Exploring the Global Landscape of Digital ID Adoption

Chapters

• 0:00 — Opening and introductions

• 5:45 — Introduction to Global Digital ID Adoption

• 11:58 — Digital ID ecosystems

• 17:40 — North America digital ID schemes

• 27:01 — Europe digital ID schemes

• 32:08 — Asia digital ID schemes

• 32:52 — Africa digital ID schemes

• 33:41 — South America digital ID schemes

• 34:55 — Oceania digital ID schemes

• 35:53 — Global digital ID schemes

• 42:20 — Q&A

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Zack Jones: All right, welcome everybody. Okay. Awesome. All right, so we are going to give it a few minutes to let everybody join here. My name is Zack. I lead partnerships at Trinsic. I'm here with Riley.

Riley Hughes: Hey, everybody. It's always nice to, like, at the beginning of a webinar, you, you know, start it and then, like, the, just the attendees just, like, jump up by a lot, right? From zero to, you know, whatever. So it's cool to see, you know, you look at the attendees list and you're trying to, like, see familiar names, and then they're, like, getting bumped down, you know, or whatever. You got to scroll around. But yeah, it's good. A lot of familiar names. Good to see everybody.

Zack Jones: Yeah. Awesome. You got a sweatshirt on in August there, Riley.

Riley Hughes: Yes. My, as you can see, this little office that I'm in is, like, kind of narrow, and I have, like a, it's like a segmented room, I guess. Like, it should be a bigger room, but they, like, added, like, you know, made it, like, into little sections of a room, I guess. And my section is the one that has, like, the vent in it. So, like, right above me, I have, like, this vent that's intended for, like, a, you know, 200 square foot room or something, and I'm in, like, a, you know, anyway. So yeah, it's, it's like the air conditioning is strong in this room, in this room.

Zack Jones: Nice.

Riley Hughes: And I'm wearing a little bit of a goofy shirt as well. I forgot I had a webinar today, so I'm wearing a shirt that's, like, maybe not as— should have wore a Trinsic shirt, you know, but instead I'm wearing a shirt for my... Favorite artist, musician, which is, his name is Fred Again. Anyway, it's a goofy shirt. So the sweatshirt is dual purpose here.

Zack Jones: Nice. Next time we'll have to play some Fred Again as everybody joins to kind of fill the first few minutes of the webinar with some music for everybody.

Riley Hughes: I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate it. If they, you know, if you haven't already, I mean, everybody's, you can feel free to play your own Fred Again too while you wait, if you'd like.

Zack Jones: Yes. Yeah, logistically, everyone is—it's a webinar, so everybody's muted and, you know, your audio, we can't hear it. People, you're welcome to submit questions in the Q&A, and then, you know, we will get to them throughout the webinar and definitely by the end of the session. And your questions will be only shown if they're selected and answered, right? So, awesome.

Riley Hughes: Right.

Zack Jones: We got one, one response in the Q&A so far. Someone said hello. Hello, hello. Welcome, everybody. I think we'll probably just give it, you know, one more minute. Seems like people are still, still a few folks joining over the last few minutes here, and then we'll jump in. Awesome. Great. Well, I think... I think we should probably kick it off, Riley. So, again, you know, feel free to write questions in the chat, everybody. We'll try to get to as many as we can. This webinar may be pretty interactive, right? Because everybody has, you know, some—we have a lot of expertise in this area, but everybody has their own local expertise as well. So if you have questions, comments, feedback, we're more than happy to hear it, both, you know, in the chat and the webinar, and then we'll, you know, provide contact information afterwards to be in touch. So.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I agree with that. Well, I can take the mic here, share my screen. I'll just add to what you said, Zack, in that I think the best way to get smarter is to throw your current understanding out to the world and then let the world tell you where your current understanding is, you know, where there are gaps or whatever. So I've definitely gotten a lot smarter, you know, throughout my years in the identity space by doing just that and being told by people that, you know, I'm off base a little bit. One time I was in a group at, or a session at the Internet Identity Workshop a few years ago, and I had a group of people, maybe 30 people, and I had a strong opinion and I said something like, you know, okay, here's what I think, and if I'm wrong, I want everybody to tell me because I'd really like to be wrong. And then the room of 30 people in unison said, like, and they timed it, they chanted like, You are wrong, and it was good. It was a good experience. So yeah, this is how we get smarter. And sure enough, you know, learned from all those experiences and hope to learn more here.

Riley Hughes: So hope that, you know, you take away something, and then if you feel like there are elements that we're missing here, I hope you can share that feedback with us so that we can— Get a little bit smarter. Well, with that, the subject of today's webinar is adoption of digital identities around the world. And I'll, in this time that we have together, I'll share a little bit about what Trinsic does and why we have a perspective on digital ID adoption. And then I'll share sort of what we've learned so far about it. So first of all, in order to frame up the discussion. I want to talk about the state of digital identity today just very briefly, and why digital ID, why businesses tend to care about digital ID. So fundamentally, digital ID improves user experience for verifying that a person is who they say they are on the internet, right? So the primary way, the most common way to prove a person is who they say they are on the internet with a reasonably high level of assurance is to do a document scan.

Riley Hughes: And generally this involves photographing a government-issued card and then taking a selfie, perhaps a liveness selfie where you're asked to smile or move your head or jump up and down or whatever the case may be. And then the software matches the face in the photo with the photo in the ID card, right? So it matches the face that's shown to the camera to the photo of the photo of the ID card, right? And to try to authenticate whether this is the same person. So you can see this image here on the left is me. I'm taking a photo of my passport and a selfie, and then the software behind this is trying to match whether this face here matches the face in the passport. The problem with this is that it takes a long time to accomplish this. I mean, it's of course a pain to have to photograph a plastic card, right, to begin with. People are wary maybe about submitting biometrics and sensitive personal information to websites.

Riley Hughes: I remember once I had to do this and my wallet was down in my car, so I had to put on pants, you know, like proper pants so that I could walk out to the street and, you know, grab the stuff out of my car. It just adds a lot of friction to the user experience. And then there are challenges around, you know, like anytime you're translating a physical thing to a digital space, you know, there's glare on the, you know, lighting issues, glare issues, variability in camera quality, and all kinds of different things that make this just a tricky process that takes time and creates friction for users. Not to mention that users need to redo this process across lots of different places, right? I verified on LinkedIn, great. I bought a car and had to get verified. You know, I signed up for a social media profile and had to get verified. I signed up for a financial account and have to get verified again. I checked in for my medical appointment, had to get verified again, right? So we're uploading our ID documents over and over and over, and it just creates a lot of friction.

Riley Hughes: Digital identity basically gets you the same outcome as a document scan, right? So in many cases, you can get the same results. You can still get a photo and an image, right? You can still get the attributes from the ID card. You can still get the level of assurance that you would expect from a document scan, a lot of times even higher. But it's 10 times faster. That's like the big headline takeaway, right? So yeah, you reduce fraud, right? It's probably cheaper, right? Like there's other benefits too, but, you know, the headline, like big difference is how dramatically it speeds up a verification process. And there's a lot of these. There's two and a half billion digital IDs out there in the world, as far as our estimation is concerned, right? So as far as we can tell, two and a half billion digital IDs out there is A lot more adoption than a lot of people expect.

Riley Hughes: And so then, you know, the question that, the logical question that I ask is like, okay, if there's two and a half billion of these things out there, and they're so much better from a user experience perspective, I could see maybe like very, very high assurance like banking or like defense use cases or something where you need like an ultra high level of assurance. Maybe you run your whole process from scratch and you maybe want to create a lot of friction. But in so many cases, you know, lower friction is better. So why aren't people using these digital IDs? Why are businesses not taking advantage of this? And the answer is because it's very fragmented. The space is, you know, if you look at the two and a half billion digital IDs out there, that's strewn across, you know, dozens and dozens or, you know, over a hundred different schemes, some of which are based on standards, others of which are not. Some are government-based, some are private sector, some are, you know, lower levels of assurance, others are higher levels of assurance.

Riley Hughes: Like, the complexity and fragmentation is really stunning. And what we're trying to do at Trinsic, so this is the problem we're trying to solve, right, is taking all these digital IDs that are out there, aggregating them into one sort of platform so that as a business you can integrate one simple thing and get access to the universe of digital IDs that are out there. So we call this identity acceptance as opposed to identity verification, right? So you can accept an existing digital ID a user already has to speed up your verification process by 10x and, you know. Get a lot of the other benefits too, including, you know, benefits to fraud and cheaper verifications and things like that. So on the left, you see like what our product looks like. As a user, you can see the product. You can click on a scheme that you recognize and authenticate faster than you would with a government ID. That's basically it. And we also offer this as an API so that you can, you know, you don't necessarily need to stop using your existing document scanning vendor.

Riley Hughes: You can simply add in a, you know, check with us first to see if a user has a digital ID from one of these ecosystems already before sending them to a new doc scan from scratch, right? So in order to accomplish this purpose, right, in order for us to accomplish our objective, we need to be aware and we need to understand really well what digital ID ecosystems are out there, what they do, what kinds of verifications they accomplish, which industries are allowed. to use them, which geographies they cover, and much, much more. So over the last handful of months and years, we've, you know, we've begun tracking 146 digital ID ecosystems around the world. And surely there are more that we're not aware of, but these are the, you know, we have a pretty big breadth of ecosystems that we are tracking. And so the first thing that I want to do is break down the concept of digital ID into different, you know, basically I want to dive into these 146 digital ID ecosystems, right? And the first sort of deep dive to do here is break them down into their different types.

Riley Hughes: So when we say digital IDs, there's a handful of different kinds. The first one are eIDs, which is a term borrowed from Europe that we are applying broadly. These are government-led identity schemes where the government is creating some electronic equivalent to a physical ID card. Many of these, you know, you break that down even further to app-based eIDs, where there's a government-issued wallet, for example, where a consumer needs to download an app. You could imagine, right, like the Louisiana mobile driver's license is only accessible through the LA Wallet, which is an app that is developed and sponsored by the government, where consumers can obtain their eID effectively through that app. There are also government database eIDs, where there's some combination of identification numbers, biometrics, potentially other factors as well, perhaps logins, etc., which governments use to create these eIDs that the private sector can use. And there's card-based eIDs as well.

Riley Hughes: There's a little asterisk here because Yeah, and there's an asterisk on this one, as well as the bank ID connections, because these two are not included in our adoption numbers, our raw adoption numbers, but they are worth being aware of. The second category of digital IDs are reusable IDs, which we shorten to reIDs because it kind of sounds like eIDs, so we can say we have eIDs and reIDs, right? And in reIDs, these are digital IDs that are private sector run. So you can imagine, right, an identity verification company like Yoti, which creates digital or reusable identities. CLEAR and Airside are the ones that we've listed here. There are many, many more of these private sector companies that are innovating on reusable identity in ways that are intended for commercial use and that are worth looking into as well. And then the last one are bank IDs. And the reason to separate bank IDs as its own category is because banks generally, always, are very highly regulated, right? And so, and in many jurisdictions are very sort of close with the government, right?

Riley Hughes: So there's varying degrees of how the closeness and how the regulatory landscape interacts with the private sector as it relates to banks. But in general, these are not strictly, you know, you should maybe not necessarily think of them strictly as private sector reusable IDs. They're also clearly not government issued, but they have their own set of characteristics that make us feel it's worthwhile to pull them out into their own category. And we can break bank IDs into two segments as well. The first is bank ID apps. These, again, similar, an app that a user downloads. It's almost like a wallet app. That contains the user's information, and they can manage the information perhaps on their device and share it with relying parties as needed. There's also bank ID sort of connector products where the user doesn't necessarily hold any of their own information, but through a bridge or an open banking connector or some way like that, a user can prove that they own a bank account, right?

Riley Hughes: Which is a, basically through this product, a user can log into their bank account, or this product can log into the bank account on behalf of the user and, you know, give some level of assurance back to a relying party that that user has a bank account. And because a lot of these cover basically the entire population, you know, we don't include them in our adoption numbers because then it would just be like, you know, anybody with a U.S. bank account can log into their bank account through whatever open banking provider, Plaid or whatever, and, you know, that wouldn't be as useful. So we don't include them in our adoption numbers, but it is worth noting. The one other thing that I'll add to this before moving on is you notice decentralized identity or self-sovereign identity is not on this list. The reason for that is because this is a technology, right? Decentralized identity is a technology that can be applied to any of these. So there's no sort of distinct kind of self-sovereign identity bucket, right?

Riley Hughes: You could have a lot of that technology brought to bear from a government, from the private sector, or from a bank. Okay. So now let's dive into the geographies where a lot of these, you know, where these digital IDs show up. First geography that we will dive into is North America. So at a glance, we're tracking 30. Digital ID schemes in North America that cover a total of 124 million people. That represents about 21% of the adult population, and there are a handful of, you know, some of the largest networks are ones like ID.me, CLEAR, Plaid, and various others. I mean, again, there's 30 schemes, so we're just sort of highlighting a couple of the big ones that you may have heard of here. One thing that I'm sure someone's going to ask that I'll call out here at the beginning is that this 124 million number is not a deduplicated number, right? So it's possible, like for example, as a consumer, I have an ID.me reusable ID because I filed my taxes with the IRS and I got to create an ID.me account that way. I also have a CLEAR membership and a CLEAR reusable ID, right?

Riley Hughes: So as a consumer, I have both. There are probably other consumers that have both, and so some people may be duplicated. And so it's hard to basically account perfectly for, within a given geography, schemes that cover multiple people. It's also hard to account for schemes that cover multiple geographies and how to break out their aggregate adoption number into the corresponding geographies. So we do the best we can, but these numbers are indicative, not sort of overly precise or something, right? So the relevant standard, I think, that's being adopted in North America is the mobile driver's license specification from ISO. So if we look at, there's a bunch of different sources for mobile driver's license adoption that we have looked at, and frankly, a lot of them say very different things. So we've looked at probably eight different places that claim to have some insight on mDL implementation status across the country, and we've kind of taken from all of those and tried to come up with what we think is our own, like the best view of our own. And so this is what we...

Riley Hughes: We, you know, in general, you know, 26% of states in the U.S. have some adoption or have an active mobile driver's license. 32% have nothing, and, you know, everything in between there is, and the remainder is in development or on the way. So if you break that down into, okay, of those states where mDLs are active or in development, which, by the way, does not mean legal; it means one of these two. So about 50% of the states roughly have an mDL that is active or in development, but that represents 64% of the population of America. So if you look at North America as a map, this is the mDL adoption status according to AAMVA, which is one of the eight sources that I mentioned. You can see what the status is across each state or province in North America. I usually consider Mexico in North America, but they're not in the AAMVA map here. But, you know, if you go from sort of dark purple means you're all the way there on mDL down to sort of gray where there's no information available, you can kind of browse this yourself and see where AAMVA perceives different states to be.

Riley Hughes: And so while 64% of Americans live in states where mDLs are active or in development, 44% live in states where mDLs are active today. And despite that, only about 2% of Americans have an mDL. And so this map shows basically a color-coded version of adoption percentages, right? So, for example, the darkest color here is Louisiana, which has roughly 50% adoption of mDLs. Then you go to other states, you know, such as Utah, where mDL adoption is not as strong. And so we've taken our best intel on every single one of these states, applied a set of assumptions to each of those states, including things like which year were mDLs made legal, what year was the mDL rolled out, what is the current adoption, what are the regulations in that state related to key drivers of mDL adoption that we've seen in other states, for example, age verification laws in place or equivalency laws, right, where the mDL is accepted at liquor stores or something like that for specific purposes, and basically come out with what we think is a pretty good and pretty nuanced portrayal of where mDL adoption will be.

Riley Hughes: And so we have a sort of confidence bands here, right, that we say, okay, well, if our assumptions are a little bit underwhelming or under reality, we have this conservative line, and then if our assumptions are a little bit—well, actually reverse, right—if our assumptions are a little safe, then we have one line, and if our assumptions are a little aggressive, we have the other, and sort of the space in between those lines are the space that we feel pretty confident about in terms of where mDL adoption will be over time. And this is a pretty significant bit of work that we had to do. But basically, to get here, you can kind of see 2025 is basically the year where each of these lines has an inflection toward a steeper slope. And in other words, 2025 is the year that we expect mobile driver's license adoption to really pick up. Yeah. Happy to answer more questions on any of this in the Q&A as well. So if you look at mobile driver's license wallets in the United States, you have basically two types. The first type are wallets that span states, right?

Riley Hughes: So Apple, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet, IDEMIA, etc. These are wallets that cover multiple, more than one state, right? More than one. Yeah, so they're more general wallets. And then you have state-specific wallets like the California DMV wallet, the Virginia MID, and the LA wallet, as another example, right? So these are the two kind of approaches to doing mDLs. And as you can imagine, as a, you know, so far, the ISO standard defines a lot, and it's good that it exists, right? It's helped this get to where it is now. But it does not define everything. And so if you are a business trying to implement this, it's not like you can just install some open-source verify an mDL library and then you just get to verify all of them easily. Rather, it's very much the opposite, where each one is, so far, I mean, we as Trinsic support a handful of these and are actively in development on a handful of others. It is very much a bespoke integration. It's very much, you know, not like just the fact that there is a standard for the data model makes it just so easy to verify all these, right?

Riley Hughes: I expect that'll get easier over time, but as of now, you would want to probably either focus on one geography to start with or work with somebody like us or others who are actively trying to solve this problem of fragmentation for mDL in the U.S. So I think this is the last slide here on North America and mDL, but the ISO 18013-5 spec is the one that is widely adopted, and that one was formalized in 2021, and it supports in-person use cases. So anything that you're doing at the airport with TSA, or in person for age verification, for like I used my Utah mobile driver's license to get into a cocktail party, right, prove I'm over 21, for example, that's all with the 18013-5, which is, again, in person. The 18013-7 specification will support remote verification, but that is sort of right in the middle of being, you know, formalized and implemented. I will say that several of these mobile wallets support remote verification in a non-standard way, which is fine. I mean, but that is to say that they support it today, and you can verify these remotely now.

Riley Hughes: And I'm sure that we'll add the standard in, you know, as it becomes, according to their roadmaps or whatever. Okay. Please submit your questions about North America here. I'm going to move on to Europe. So in Europe, Europe is the geography with the most digital ID schemes that we are tracking. It is the geography with the deepest digital ID adoption in terms of population. I mean, 210 million people covered, and again, that's not including eID cards or bank ID connections, covers a very large portion of the adult population in several large geographies, right? So. I'm not going to read all the largest networks here, but you can see on the screen some of the major networks. And something, the relevant standard to be aware of here is the eIDAS 2.0 work and the EUDI stuff that's going on, and we'll speak to that as well. So here's a map of adoption rates of eIDs in Europe, again, as best as we can tell.

Riley Hughes: The darkest color is 88% adoption rate, which is effectively, right, when you look at the sort of eligible population and you weed out some of the edge cases that, you know, won't—I mean, that's basically as adopted as any digital ID will get, essentially, in my estimation, right? Because there are people in, you know, nursing homes, or there are people, whatever, that are just not in the eligible population of, you know, who you would expect to be using eIDs regularly. And so you can see that countries like the Nordics, Greece, the Netherlands are, you know, have quite a bit of adoption of eIDs, all the way down to countries like Germany and Spain and the UK, which have some exposure. So if you look at Europe in terms of adoption rates, if we break it down from a map into a graph, you can see the sort of countries that I mentioned with high adoption up here, anywhere from this mid-80s to sort of north of 75% adoption. And then there's sort of another tier of countries which are in between 50 and 75% adoption, right?

Riley Hughes: And then there's another tier of countries that are sort of hovering around that 25% adoption, and then a long tail of others with much less adoption. So eIDAS 2.0 and EUDI is the thing to watch in Europe right now. I mean, there's eIDAS 1.0 eIDs that are already widely adopted. That's primarily what we're talking about here. eIDAS 2.0 is, I think, really compelling because it unifies an approach, well, because of a lot of reasons. But in general, you know, the sort of headline is like, oh, by 2026, it's going to be mandatory, right? So things like opening a bank account or creating a social media profile with one of the very large, you know, social media companies, you know, these companies will need to accept the digital ID wallets. that comply with eIDAS 2.0. Now, personally, I added an asterisk to the slide because I think there's, I guess, a little nuance to be had in this discussion. I think that the timeline here is, if—I hope that the timeline is accurate and I hope that everything goes smoothly.

Riley Hughes: I think, you know, if I've seen anything in the last seven years in identity, it is that, particularly with government-driven things like, you know, I look in the U.S. at login.gov or the REAL ID standard for physical driver's licenses, right, and the timelines that were imposed on some of those things. I look at what's happening in the standards space in the eIDAS 2.0 with sort of objections to certain technical choices and back and forth going on there. I look at the legal landscape and, you know, challenges, potential court challenges to some of these, you know, obligations on private enterprise and things like that. I think the reality is that things will take a little longer than I think what most people expect here. So it is worth noting that this is happening and that it's extremely important to be aware of and to be preparing for, but that I think things are a little less set in stone than other people think. I could be wrong. Other people are very bullish on this. I am also bullish, but have a few, you know, of my own reservations around some of those timelines specifically.

Riley Hughes: And I don't think everything is etched in stone. I think there's still some things that are in flux that you will want to be aware of, right. Okay, let's go to Asia. In Asia, we're tracking 12 schemes that cover 1.4 billion people, right? And I think it's something like 1.2 billion of that, or something, right, is Aadhaar in India. And, you know, there's others you can look at here. South Korea has a mobile driver's license. Singapore has a centralized kind of reusable ID that is widely adopted, and that's pretty compelling as well. But, yeah, and so this is the only slide we have on Asia. We don't have an adoption map like the other ones for the remainder of these. We just did that for North America and Europe. But these are some schemes to be aware of. All right, in Africa, we're tracking 10, which cover 135 million people. And you can see some of the key networks here as well. Like I say, we don't have a map that shows adoption across all of Africa.

Riley Hughes: There really are, you know, again, we're only tracking 10 schemes across a key number of geographies, and most of these are the government database-type solutions that mentioned at the beginning of the digital ID breakdown, right? So as opposed to being a wallet app or something like that. And, you know, each of these geographies has their own challenges in terms of technologies that will work and approaches that will work. And so we will see variance across the world, of course. Okay, then the next one is South America. In South America, we're tracking six digital ID schemes, which cover 125 million people. And so, again, I'm not going to read through all of the largest networks here, but— If you zoom in to each of these, there are sort of different approaches that are taken and a lot of complexity around the fragmentation and the fragmented nature of this geography. There are private sector companies, right?

Riley Hughes: So INCODE, for example, is one that is prevalent in Latin America that is, you know, that recently acquired MetaMap, which I believe is based in Colombia, maybe Peru, which had a lot of reusable IDs as well. And so they're building that network there. FacePhi is prominent, CBQD and QuarkID are others. So there's definitely a lot of activity. I think this is a huge growth area. This is one of the primary geographies for the Mastercard reusable ID network as well. And so it's a part of the world that I think we'll see a lot of growth in reusable ID networks in the next several years. Okay, Oceania is the last geography here that we'll touch on. Well, actually second to last. There are nine schemes that we're tracking, which covers 17 million people. This geography, you know, is obviously one that has a smaller population to begin with. And you can see that some of the largest networks here are things like ConnectID, RealMe, etc.

Riley Hughes: There are digital driver's license projects in Australia that are gaining prominence and adoption, and those are definitely things to watch for if this is a geography that is, you know, interesting to you as well. Recently, a company called Matter did an interesting, had some press around the things they're doing with mobile driver's licenses in this region, and, you know, really excited to see what comes out of that as well. Okay, and the final geography that we'll touch on here is the global schemes that you should be aware of. So there are 25 digital ID schemes that are not associated with a specific geography. And instead, they, you know, they are sort of general purpose. They cover more than one geography. Perhaps they are focused on a specific industry, like Fractal ID in the Web3 space. Perhaps they're focused on a singular use case, like the Velocity Network in their... careers focus and career educational and employment-related credentialing. But regardless of what their reason for being global is, there are a handful of global schemes.

Riley Hughes: And adoption, specific adoption number—we don't have a specific adoption number to tie to this global scheme. It's a little harder to get, you know, that number, and we generally try to apply any numbers we could get from these schemes to the specific geographies in question. But these are some of the networks to be aware of in those, you know, in the global landscape. So this is, you know, as you can tell, what we're trying to solve with identity acceptance. This is why we're doing what we're doing, to help businesses accept digital IDs that their users already have, regardless of where their users come from. So just a few more words on, you know, how this works, and then we will pause and open it up for questions for hopefully the last 15 or 20 minutes. So our little tagline, right, is we help you verify users 10x faster by accepting digital IDs they already have. Problem before is that relying parties like businesses, you know, can't really realize the value of reusable ID because of all this fragmentation and complexity.

Riley Hughes: So what this tends to look like is a user would be presented with a screen. From the Trinsic widget, which is really easy to implement, and see options, right? And depending on their geography, they're shown different options. If they see one of these options that they recognize, they can, you know, click on it, and they are then directed out to that option to authenticate. Once they authenticate and, you know, consent to share their information, then they get right back into your flow, and the process in total takes, you know, a dozen seconds instead of, you know, ten times that long. And so, you know, the benefits are obviously, I've mentioned the just better user experience, which leads to higher conversion rates, higher user goodwill and satisfaction, right? Users getting a choice of how to verify, right, is generally a positive thing, right? Being able to choose which wallet I like, right, which company I want to hold my identity with is something that I would like to do as opposed to being, you know, forced to redo it with a specific vendor.

Riley Hughes: But the other big thing is this prepares you for what is coming, right? When we look at North America, when we look at Europe, when we look at, you know, other geographies as well, and the wave that is coming with eIDs like mobile driver's licenses and eIDs 2.0 wallets in Europe, and as we look at the increased adoption of private sector reusable IDs from generally from world-class identity verification companies who are creating very strongly assured reusable IDs off the back of remote onboarding experiences, you know, this number, these numbers that we're talking about are only going to grow. And as digital ID adoption accelerates, it will become the primary mechanism for completing identity verification online. You know, as that wave is cresting, it's wise to sort of get involved before the wave is, you know, starting to crash, and so that you can ride it properly. Just made that analogy up. I'm going to use that more.

Riley Hughes: Okay, so how it works, just really simply, is that as a business, you can configure—and this, by the way, is Trinsic-specific, right?—but as a business, you can configure, okay, I need the following attributes. I need name, date of birth, and address, or whatever it may be, right? We then go out to the universe of IDs that we have integrated with and find the IDs that meet those requirements, right? So you specify the attributes you need, your trust requirements, how strong of a level of assurance do you need out of this ID, what compliance regulations do you need to be—or what regulations do you need to be compliant with and following? And we then basically use a lot of that input to then source the right IDs from the universe of reusable IDs we've integrated with to give your users the best user experience.

Riley Hughes: So if this is interesting to you, either the sort of general adoption stuff we covered here in our conversation across these different geographies, right, any of this data is interesting, or you'd like to dive deeper into any of this, what I would suggest is—or if the Trinsic product or the Trinsic acceptance network or the solution to this is interesting to you, what I would suggest is that you go to trinsic.id/adoption-report. Where you can request a free customized digital ID adoption report. So what we'll do, you'll, on that web page, you'll put in your key geographies that you're interested in. And then what we'll do is we'll take basically what was presented here in this meeting, and we'll sort of explode that out a little bit and give a little more granular—I mean, we can't go into the granular detail for everything on, like, a general webinar like this. So, you know, what we try to do is provide a little more tailored, directed insight on ID adoption in the specific geographies you care about in a sort of PDF format, which you can socialize inside your organization.

Riley Hughes: So, yeah, go to this link here that you see on the screen to get started with that. And we'll be in touch. You know, we'll turn it around as quickly as we can. And with that, I believe... that's the end of my time, and we can open it up for questions. Oh yeah, thank you, Zack, for putting the adoption report link in the chat. So, Zack, if you want to join me here, we have a lot of questions already. And, I mean, I've done a lot of these webinars, and usually it's like the questions start coming in right now, and I'm already like, I think we're already over-allocated in terms of our time here to just answer the ones we do have. But please keep submitting questions, Zack. If you can help me filter through these a little bit, that would be really helpful. I haven't even looked at a lot of these yet, so.

Zack Jones: Yeah, I think that maybe a good one to start, I think it's an attendee's first question here: Why is it taking so long for specifically self-sovereign identity to gain adoption? So maybe we'll answer that one live. There's kind of a follow-up to it that clarifies that it's about self-sovereign identity, so I don't know if you want to—

Riley Hughes: Oh yeah, yeah, I see that. Yeah, so why is it taking so long for self-sovereign identity to get adoption? That's a great question, and I think, yeah, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, asking this question. You know, Trinsic's background is as a self-sovereign identity platform, so of course spent a lot of time thinking about this during those years. And my quick answer is that, I don't know, maybe this is a cop-out answer, but I think there's just a product-market fit gap, right? Like, businesses have— Needs, problems, right, that they're willing to pay for solutions to those problems. And currently, objectively speaking, businesses are choosing to pay centralized or federated or whatever you want to call it, right, companies for solutions to those problems. So, in other words, self-sovereign identity has not solved a problem, like a problem that is clear enough for businesses to pay for yet, on mass, right? And I think the main gap there is, like, there's obviously a chicken-and-egg problem.

Riley Hughes: So, in a world where everybody, all the consumers have a self-sovereign identity wallet with something useful in it, of course businesses are going to be like, Great, let's sign up to accept it. But before businesses are signing up to accept it, why would anyone sign up to issue those credentials, but also getting the consumer wallet involved? So I think the typical model you think of with self-sovereign identity, where there are issuers, verifiers, and holders, holders download a mobile wallet, they can accept any arbitrary data from issuers and present that to any arbitrary verifier using a standard. I mean, that model, I'm not betting on taking place in the next little while, because there's just a—it's too maybe decentralized and doesn't solve a specific enough problem. So I could, you know, go on there, but I hope that that is helpful. Thanks for the question.

Zack Jones: Great. So maybe we—there's a couple other great questions in here. What are major—let me, we'll toggle this one on to answer. What are major digital ID adoption drivers in different regions, and what are the differences from region to region?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, good question. So, yeah, I mean, when you go to, when you, you know, that slide that we had that breaks out digital ID into its component parts, if you zoom into each of those component parts, there will be a different set of adoption drivers for each. So, for example, private sector reusable identities, in my view, are driven by, you know, the sort of competitive market dynamic that exists where, you know, companies want to continue to build better products that serve their customers better. And, for example, with like, if you look at like Plaid, for example, Plaid is, Plaid has an identity verification product, and they have added a feature, a reusable identity feature into their product to make it better, right, to make it more competitive in the marketplace so they can sell more of their primary offering, right, and streamline that user experience. If you look at eIDs, generally those are driven by regulation. So, for example, mobile driver's licenses in the U.S.

Riley Hughes: usually are preceded by legislative action on behalf of the, you know, the constituents in the state legislatures that then cascade into mobile driver's licenses in the subsequent years. So, once those mobile driver's licenses are out, you know, there are different drivers that cause those to be more or less adopted, things like age verification and, you know, regulation and, frankly, just use cases, places to use them, I think. So, yeah, we'll zoom into each one and we can speak to each one individually, but those are a few ideas of some of the drivers in each region. And then in terms of the differences from region to region, I'm not sure I have any useful answer there other than the drivers are different in each region, right? The regulations are different in each region, the laws are different in each region, and so that will result in just different form factors of a solution. But yeah, hope that that helps.

Zack Jones: Yeah, one thing I'll mention as well is that we will be doing, releasing a podcast episode in the next month or so with one about one of the U.S. state mobile driver's license implementations, and a lot of that conversation will center around the adoption drivers. So I'll put in a link here just to— our podcast page in case you're not subscribed, because we'll have some more content about, like, specific projects. And we actually already have a decent amount of content about what is driving adoption of, you know, reusable identity. I'm sure you could think of a few episodes right off the top of your head, Riley, that are pretty—you know, we talked with ID.me, and there's a number of other ones that are probably relevant to this topic as well. Okay, so let's close that one. Another question: are there payment use cases in companies working in those leveraging SSI, or maybe digital ID broadly?

Zack Jones: So maybe this is a good opportunity just to talk about the kind of the intersection of kind of financial services and digital ID, and kind of companies that maybe, you know, are using that intersection there.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, so payments use cases, there's—I mean, there's a lot of use cases. You know, if you zoom into that specific category, there's a lot to say there, right? There's, like, origination of payment methods, like account creation, card issuance, you know, and other types of payment use cases, right? Onboarding requiring identity verification. There are also sort of on the other end— For example, payouts requiring identity verification, real-time payment authentication, especially for card-not-present or any other kind of risky transactions, right? There are often identity verification use cases there to explore. So I think, yeah, I think when you—payments and identity are very, very related. And I think over time, we'll see those two things coming together a little more directly, right? I mean, the closest they're coming together right now is what Apple, I think, is trying to do in the Apple Wallet, where you can both pay for something and prove your age or identity in one single Apple Wallet transaction. That's like a holy grail.

Riley Hughes: You see, like, the banks coming together through EWS in the U.S. doing Paze as an app as well, which, you know, is trying to tackle that. There are one-click checkout companies that are fundamentally just an identity network where the use case is faster payments, but the core of their technology is an identity wallet. And, you know, similarly in other geographies where, you know, you'll have like a super app or other app-based payments where the app is fundamentally an identity app, and there's authentication and verification steps to establish those. So I think they're very similar, and I think the use cases there—I mean, payments is one of the most frequently done things, right? Like, you don't onboard to a job marketplace every day, but you probably pay for something every day. So I think that because of the high frequency and the risk of fraud, I mean, it's a super ripe place to be looking for. Use cases. I need to answer these questions faster, don't I, Zack?

Zack Jones: They're pretty—there's a bunch of them here. So I think let's go to this one. As a private sector company, how could reID, reusable ID, contribute to digital ID adoption? And eID should have a big impact because the government leads. So maybe this is a good opportunity, Riley, to talk about both, you know, issuance of reusable IDs and how companies are involved that way, and also the consumption of existing reusable IDs and eIDs.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, honestly, you're exactly right that eIDs are going to have a big impact because the government's driving it, and generally the government is like the source of truth for identity information in a lot of modern economies. But when you look at incentives, private sector, the profit incentive is very motivating, right? And as a private sector company, if a government-issued digital IDs represent a threat or significant change at least to your business, obviously you're going to be incentivized to figure out how to keep that, you know, keep your business and innovate yourself, right, as opposed to waiting to be disrupted. So reusable IDs are doing that in the private sector, especially in the identity verification space. And creating reusable IDs off the back of an existing verification flow is so easy. Like, it's gotten to the point, at least with the Trinsic solution to this problem, it's so easy, so fast, such a good user experience to create a reusable identity and then subsequently, you know— Reuse it.

Riley Hughes: That, I think that that is why, especially in the U.S., private sector is leading out in reusable digital identity adoption, right? Because there's an incentive to step in where, you know, governments are sometimes slow or overly engineered or whatever the case may be. So I am really bullish, actually, on private sector reusable ID adoption, and it's why, as Trinsic, we work with many, many, you know, identity verification companies in consuming and accepting their IDs as well.

Zack Jones: Yeah. All right. We've got time for maybe one or two more, but this next one is kind of a double about the legal landscape, so... I'll kind of toggle both of these on. Both good questions about the legal and contractual complexity of supporting different identity schemes, and then also the legal landscape around, you know, potentially who's liable for fraudulent IDs and how that—

Riley Hughes: So these are two questions that could be an entire other webinar.

Zack Jones: I know, I was going to say, Zack, you got to pick easier questions for me to answer. Yeah, this is a good way to close it out.

Riley Hughes: All right, yeah. So, yeah, the legal and contractual complexity of supporting these identity schemes. Yeah, so it's useful maybe to think about the way that the world works today. If you go out and contract with an identity verification company to perform KYC on your users who are onboarding, for example, right, that KYC company is going to do their best, according to how you configure them, to verify that user and whatever. But ultimately, what you are doing there is you have a customer coming to you, and you need to know something. You need to gather some information about them, so you use this third-party vendor to gather information and give that information to you, right? But ultimately, that third-party identity verification company is not liable for guaranteeing that that user is, like, definitely not fraudulent or something, right? Like, their job is to give you information so you can make a risk decision on that user. Not that they are liable per se. So reusable ID works the same way, right?

Riley Hughes: Like when we deliver a mobile driver's license through the Trinsic platform to your verification flow, you know, Trinsic is not guaranteeing that the person behind that mobile driver's license is legit, right? We're not guaranteeing that the DMV did a good job of vetting that user necessarily. All we're doing is we're conveying the sort of level of trust that you have with the DMV, and we're sort of guaranteeing maybe the provenance, right, of that information. And in an mDL sense, it is cryptographic verification of that license, right? In another case with a private sector company, if it's like Yoti, for example, and we're delivering a Yoti reusable ID, we are guaranteeing the sort of provenance that that actually came from Yoti, that it wasn't tampered with in the middle there. And as a business, you need to decide, like, do you trust the DMV's onboarding process? Do you trust Yoti's verification process? And those are data points that you use in your own risk decision.

Riley Hughes: So if there's a fraudulent reusable identity that your business consumes and uses, you should think of it as like, who's responsible for that? It's the same thing as if you use a from-scratch verification, right, with a doc scan and a selfie. If that user is fraudulent, who's liable for that? Well, I mean, the business is, right? Because ultimately you made the decision to accept that user. You were able to toggle that doc scanning provider with a bunch of different toggles of like, are you okay with, you know, this or that? Do you want it to be higher friction or lower friction? Do you want to make it easier to accept or harder to accept? How many manual reviews do you want to be doing, right? Like there's all these different toggles that you get to specify for your own risk appetite. So that's what I would say on the liability side. And then on the legal side, there's just so much to dive into there, including, like, the regulatory landscape.

Riley Hughes: But in general, what I would say is that reusable or digital identities are new enough that nothing is just obvious and clear with lots of easy precedents, right? The vast majority of this stuff is nuanced and complicated, and the way to deal with this today, in general, is that a digital ID is an input into your KYC process or into your verification process, but is unlikely to be a complete whole cloth, like, oh, they were KYC'd once, now they can use it everywhere, right? Like, that's just too simplistic a worldview. In reality, it's more of an input into a total process than it is a process in and of itself. What do you think, Zack? Did I do all right answering that?

Zack Jones: You did all right. Yeah, like I said, we could even, yeah, this is a great potential topic for future webinars. I think we have an idea that we'll do even next webinar will be a deeper dive into mDLs, I think is kind of what we have planned, and that'll be kind of penciled in for about a month from now, early September. But then afterwards, I think, you know, the legal complexities and everything could be a very interesting topic. So, you know, with that, we're at the top of the hour here. We don't want to keep people too long. Is there anything else you want to close with, Riley?

Riley Hughes: I just want to close with, I guess just, you know, conceptually... Yeah, there's a lot happening. It's confusing. It's complicated. But, and adoption is not ubiquitous by any stretch of the imagination in the vast majority of geographies. But that's what we've built Trinsic around, right? Like, that's what we are building with in mind, right? We're building, like, so for example, you can adopt Trinsic today in the United States, despite the fact that it's like, you know, only 2% of Americans have an mDL, right? But you can still take advantage of mDLs. You know, you don't need to wait until they're at 100% adoption or 80% adoption or something. So what I would say is, you know, if you're interested in exploring further, again, it doesn't hurt to hop on with our team and see if we, you know, again, zoom into like some of the key geographies, zoom into your numbers, your onboarding numbers or whatever, see what expected, you know, return you could get on starting to accept users' pre-existing IDs. Yeah, I think that's it. I'm glad that everyone came.

Riley Hughes: Appreciate you listening and all the good questions. And don't hesitate to get in touch with me or our team generally and, yeah, give us feedback, like I mentioned in the beginning.

Zack Jones: Yeah, you'll get an email probably tomorrow with the recording here, as long as you're registered, which I assume you have to be if you're here. And you can always respond to that email. You can send us a note. There's plenty of ways to contact us on the website if you'd like a specific adoption report. And then, you know, we hope to see you in the next webinar. So thanks, everybody. Appreciate it.

Riley Hughes: Thanks, everybody.