And then from a private sector perspective, You know, this is growing really quickly, and it is available for companies to use. And there's not a lot of additional regulatory burden required for companies, for example, U.S., Canadian companies, North American companies, European companies, to verify people from Brazil, aside from, of course, complying with the relevant data protection regulations.

Riley Hughes: But of course, that should be expected. So Brazil is definitely in the green zone, given the high population, flexibility in terms of the user experience and assurance level of the verification, as well as the strong need, right, growing. fraud and things like that in the geography means that there's a strong need to verify people. And then the last one here, I think this is the last one. Oh no, we've got two more. India is another one in the green zone. Aadhaar is near universal adoption in India. And, you know, it can be somewhat of a complicated landscape to understand because it is a mature landscape. And so there's a variety of solutions in place there with high adoption. Or another way to say that is sort of a number of modalities supported to verify the Aadhaar, right? There's a physical card, there's a digital card, there's an eID database that the government runs, and there's a variety of ways to kind of tap into that. But suffice to say, people are used to using this everywhere.

Riley Hughes: And especially for the digital wallet, or the digital vault that's run by the government called DigiLocker, where users can obtain a, you know, a digital version of their Aadhaar card or their PAN card or digital driver's license. You know, this is a really commonly used product, especially for individuals, you know, who are used to onboarding into tech companies' products kind of thing, right? So for people who are online and used to using digital services, they are very used to using their, you know, DigiLocker to do so. This is done primarily via, like, the user experience, which is very connected, again, to assurance level. It's done with an SMS number, the Aadhaar number, and sometimes a PIN or OTP. And so, again, this can be sort of tailored. The government is the one that issues the, you know, OTP to the user and authenticates the user through the DigiLocker service. And so it is, you know, it's considered sort of good enough for regulatory use cases.

Riley Hughes: It's run by the government, and it sort of operates under a regulatory framework and regulatory regime in India that qualifies this as good enough to be used in a variety of places. And it's pretty open for what it can be used for. You know, it does have strict data protection regulations. And so, you know, navigating that is probably the biggest challenge, right? Is this a use case or is this a modality where local data processing is required, you know, or a local entity, and so forth? So, I mean, I think, you know, there's ways to navigate these things, especially with, you know, here we talk about matching flows, which allow you to sort of collect data from a user, send it to India to have it be sort of—the user goes through a flow, you know, you sort of match the data submitted against the data that the user obtained from DigiLocker, and then you can return a value that sort of says, you know, yes or no, does this data match? And you can kind of gain trust without very much extra regulatory or administrative hurdles, right? And then I think this is the last one.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, last one in the green zone is the Philippines. The Philippines has a, the Philippines Statistics Authority, a division of the government called PhilSys for short, has eID database, essentially, where they've registered users and their sort of national ID data alongside their biometrics into a solution that allows them to, you know, easily verify their ID across public and private sector services. So, you know, 95% of the adult population basically has been registered into this database, and there's various modalities, again, for how this can be used. For example, a user's data can be matched directly against the PhilSys database with their biometric, where, again, PhilSys is the one that provides a biometric matching service to match the user, right? So you sort of redirect the user to a PhilSys-provided interface. The user sort of presents their biometrics and does a liveness check with PhilSys itself, and then PhilSys, if they authenticate the user, will then, you know, share the data to the relying party.

Riley Hughes: You can also validate things such as the ePhilID and the digital national ID, which are sort of, again, digital ID, forms of digital ID that are available to Filipinos through these PhilSys APIs. And because there are a variety of modalities, there are a variety of assurance levels available, as well as user experiences. And so this is, again, a pro in my view, where companies can tailor the right, you know, the right experience for the use case at hand. There are, you know, there are regulations around data processing in the Philippines. And so, you know, that is the other thing to get around. But, you know, if you have an entity in the Philippines, you know, then this is a great thing. And if you don't, then, you know, there are, again, similar to in India where there's matching flows and things like that. At Trinsic, we support matching flow, for example, that allows international companies to verify users against the PhilSys APIs. Okay. Again, submit your thoughts or questions to the Q&A if you have any about any of these geographies, but I'm going to keep rolling here.

Riley Hughes: So the first one in the yellow zone is the United States of America. We put this as yellow primarily because adoption, you know, the adoption rate is not great for any one scheme. So if you look at all of the mDLs and private sector reusable IDs in the United States, you know, there's maybe between 30 and 40 percent adoption of digital IDs in the United States, which is way more than most people would expect if you sort of ask people on the street how many people in the U.S. have a digital ID. But between things like Clear and ID.me and mobile driver's licenses and reusable, other reusable ID services embedded into ID verification products, you know, you start to see how these things can add up. And by the way, that like 100 million number is probably not deduplicated, right? There's probably, you know, people who have a Clear membership who also have a mobile driver's license, and so that's something to consider. But, you know, generally the overlap's probably not too dramatic. So we feel confident in the sort of 30 to 40 percent range.

Riley Hughes: I think the challenge with that is that it's very fragmented. So there's not one standard you can integrate to accept 30 to 40 percent of Americans. There's not one digital ID type that you can integrate to do that, right? So if you want coverage of all the digital IDs in the United States, you need to do lots of separate sort of integrations with different schemes and different digital ID types. Generally in the United States, NIST has established the sort of Identity assurance levels and authentication assurance levels that are generally used as the benchmark for—I mean, there's really two schools of thought, right? Like some folks swear by the sort of IAL2 or something, right, that sort of benchmarks and talk about that a lot. And then the other school of thought is, you know, that those are not useful frameworks at all, and that, you know, just because you did a doc scan and a 2FA, you know, there's various forms of 2FA, there's various efficacy of document scans, right? And so then, you know, there's some who sort of don't put a lot of stock in that.

Riley Hughes: So, you know, but between these two camps, right, I think the common thing is that IAL2 is generally viewed as the level of assurance that a digital ID will attempt to reach. And so most digital IDs meet that level of assurance. And in the U.S., user experience is really, really high on people's list of things they care about. So consumers expect things to be extremely convenient and easy. And so generally speaking, user experience of these is very strong and really quite smooth. For private sector usability, what I would say there is that, you know, it sort of depends on the scheme itself, particularly with respect to, you know, things like Login.gov are not available for private businesses, but for the mobile driver's licenses, most of them are available to private businesses without many restrictions. And I think the challenge comes in, again, not only integrating all of the providers, but doing business deals and partnership deals with the providers and becoming a customer of different private sector companies and things like that.

Riley Hughes: And from a regulatory perspective, it's quite open. There's maybe some question marks on whether they could be used for compliant KYC or to what degree, in what scenarios, things like that. But generally, I think the regulatory landscape is quite open. And just because of the sheer population of the United States, you know, with 100 million people who have a digital ID, you know, it certainly should not be counted out when you're evaluating, you know, geographies to focus on. Italy is the next one. 40 million people have SPID. It's like, you know, a very high portion of the relevant population. It accommodates a variety of assurance levels, and the user experience is sort of interesting here. It mirrors that of bank IDs, even though SPID is not a bank ID scheme, right?

Riley Hughes: A user will enter into the SPID sort of workflow and then see a list of accredited wallet providers, and private sector companies like certificate authorities and so forth, and some public sector companies or agencies or whatever, like the post office or something, can become accredited wallet providers within the SPID ecosystem, right? And so users can choose from any one of, I don't know, like nine, eight or nine or ten different wallet providers. And then the user experience, basically first the user has to select which wallet provider is the one that they have chosen to use, and then sort of go through their wallet provider to consent to share their data. So there's, you know, it's a good user experience as far as ID verification is concerned generally, but as far as eIDs are concerned, you know, it does have that extra step. Now, private businesses are allowed to verify SPID. It sort of depends on at what level, like how deep do you want to go into it, right? Like Trinsic has become a registered sort of broker of the scheme itself, so we've gone quite deep on this one.

Riley Hughes: You know, there's also a path where you could just, you know, register as a relying party by working through a broker, and that is much easier. So it sort of depends on how deep you want to go and how much of that you want to take on yourself. There's a lot of brokers in Italy locally, as well as, you know, a small handful of us kind of... digital ID aggregators that have done that. And yeah, the approval process can take some time because each request from each relying party does need to be approved by the government entity that sort of administers the SPID scheme. But, you know, by partnering with an aggregator, it can be done without too much effort. And again, with 40 million people in a, you know, sort of high economic activity sort of geography like in Italy, it definitely, you know, deserves its spot in at least the yellow zone here in the report. Now, the next one, again, this is a little bit bundled here, Sweden slash Norway. We're sort of grouping these Nordic countries together. We're ranking these as yellow, and I think this has been surprising for some people.

Riley Hughes: They're saying, Oh, why isn't this a green one, right? Like BankID Sweden has virtually 100% adoption, right? Same with Norway. And despite, you know, having really a high level of assurance, really very good user experience, really very high adoption numbers, so like there's like all these good things going for it, and it's ubiquitous use in private sector, the regulatory sort of openness challenge demotes it down to the yellow zone from green here. So the primary issues there are that there are... Like, for example, in order to verify somebody with their Nordic BankID, or sorry, their Norway, like BankID Norway, you as a relying party, you need to have a bank account in Norway, right? So, meaning, or with a, you know, with a bank based in Norway. So as a relying party, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is it's built for domestic use cases, right? It's not exactly built for international companies to verify people that way.

Riley Hughes: The other challenge is that there are strict rules around what's called ID switching, which means that you cannot associate the trust obtained from, you know, BankID verification with another login of any kind. The other way to think about that is that if you use one of these bank IDs to verify a customer, you also must use that bank ID to authenticate the customer, right, to provide that bank ID as the login solution for that customer. So again, going back to the very beginning, we gave our caveats. I think if you are based in one of these geographies, or if you plan to offer this as, like, a login option alongside username, password, and you log in with Google and whatever else, then, man, this could be tremendous. It could be top of the list of the green countries for you, right? But going back to the use case that we're interested in, we're interested in sort of global companies who would normally plan to do a document-based verification on a user and instead are looking at eIDs as a solution.

Riley Hughes: And for these eIDs, for a lot of the use cases for a document verification, you know, you're going to want to associate the trust of that document verification with, like, your bank's login or your, you know, sharing economy company account or something, which are not use cases that these schemes have contemplated. Or allow, right? Now, there are other eIDs in these geographies that do not have as strict of requirements. For those ones, the adoption rates are not as high, but adoption is growing because, you know, if it allows people to use these services with, you know, international companies and things like that, then of course this attracts other users, and people like that. So again, the free market is hopefully doing its job a little bit in some of these ways, and other eIDs are also growing to support more international use cases. But for now, Sweden, Norway, and Finland is similar but distinct enough that we didn't include it. They sort of belong in the yellow zone here for the purposes of our report. All right. Australia. Australia has a number of digital IDs.

Riley Hughes: It's kind of interesting. If you sort of dig in, there's a lot of them that almost seem a little bit overlapping in some cases. You know, there's government-run things, there's the mobile driver's licenses, there's the bank-based ID scheme called ConnectID, and, you know, it can be hard to sort of grok, like, okay, which things are relevant to me where. But I think the thing that brings Australia into the yellow zone is primarily that mDLs are non-standard, generally speaking, right? Like, if you look at the adoption numbers, like, of the number of mDLs that have been issued in Australia, how many of those conform to the ISO standards or something? You know, it's certainly not the majority, and that is changing. So again, in a year or two, maybe this is in a different spot in the opportunity zone matrix. The other thing to consider is that bank-based IDs, such as ConnectID, currently require companies to be domiciled in Australia, right, have a local Australian entity and process data there.

Riley Hughes: Same thing for the DVS, I think, Document Verification Service, which is a database provided by the government to allow private companies to validate the data from documents such as a driver's license or a passport against the government database. These databases require the relying party to be, again, domiciled in Australia and do all the data processing there in Australia. So while there are a variety of solutions, you know, that are generally good and will reduce friction and increase trust, there are some regulatory openness questions, and for certain eIDs such as mDLs, some adoption questions that need to be resolved first. Okay, going to Indonesia. Indonesia has a digital ID card called the eKTP, which has the national ID number, which is called the NIK, associated with it. I think it's, like, printed on the card, if I'm not mistaken. And this is the sort of landscape today with very high adoption. Now, there are more advanced forms of digital ID, like digital ID wallets, that are developing there.

Riley Hughes: INA Pass is a digital wallet that's growing quickly that's provided by the government, and I think it was launched last year, like a year ago or something like that. And it covers 12 million people, which on the one hand is like, wow, that's a very impressive growth rate, you know, for something like that. But then when you look at the population of Indonesia as a whole, you know, it's a very small portion of the population who's already adopted it. There are private sector schemes in Indonesia as well. Privy is one, which is primarily focused on e-signature, but also, you know, provides this sort of identity validation service associated with that, which has a lot of users. You know, so this is certainly a sort of yellow. You know, we certainly think this belongs in the yellow zone.

Riley Hughes: I think generally these digital wallet-based IDs like Privy and INA Pass meet those sort of IAL2 standard, meaning the kind of document-based proofing and then two-factor of authentication and the presentment, while the eID card, eKTP and NIK-based verifications, again, you can tailor the verification level and the, you know, whether you add biometrics or not, things like that, to the check performed. And regulatory openness is always a sort of a question there, right? I think the path to working with Indonesian users is to have a local partner in Indonesia that can help facilitate that. All right, moving on to the red zone. We're starting off strong here with a strong opinion here or whatever, which might surprise some people, which is Germany. And the primary reason for this is that despite Germany really leading the way on a lot of the next-generation digital wallet and eIDAS 2.0 or EUDI-based kind of digital ID schemes, and, you know, meaning that like in three years, Germany might be at the top of the green list.

Riley Hughes: If you zoom into right now, how many users have a digital ID and how can they use it, we think it is probably not the right place to start for most global businesses. And the reason for that is that the main method of, the main sort of eID method in Germany is the eID card. And the card is not ubiquitously adopted, nor is it a particularly pleasant user experience for people who have it. We've heard anecdotally that, you know, for the people who do have it, not all of them remember their PIN, which was issued by the government, and, right, they haven't used it in a year, and it's like, you know, they forget the PIN or whatever, and it's just not used frequently. I mean, one thing that would be interesting to add to this report, maybe at a future point, is something about how often people use these things, right? So, like, in India, people use their, you know, DigiLocker or Aadhaar-based verification frequently, whereas in Germany, people do not use their eID card nearly as frequently.

Riley Hughes: Again, generally speaking, I'm sure there's exceptions to that, but generally speaking, don't use their eID card nearly as often. And so despite having a high level of assurance and a decent number of people, right, if you look at sort of 22% adoption and you look at the population of Germany, it's like, wow, there's, you know, a few tens of millions there. It is, yeah. And then the other factor is that it requires private businesses to register themselves and go through a process to even validate the eID card in the first place, right? So it's not just that it's widely open. It also takes some work for relying parties to be able to do that. Now, there are a couple of private sector reusable ID wallet-type companies in Germany that will onboard somebody using this eID card and then subsequently sort of give them a digital reusable ID that they can present much more seamlessly and conveniently. And, you know, there's, you know, millions of users who have these wallets. Those are usually the places we point people to to start.

Riley Hughes: But again, from an adoption rate point of view, generally these are a subset of the people with the eID cards, which again is just not ultimately the highest adoption geography to potentially start. The next one on our list is another one that surprises people, which is Canada. So while Canada has been talking about, I mean, I remember in, what was it, like 2019? How many years is that? Six years now. Six years ago, Trinsic's first funding, right, was back when it was StreetCred ID, you know, and our co-founder Thomas Love, you know, obtained funding from the Canadian, you know, province of British Columbia to develop a digital wallet app, right, six years ago, where they had the intention of issuing credentials into this app, and did, and certainly issued production credentials into the Trinsic wallet back when we did that, you know, four or five years ago. So, you know, certainly been at the cutting edge, working on this stuff for a long time.

Riley Hughes: But if you zoom in again to actual adoption rates today in each province and of what types of credentials and digital IDs, progress has certainly not been as rapid as I think many people have hoped it would be. So Interac is a bank-based ID, right, primarily known as an acceptance product for payments, but Interac also supports ID verification around Canada. And so that is sort of the main way, the main digital ID method in Canada that I think covers quite a large number of people. In terms of digital wallets, British Columbia has a wallet, which is still, I think, quite low adoption. There's some hurdles to obtain the wallet, right? You've got to, like, go through step one first before you can get the wallet, and the number of users who've done step one is not that high, and it only maps to one province and that sort of thing. So I think this is an area where I'm going to be watching closely on how it evolves. Because the thinking in Canada and the innovation and the sort of market is ripe for it.

Riley Hughes: But, you know, but it has been held back in terms of real world adoption of digital credentials so far. Okay, Spain is the next one we've put as a red zone. Spain has both an eID card as well as a digital ID, which support level of assurance high, right? So they're both, you know, high assurance things. But the user experience of the eID card is not tremendous because it requires a reader, and the digital ID is primarily used for government services, right? So there's quite a few hurdles there for companies that want to accept it, and that's generally why we put this one in the red zone. The UAE is another one that we put here. The UAE Pass is about half the population in terms of adoption, so it's quite high adoption, and it's a sort of wallet-based or a mobile app-based wallet-esque approach with a good user experience and a reasonably high level of assurance as well. So this is one that's frequently, I guess, in demand.

Riley Hughes: And the sort of caveat with this one is just that it's really good if you're local, and it's hard if you're an international company because you need to have a local entity and register, you know, as a business, go through this sort of process with the agency that runs the UAE Pass. And so that just limits its sort of international utility. The same thing applies for Singapore here. So while it's ultra high adoption within Singapore, and it's really useful, it's like people use it all the time, it's usable by the private sector, it's high assurance. It does require somebody to be a local company that registers directly with GovTech, which is the agency that operates SingPass. So, you know, if you have an entity in Singapore or something, then it can be, you know, at the top of the list of the green zone. And if you don't, then, you know, there's a significant barrier to entry to get started, and so this is why it belongs here in red. Okay. So sort of here's our conclusion. I'll leave it up on the screen for you to, I guess, read over it.

Riley Hughes: The short answer is that as we've begun helping companies accept digital IDs, you know, we sort of launched a product in this space last year, less than a year ago. And in the last 11 months or so as we've been doing this, we've seen that this is not, like, digital IDs are not theoretical. Digital IDs are not just the next generation digital IDs that are coming in the next handful of years, you know, that will meet the most idealistic sort of aspirations of what a digital ID could become. Digital IDs are real today and dramatically reduce friction relative to a document-based verification and, in many cases, are higher assurance as well. And can be accepted today. But if you zoom in, it gets complicated. As you look at each geography, each one has its idiosyncrasies, you know, and sort of navigating that landscape can be tricky. So what I would say is that, you know, I hope the takeaway from this is that there's digital IDs all over. Some are easier to get started with than others. But the factors that we use to determine how we ranked something are based on these things.

Riley Hughes: And if you're a business that's like, oh, well, we're based in that geography, so it's easy. There's not really a regulatory issue, then. you know, your recommendation could be different. If you're a business that really cares a lot about having the highest level of assurance, your recommendation could be different. If you're ultra optimized for just adoption rates, your recommendation could be different. And so what I would suggest is if you're a company that's interested in accepting digital IDs, we would love to chat. We'd love for you to reach out and basically get a customized version of recommendations of what the opportunity zones are for you. And, you know, because each geography is different and each ID provider works very differently as well. And so in some geographies, you might say, I'm willing to accept only government-issued IDs, in which case the bank ID stuff is not going to be relevant, and it's going to not be even in the list of things that you should start with. And so, yeah, for that, if you're interested in accepting digital IDs, chat with our team.

Riley Hughes: We've got, you know, Zack, who opened us up here, and Zack, maybe I'll invite you back on the stage to kind of help with the next sort of Q&A steps here. But, you know, we've got Zack on the team. We've got a handful of others on the team who'd love to be helpful as you navigate this. And I guess I'll just close by saying, like I say, we share a lot of this information in part to hopefully be helpful, but also to get smarter and to hone our recommendations. So if you have feedback for us, I think maybe Zack can speak to, like, next steps on when they should expect to get the e-book itself and how they can share their feedback. But yeah, thanks everybody for listening, and go ahead and shoot your questions if you have any into the Q&A, and we'll do that next.

Zack Jones: Yeah, thanks again, everybody. We are going to get the recording of the webinar out to everyone along with a copy of this, of the e-book. Consider this kind of like the early feedback round, the first draft. So we will send out that email in the next day or two here, and then you'll be able to respond directly to that, right? It'll come from myself or Riley. And if you have feedback or questions or want to hop on a call to dig deeper into any of these areas, you can just respond to that email. You can always, you know, contact us on the page, and we're super responsive there, and we're all over LinkedIn as well. So happy to be responsive in any of those channels. So you'll expect a follow-up in the next, you know, 24 to 48 hours. And then, yeah, we have a few questions coming in here that we can get to. We only have a few minutes, so I want to be conscious of time. Let's see if we can go through a few of these quickly. Riley, do you see any that you want to start with? Want me to jump in?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I guess maybe the question on the UK maybe I think is good. Like I say, you know, an exhaustive analysis here would sort of map every country. We tried to speak to a lot of the big ones, but of course, you know, the UK is a really big country with a dynamic digital ID ecosystem that's not—we don't speak to in this report, so this is a good question. The question is, the UK will probably have 25 to 30 million digital IDs in the next three years due to the UK government entering the marketplace as an IDP. Was the UK considered in the analysis? I think, yes. The short answer is yes, we definitely considered it. I think certainly really interesting to see the UK government stepping in with the mobile driver's license stuff, which I think we'll see by the end of this year, you know, really the true shape of that and how it fits into the existing frameworks in place in the UK. I think UK is a really interesting geography because There are mature frameworks in place.

Riley Hughes: I think like GBG 45 and like the trust frameworks that are in place there, and the roles, and the ecosystem is very well developed. And there are a handful of IDPs, you know, that are there, both private sector and soon to be public sector, that fill that gap. So I think, generally speaking, I think off the top of my head is probably already something like 15 to 20 million digital IDs, like wallet-based digital IDs in the UK. And then there are sort of bank-based schemes such as, you know, Select ID, OneID, these types of things that, you know, enable more of a federated or kind of hub-and-spoke model. And so, yeah, UK is great. I mean, I might put them, if I had to just say off the top of my head, I don't know, something green or yellow maybe. Still a bit fragmented. It's still, you know, it's not like every IDP complies with every scheme or something like that. So it's still maybe a bit yellow in some of those respects. But yeah, big geography with a lot of digital IDs, like leans it a little in the green direction. So that's what I would say off the top.

Zack Jones: Awesome.

Riley Hughes: I need to answer these questions way faster.

Zack Jones: We answer quick. Yeah. What should I tackle next? I may answer the—

Riley Hughes: Or yeah, you can answer some too, because you'll be—

Zack Jones: I may answer quickly this one. Has Africa been assessed at all? There is a lot of interesting things happening in Africa. I think we would love to make this report 50 pages or 75 pages or something. Then we would include some of the really cool things that are happening that we're aware of in like Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, just to name a few, South Africa as well. So, you know, we couldn't include everything in the first round, but we'd love to. We're aware of some of the things that are going on there and do have, you know, requests for some of those geographies. And, you know, we'll hope to integrate that into kind of the future updates. So that's the quick response there. Maybe question about, there's a two-part question, Riley. Trinsic has a lot of integrations. What's the process? of adding new ones is maybe a good one to do next.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, so really, we have a long roadmap of, I don't know, 100-plus digital IDs that we want to add, and it's driven by customer demand, right? So, you know, there's a reason that we registered directly as a broker of SPID, right? It's not because we thought that, like, bureaucratic process of, you know, registering an entity locally and going through that process would be fun, but it's because, you know, somebody needed it and, you know, it's sort of driven by demand. And the process is really, unfortunately at this stage, every single country and geography and digital ID that we add is a bit bespoke. So it's a bespoke integration, a bespoke process to add it, bespoke contracts, things like that. What we do, our business model is we sort of create one contract for our customers, right? One contract, you know, one data model, one integration, and you sort of get all the digital IDs that we've integrated.

Riley Hughes: So we sort of try to take the fragmentation and the bespoke nature of each one of these and kind of condense it into something that's simple for relying parties and resellers or distributors of our service. So that is the process. I see another question here about interoperability between digital IDs and how critical is that to our business model. I think it surely would be helpful to us because we could, you know, if all the mDLs were interoperable with each other or something, or they all conformed to the latest standards and things, that would be nice because we wouldn't have to write as much custom code. But the way that it works today is that— You know, things are still a bit bespoke. So it's not critical that things be interoperable in order for Trinsic to integrate them. We have integrated everything from SAML-based systems to OIDC-based systems to mDL-based systems to totally proprietary bespoke systems. We're sort of agnostic to what the technology stack is behind it. It's just a question of, like, does it have users? You know, is it usable? Do customers want it?

Riley Hughes: That sort of thing.

Zack Jones: I know we're out of time here. There's a few other questions we'd love to speak to, but yeah, I don't know, Riley, do you have any closing comments that you want to make before we wrap it up? Thanks for all the questions, everybody.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah, a lot of good questions in here. I mean, I guess there's a question in here about the UDI and wallet pilots and, you know, private companies helping to sort of enable private businesses to integrate these different ID wallets that will be coming out. And I think what I would say is, like, in closing, is that, yeah, this, when you look forward at what that landscape will look like, yes, it will be complex and there will be roles for integrators and private companies like Trinsic to help enable those. But if you even don't look ahead, really, you just look at, like, today, there are, I mean, we just walked through in this list hundreds of millions of digital IDs that can be supported now, right? Like, hundreds of millions of digital IDs that are integrated into the Trinsic platform already, or, you know, just ignore Trinsic, right? Like, if you just, I don't know, if you're a Filipino company and you want to integrate directly with the Filipino government APIs, right, like, those are there. So there's a lot that can be done right now.

Riley Hughes: And I hope that the takeaway from this is that, you know, there's some places that are really ripe for getting started right away. You know, and then of course there's some others that are also relevant with lots of digital IDs that just maybe have a few more hoops to jump through. And if you are somebody interested in accepting those or going down those routes, then we'd be happy to help.

Zack Jones: Awesome. Thanks again, everybody for joining. We will get out a follow-up to everybody who registered, and we'll look forward to any other feedback or conversations that come from this. Thanks again.

Riley Hughes: Thanks all. Bye-bye.