Jonas Brännvall - How BankID Became Ubiquitous in Sweden

In this episode, we speak with Jonas Branvall, Head of International Expansion at BankID Sweden, one of the most widely-adopted reusable ID systems in the world. With 99.7% of Swedish adults using BankID and over 7,500 relying parties onboard, it’s a fascinating success story in the digital identity space.

I’ve been eager to explore what drives the adoption of a universally embraced digital ID system, and Jonas provides clear answers. We discuss the pivotal role of strong use cases in driving adoption, including the two major relying party use cases that helped BankID achieve its widespread success. Jonas also shares his insights on the tipping point for adoption—approximately 40% penetration—and why that marks the transition to ubiquity for both users and relying parties.

BankID’s story offers a powerful model for anyone involved in launching mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs), EUDI wallets, private-sector reusable ID networks, or companies looking to integrate these solutions.

Join me for this insightful conversation with Jonas Branvall and learn more about BankID at https://www.bankid.com/en/.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to The Future of Identity, a show that highlights the world’s most innovative digital identity ecosystems and the people behind them. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we are the first identity acceptance network, helping businesses verify their users 10 times faster through close partnerships with dozens of digital identity wallets. Today, I spoke to Jonas Brännvall, head of international expansion at BankID Sweden. BankID Sweden is one of the most widely adopted reusable ID ecosystems on Earth, with 99.7% of adults using it daily at over 7,500 relying parties. I have been waiting for a ubiquitously adopted digital ID system to finally ask someone definitively, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Now, it’s safe to say that after this conversation, my conclusion is that strong use cases with big relying parties primarily drove adoption, and he shares the two big relying party use cases that helped propel BankID to where it is today.

Riley Hughes: I also asked him, at what level of adoption is there a tipping point where the service goes from mostly early adopters and relying parties that have a very strong need to inevitable, ubiquitous end-user and relying party adoption? And his answer of roughly 40% penetration and his explanation of why was surprising to me, but in retrospect really makes sense. BankID is clearly a great model for the rest of the world. I think that this conversation will be super relevant to anybody launching mobile driver’s licenses, EU digital identity wallets, private sector reusable ID networks, as well as companies interested in accepting these types of digital IDs. And now to my conversation with Jonas. Jonas, welcome to the podcast.

Jonas Brännvall: Thank you very much. We’re happy to be here.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I’m happy as well. I’m really excited to talk because for so long, I’ve heard so many pitches and seen so many startups in the identity space, and oftentimes BankID is worked into their pitch, right? They’ll say something like, Oh, we’ve seen how well BankID works in Sweden, and so now we’re taking this same model and applying it to… Whatever, right? Travel in Romania, or, you know, name your thing. So I even had lunch with somebody in Utah recently who had gotten their master’s degree in Sweden and came back to the United States and got a job in the digital ID space in the USA because of how well BankID worked for them. They thought, Wow, this is incredible. I need to make something like this happen in the U.S. And so they got a job at an identity company here in the States. So I’m sure your job in international expansion, the reputation precedes you, and I’m sure that you have quite a fun time doing your job then, huh?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, that’s a great intro. I mean, yes, I think from that perspective, BankID has a really great sort of brand and a strong reputation around digital identity. And as we started many, many years ago, we have been pioneers in this space. And yeah, so it’s been a long journey, over 20 years in operation. But digital identity today was not what it was 20 years ago. I’m sort of, me myself personally, is very humble. I always say it wasn’t me what we have achieved, but of course the whole team behind and the history is quite intriguing.

Riley Hughes: I agree. Well, for people who aren’t aware of BankID in Sweden and how it works, maybe you could give just a brief intro on why many consider this to be the most widely adopted digital ID scheme on Earth, or the sort of voluntary digital ID scheme on Earth maybe, right? Or why people consider it to be so sort of advanced and a model to look at for other systems.

Jonas Brännvall: Sure, I’ll try. You have to help me here. It’s a pretty big question, I guess. From the one hand, I mean, the simple thing to say, what is it? Well, it’s a digital identity that is stored on your mobile device, onto your phone. And we have had predecessors of this before, but I think when we launched this mobile digital identity back in… 2010, I mean, slightly after the smartphone came out. That’s where we sort of got this huge user adoption and really started to build this sort of, as you mentioned, the advanced ecosystem that we have today. Because, I mean, you can carry it everywhere, and we were able to build a solution that is easy to use, very secure, but still easy to use for the majority of population. And so I think simply you go online, you download the BankID app in Apple or Google Store. Once you’ve done that, you need to issue your digital identity, store it onto your phone. And the way it’s deployed in Sweden is done through banks. So you go to your bank, and they are where I’m a customer, and I get it from them. So that’s the model.

Jonas Brännvall: And once I’ve done that, it’s stored into my phone. I can use it to authenticate, to log in, and sign at over 7,000 different places in Sweden, both in public and private space. Another sort of hidden gem in this is that I can use it everywhere, and all the way from banking use cases to doing tax returns to do pick up my prescribed drugs, I can basically use it everywhere. And I think that’s also, of course, today why it’s so loved by the end users, because it’s simple to use, it’s secure, and I can use it everywhere.

Riley Hughes: That’s a really helpful intro. And I think, you know, a lot of people when they’re starting out with these systems or a system is sort of midway through adoption and it’s, you know, facing growing pains or whatever, the question is often asked, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, right? Like, which one comes first, the end user adoption or the issuers, like in your case, the bank, or the relying parties and the merchants on the other hand? And maybe it’s helpful to ask in a retrospective way, what drove adoption? Was it the chicken or the egg, right? Was it the banks issuing these things and consumers just decided to get them in advance of real use cases on the other side, or was it the relying party ecosystem that really demanded this and the banks needed to respond in kind, or I guess, could you speak to that?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, of course. Let me do a little bit history. I think there were, I see it as we have several major steps in the adoption of BankID in Sweden. So way back when we started, the big use case before sort of all banks… came along was the tax return. That was a big thing for us. And also for the Swedish government, who really wanted to have a more effective way of handling tax returns. And to get the use for adoption back then, the biggest holiday in Sweden is midsummer. It beats Christmas, it beats everything. That’s the milestone. It’s a midsummer celebration. And so they had like a campaign where they said, well, if you do your tax returns using online and then using BankID, there were other solutions as well, I should say, not only BankID, there are other solutions.

Riley Hughes: Well, that’s not a given, you know. I mean, in the U.S., there is one single reusable ID system that you need to use to file your tax returns, right? So it’s not a given that there’s multiple options. So that is saying something.

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah. So the whole thing was like, if you do your tax returns online using a digital identity to sign it, you will get your returns before midsummer, meaning money in the bank before midsummer. So I think that was a genius campaign because, you know, it used to be like a tax return before payout was like, I don’t know, six months plus, right? So they started chopping away this milestone: I will get my money before midsummer. That was one of these first milestones where user adoption started picking up. So that was key.

Riley Hughes: So what timeframe was this? Was this expedited tax return promotion after things were already widely adopted? Was it more early in the adoption of BankID, or what was the context around it at the time?

Jonas Brännvall: So this was sort of the early phase of adoption, you know, starting in like 2004 or something like this. This is where these first campaigns came out to really shorten the payout for tax returns. So that was the early days, and that gave the first adoption boost to BankID, let’s say. But as anything, and back then, this was prior to smartphones. So back then, BankID was on—you download to your computer, you stored your digital identity onto your desktop and not onto the phone. But that was still a very good way to get user adoption. It was a cool campaign from Swedish government, which was, you know, this… Getting your money at an important date that is recognized by many Swedes. And I think that the next major milestone, as I already mentioned before, is the smartphone came out. And with this, of course, all of this, the new possibilities and creating great digital services. So we were quite early there to create our own app and to move away from the desktop solution.

Jonas Brännvall: And pretty much in conjunction with that, there was a new digital service launched in Sweden called Swish, which was then a peer-to-peer payment method, essentially replacing cash. So Swedes are very digital. So today Sweden is a cashless society, essentially. I always say we’re a cashless society in terms of that no one uses cash. To remove cash sort of politically, I guess, will never happen, especially with geopolitical times that we’re in now. No one would sort of suggest that. But basically no one in Sweden uses cash today. And Swish is, of course, a big push for that because it’s a very easy peer-to-peer method that was introduced then also in the sort of early 2010s. So I think they launched 2010, maybe 10, 12, let’s say. So that was like the killer use case for us as BankID as well, in terms of, okay, also driving user adoption, but really a use case that many, many wanted to. Okay, I don’t need to use cash. I can just send you money for lunch or give my kids the weekly allowance and stuff like that. So with that, we got user adoption sort of took another jump.

Jonas Brännvall: And of course also then the transaction started. So I think those are major milestones. And at the same time, banks got into using BankID as the primary ways of logging into your digital branch, so to say, or the mobile apps or the web. But all of that sort of, I think, from end user perspective of using end user adoption perspective, these others are like switch, that’s sort of what I call a killer app or a killer application that, okay, really pushed. Then of course, I can also use this logging into my bank. That is, of course, great. So those were major milestones. And I think that looking back at these, you know, your original question was the chicken and egg problem, which I think many digital identities are facing exactly like you said. I’ve seen this in many places in the world, is that when you reach then a certain level of end user adoption, that’s where the ecosystem starts really, you know, you get this ecosystem effect where more and more services are created.

Jonas Brännvall: And that’s where we come to really a point where this takes off and totally new digital services are created because you have this opportunity of really smooth onboarding of end consumers. You can do it in a secure way and a trusted way, both from the end user perspective that I feel trust because I can use it, my digital identity to do it, and on the other hand for a digital service to onboard people. I think today when you can use BankID to access unmanned stores, you can use it for the local gym.

Riley Hughes: Well, this is actually where I wanted to go next. So this is like a perfect segue, because your point about new services being created because a digital ID system like this exists is a hypothesis and a belief that I’ve had for some time, and I’ve been looking for evidence to either prove that hypothesis or disprove it. And so maybe this is a good place to gather some of that data. You know, the idea is basically once consumers have a digital ID, That is reusable and widespread and secure. The hypothesis is that more places. like there will be more use cases for using that digital ID, which will result in essentially net new opportunities that didn’t exist before or wouldn’t be feasible to exist before, because the alternative would have been the onboarding was too cumbersome or something and the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, so to speak.

Riley Hughes: So are there use cases for BankID on the consumer side that have surprised you or things that definitely would not have been feasible with other more cumbersome methods of verification, but that because BankID is so widespread is commonplace in Sweden?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, I think for me personally, I mean, when I joined BankID myself, you know, that was the big surprise. I mean, I was a user, of course. I mean, everyone in Sweden, every adult basically in Sweden are using our service, and so was I. But entering here and they said, like, okay, we have like 4,000 different services. I was like, what? 4,000? I mean, what is that? I maybe use 20 myself. And since then that has grown into like 7,500 or something, and I mean active, not total, currently active services on our platform.

Riley Hughes: How long have you been there? So this is over what time frame?

Jonas Brännvall: The last three years, I’d say.

Riley Hughes: Wow, that’s fast growth. It’s gone from like four to like seven, and it’s like, that’s amazing.

Jonas Brännvall: And I think, I mean, I can’t single out one, but I just love the fact, like one example is that I was taking the subway here in Stockholm. We were in Stockholm, Sweden, is our head office. So I entered the subway and they had these billboards here where, and you… Wellness app, right? Like, so the ad is like, okay, you know, wellness is important, blah, blah, blah. We have a new app for it where you can get whatever the service was, but it was a wellness service. And the whole ad in the subway billboard, like huge. It has like one big button in the middle. That’s the whole ad, and it says BankID. And what that means is like, what you need to onboard to our service is BankID, right? And everyone recognized, I hit that button in the app or web, and I will use BankID to log in and I can start using the service. But to see that the billboard in the subway, that I’m not marketing genius, but someone has designed that ad for a reason, right?

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: It’s like, this will be really easy for you to onboard. That’s the whole message I’m guessing of that ad. But of course, seeing that is like, okay, so this is their advertising for a new digital service: use BankID. Like, that’s the whole ad. So that I think is pretty cool. Then there’s a lot of aspects to it, like trust and easy-to-use, trust, all of these aspects that we stand for as BankID in used for digital services. A very popular service in Sweden is like what we call like a digital mailbox. I mean, some might use— today everyone talks about wallets. You have payment wallets, you have identity wallets, you have whatever wallets. That’s why I separate this into, like, I call it digital mailbox. Essentially it means like, it’s called Kivra. It’s very, very popular in Sweden. A lot of people have it, and where I can collect all my governmental mails, tax returns, pension, social security, all of that stuff, I end up in one place. Of course, you can get that on email. I also have it here, I have it stored, I have it accessible.

Jonas Brännvall: And they have expanded it to also add, like, I can get my receipts in there for warranties and stuff, all of that stuff. It was launched way before wallets became the thing to talk about. And it’s just, again, they have solved the problem. It’s easy to use. It was a completely new digital service, and they use BankID for authenticating. I can ensure that I’m the only one accessing these very important documents. When I have them digital stored, and it’s a super cool service that still is. Also, they are also expanding into new and new and new use cases in terms of sort of keeping track of different kinds of things.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, those are good examples. What if we looked at areas where, I mean, I guess I think it is reasonable to think about common use cases for high assurance identity verification in the U.S. or Europe or things like this, where there’s healthcare, public sector, financial services, right? Things like that I’m sure are high penetration and common use cases for BankID. You mentioned this wellness app, which maybe falls outside of that, right, where a wellness app would probably not want to do a document scan, a physical ID document upload in the U.S. or in Europe. Are there other services like that that just would never think to do a strong identity proofing for a user in these other geographies, but because they can get a strong identity proofing through BankID, they are able to offer that and therefore improve trust and reduce fraud in their services in Sweden?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, no, for sure. I think if we look at our ecosystem today, as I talked about, we have 7,500 services active on the platform. So if we look at it from a transaction perspective, you know, bank and finance is the biggest, and the payment use case is, of course, the biggest because we use it for signing almost all payment transactions in Sweden, both card, online, peer-to-peer, different types of payments. So banking is by far the biggest. And then you can think about, like, public sector. That’s huge, right? But that’s only like 6%, 7%, single, high single digit of the number of transactions is in that because tax returns you do once a year, right? Social security you might do a couple of times per year. So it’s quite limited. Banking. Public is somewhere like high single digits, and then we have the rest. And we are today in 20 different industries when it comes to telcos, e-com. But a big thing for us has been lately is like in-store use cases, right? Like grocery stores has been big age verification in- in-store. This is growing, growing, and not only age for in-store.

Jonas Brännvall: It’s also for self-service type of use cases. It doesn’t have to be unmanned, so it’s more that I can do self-scanning in terms of in-store. So there’s so many aspects of things where you actually don’t need what we call strong customer authentication, right? Because that comes from banking. But it’s beneficially in banking and payments, it is super crucial and becomes more and more crucial to ensure that you are you. We have to help protect the user in terms of fraudulent behaviors and all of these things, that the rest of the services will benefit from, because we can ensure whoever is in control of the BankID is the right person. That’s what we do. We know that you are you, and when you use it, we can ensure that it’s you that are using it. So I think these, whatever 20-plus other industries that are non-regulated industries, they are not necessarily needing to have that level of high advanced electronic signature, but they can benefit from it. And of course, this goes back to, like, when you scale out an ecosystem, of course the price point is crucial, right?

Jonas Brännvall: I mean, since they are not regulated and so forth, you would compete with email and password, basically. So how do you compete with email and password, which doesn’t have a price point per se? Well, yeah, of course, it’s conversion end user for onboarding. It’s support, all these things that you compete to. So it has to have a price point that also resonates with that. And I think— We have managed to do so. But again, it’s also something for us to keep working on, and you have to always keep improving. Long answer to your question, maybe.

Riley Hughes: It’s all interesting and good stuff. At one point you mentioned how there’s a tipping point at some point, right? And there’s a certain point where you have the initial use cases, initial adoption, and then all of a sudden you reach a level of penetration where the rest of the market all falls on top of it and tries to adopt it all at the same time. And it sounds like in the last three years, you’ve virtually doubled the number of places that accept BankID. It’s probably been a doubling every few years for the last little while. So I guess if you had to put your finger in the air and guesstimate, what is the adoption rate where the whole market starts to kind of jump all over it at once? Is it 20% of users? Is it 95% of users? What would be your guesstimate?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, I would say, and this is me personally, yeah, estimating like 40%, again, of adults. Adults in my world is like 18 to like 65 or something. Yeah. We look at, you know, the adults of Sweden today, we have a penetration of 99.7%, something like this, which is extremely high, of course, and we worked extremely hard to get there. Senior citizens, 65 above, or wherever you want to do the cut, if it’s 70, it doesn’t really matter. We have like 85% or something like this. So we have like 100 years, people who are 100 years old using our service, which is like, you can’t imagine. And then we have young people, and we have people from 10-year-olds starting using BankID, something like this. It’s up to the banks. It’s not us. We are not dictating how the different banks have different sort of solutions for young people. So we start like from young age we have like 50%, and then if you come to like 17 years old, then it’s like closing into the high 90s. So I think that it starts earlier than that.

Jonas Brännvall: But again, back to that, I don’t think end-user adoption is not the only thing, but it’s like a tipping point, right, what you talked about, where the services will also create a pull of end-user adoption, at least in our case, having those services that people want to use. So Sweden had a big push for a cashless society. We have a great service in Swish, who’s our friends. We worked closely with them to create a great service for people to do peer-to-peer payments. Today, as I mentioned, they have expanded into doing other things than only peer-to-peer. They do B2C type of things today, and these services are really backbone of whole digitalization of Sweden. So when that comes, of course, okay, I have to send money to my kids. Okay, then they have to be adopted as well. So I think in our journey, we saw that. But another thing that I would want to highlight is that when we talk about the number of services here, I think what has been super crucial in this is that we have a lot of system integrators. They are the ones that do that work.

Jonas Brännvall: We are only the enablers, and we work in enabling a service. We work extremely hard in protecting our end users. We work extremely hard on user experience, inclusion, all of this stuff. The ecosystem as such, and really to get that to flourish 100% like it’s done, is the system integrators, because they are the ones—we have a lot of different system integrators, big ones, small ones, different types—but they are the ones that are out meeting companies, helping them to integrate, so a smooth journey to onboard to BankID as possible. That, I think, is another super cool thing about this, because they create other businesses around it, right? So enabling BankID, yeah, that’s great, but they help the companies to do other things, like could be like archiving or other things they need to realize their digital journeys.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: So I think those have been super, super crucial. And if you look at these 7,000 plus, they have onboarded most of them. Of course, there are companies that are very tech savvy and have developers and so forth, which can do direct integration to us. But most of these are done through an integrator, which enables this in an even easier way to companies.

Riley Hughes: I’d like to dig into more on the product side, and I have a set of questions that I want to rapid-fire go through. I’ll ask a question, and if you want to give a quick answer, then I’ll just go right to the next question, and we can get through a handful of these pretty quickly here. And then after that, I think it would be really interesting to explore why more countries haven’t succeeded at some digital ID scheme like this, and maybe if we look forward a little bit at eIDAS 2.0 and what’s going on in Europe, maybe what can they learn from BankID. To kind of jump in on the rapid-fire questions, if I grab your phone, do I have the keys to your whole life? Are there high-assurance use cases where simply possessing the phone and using my BankID is not enough?

Jonas Brännvall: No, of course. BankID, you have your own PIN code that protects you, and you are the only one that knows that PIN code. No one else knows. We don’t know it. Your bank doesn’t know it. It’s only you. So if you steal my phone, you can’t access mine. Then, of course, in our platform and our customers, the banks, they also allow Face ID to get into your BankID, which can of course be tricked into. But short answer, no, because you are the only one that has your PIN, and no one else can access that.

Riley Hughes: Great. I saw a statistic that BankID has a 0.00042% fraud rate. How is this realistic? How is this even possible to exist, such a small fraud rate number?

Jonas Brännvall: Well, I don’t know about the exact fraud rate because it depends on… But it is something that is crucial in the whole. Fighting fraud is something we work on every day. This is on top of our agenda every day. So I think the answer to that is that this is something that is the highest priority for us. And for our customers. So I think that that’s the short answer to this. Of course, we do so many different things to fight fraud, and it is a key thing in achieving these low numbers, regardless of what they exactly are. It’s collaboration. So we collaborate with banks, we collaborate with authorities, we collaborate with different organizations in society. When it comes to protecting BankID for senior citizens, which is of course a huge problem that fraudsters attack the weak point in your system, and we have protected BankID and the BankID service from attacks. Then, of course, fraudsters will go for the weakest link, which is the human. And unfortunately, that’s also attacking elderly people is where they get the most success.

Jonas Brännvall: So, short answer: we are relentless in fighting fraud, and we do it every day, and that’s why it also shows in the numbers.

Riley Hughes: So there’s maybe two elements to fraud. One is how strongly is the authentication when I use it, right? So you mentioned the face ID and PIN code and things like that. The other element is how strong is the proofing when I onboard, right? So you’ve got to do a really good job onboarding me, and then got to make sure it’s still me every time I come back. And in this world, I imagine it’s the banks that are doing the ID proofing of the user because they’re the ones that are issuing the BankID to the user. So in this world, like if I’m picturing the world in Sweden where I’m using my BankID everywhere and my bank is the one that’s authenticating me to a high degree of assurance in the first place, are banks really the only place that I, as a user, would get ID proofed or documents scanned? Maybe the government too to get identity documents, but is it really like that?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, short answer, I guess is yes. But I think you’re right. I mean, the foundation is that you have to—I always say we help with the whole lifecycle of digital identity, right? From onboarding to blocking, revoking IDs. I think that that is a crucial thing to understand. I always talk about we have a platform for the whole lifecycle of digital identity. So I think that’s the way I look at it. So we help the banks to do these things, and for this to really work throughout an ecosystem, we also set the rules to be able to ensure this. You know, everyone has to follow sort of the scheme and processes that we put in place. And again, coming back to the fraud is that they have to be updated all the time. I mean, when we started, you didn’t do onboarding with scanning ID documents, right?

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: But today we do.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: And you have to do it, and you have to use biometrics and to do the comparison and to do a remote onboarding. So those are the basic stuff, right? And then you have to continue. So for example, we have a risk engine in our platform where we risk score all transactions and these kind of things. So if we see a behavior with your device or with how it’s being used, let’s say, then that might trigger a response that you have to also now scan an ID document, or you have to in the future do more biometrics to ensure it. So yes, it is extremely crucial to do the onboarding right in a secure way, of course. But it’s also very important to maintain the life cycle of your digital identity. And of course, this is something, again, that we have processes and a scheme for it that everyone that is part of the BankID ecosystem has to follow. And those rules can’t be static. We have to update them all the time, and we do. So again, that’s how we keep track or keeping sort of a step ahead when it comes to fraud.

Riley Hughes: All right. So my next question is, does my bank know everywhere that I use my identity?

Jonas Brännvall: So in our world, you are a customer at the bank. So we enable BankID for banks’ customers. From that perspective, we are a tech provider and enabler, and then we help them to be compliant when it comes to data. We don’t sell or spread data. It’s up to the bank. They need to comply to all regulatory requirements when it comes to your personal data and the personal integrity of that data. So that is, of course, also. one of the foundations of what we do. We are not in the business of selling data or controlling consumers’ data or stuff like that. We are authentication and signature services.

Riley Hughes: So should I think of it a little like a credit card maybe, where, you know, of course my bank knows everywhere I use my credit card because they issued it to me, right? Is it a similar kind of an idea, but then of course they need to take care of that data and protect it and that sort of thing. All right. My next question is, doing my best not to get political here, which is always a danger with this kind of a question, but there are situations such as a recent podcast I heard with American crypto founders, or in Canada with truckers that were protesting during COVID, and other scenarios where debanking is something that can happen, right? So is there a risk that if I’m using a BankID in Sweden and I do a protest or do some other kind of activities like this, that I could have my BankID revoked and therefore all my access to all my online services and all of my livelihood be revoked along with it? Or are there protections or systems in place that protect people from that sort of risk?

Jonas Brännvall: I mean, if you are part in fraudulent behavior and the bank will detect that, they will block your BankID. And that, of course, you don’t have a digital identity that you can use in different services. So I would say like this: if you are a fraudster and the bank detects that, they will block your digital identity, and of course that creates a challenge.

Riley Hughes: Well, now I want to, sort of as a way to close the conversation, I want to ask, why haven’t more countries Succeeded at the level of Sweden and the level of BankID specifically, with their digital ID schemes, particularly voluntary digital ID schemes that are maybe not compulsory from the government but are services provided by the private sector. And especially as we look at eIDAS 2.0 and the EU digital identity wallets that are slated to come out over the next few years, what do you think that these geographies should learn from BankID and try to take away to improve their odds of success?

Jonas Brännvall: So I think, of course, there are multiple things here. I think, as you mentioned, in Sweden we have what we call an open model, right, from the governmental side, is that you as a private player can issue a digital identity. It can get certified by the Swedish government as a digital identity here. And I think in other European countries and in the world, that differs. So, of course, an open model allows for private players to be active, is a starting point. And when you look at BankID and BankID success, I mean, where we come from, it’s banking. I think banks can play a very active role here because you trust your bank with your money. You could also trust them with handling your digital identity.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: And, you know, I’ve been speaking to people all over the world about digital identities and everything, but we don’t trust our banks. Well, okay. I always like, well, if I trust them with my money, I should most likely also be able to trust them with my digital identity. Of course, that needs to be there, but apart from the government, I think on the governmental issued identities that I’ve seen in the world, I think they are massively underinvested. They launch something, they invest a bit of money, and it goes way too slow. I think that’s my common theme of why many governmental digital identities have failed, is they are just way underinvested. I mean, as I mentioned before, we work every day to improve our service. We will do like 150-plus updates to our service this year in terms of, of course, not all of them 150 are not big new features.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: But we constantly, constantly, constantly work on improving our service throughout. And I think that is also a major part of why we have. Of course, again, banks in Sweden came together around this, right? So today it’s one solution that is worked for all banks. But then when I’m out talking to people, they’re like, But that will never happen in our country. You know, don’t want to collaborate, they compete, and sort of getting the false impression that in Sweden, banks don’t compete. I always say, Well, that’s the wrong. Banks in Sweden are fierce competitors. It’s just that in this space, they use the same solution, which creates even more possibilities to compete, because it’s very, very easy for me to onboard to the next bank, and it’s very, very cheap to do onboarding. I mean, onboarding for a bank is normally full KYC, very expensive.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jonas Brännvall: Having a digital identity like BankID means that KYC cost is cut, like whatever. If it’s one tenth or even lower, that creates competition between banks. You know, I’m a customer in every bank in Sweden, and it’s just way, as I talked before, onboarding to the wellness app is easier than to onboard to a new bank. But compared to every other bank in the world, I would say maybe with a few exceptions, it is super easy, and the KYC here in Sweden is so smooth and cheap for banks compared to anywhere in the world. And so I think personally that it’s not the one thing. There are many things that work in our favor, but that’s a few examples that are, I would say, the key things that come to mind, in my mind at least, what has created the success of BankID and why others might have came short.

Riley Hughes: When you talk about doing 150 updates per year and governments underinvesting in the identity solution, is this not a classic scenario of private sector companies need to compete or die, and government oftentimes lacks an— incentive to provide the best service because they can’t die, they’ll always exist or whatever, right? Like, is it just a fact that perhaps private sector schemes like a BankID, which is of course enabled by the government regulations and complies with these certifications and things like that, right? So it’s not like government’s not involved at all, but is it possibly the case that just private sector schemes are destined to be superior products because of the fundamental incentives involved?

Jonas Brännvall: You said before, I’m not trying to be political. I think for me, the best service will win, right? It has to be a great service. I mean, BankID, we had all of these other components in this, but usability was poor, let’s say. BankID would not be a success. I’m 100 percent sure about that. We have invested immensely on the user experience to make it easy to use, so it’s usable for a 10-year-old and a 100-year-old and, you know, 50-year-old. And it doesn’t stop. I mean, when I came to BankID, you know, your friends are like, Oh, you start working there, but I’ll give you some tips on what to improve in the service. You know, they have great tips on, There’s no news in your app. People want to have feature-rich apps. Oh, add more and more. So a big thing of what we have done is try to embed our user experience into others, right? So we don’t want to steal away the user. It has not been our case to sort of have one app to rule them all. How can we embed a strong, secure user flow into the 7,000-plus places we are today in an easy way? And of course, it has to be like that.

Jonas Brännvall: There are tech giants who can achieve those things because of scale and having that possibility as well. But yeah, I think that’s the best service. That’s just— comes down to staying ahead in that field.

Riley Hughes: So if you were talking to European leaders of EUDI large-scale pilots or member states of the European Union who are preparing for eIDAS 2.0, would it be an accurate translation of what you’re saying then to assume that you would maybe be recommending these systems be a little more maybe open instead of one wallet driven by the government for the whole country, perhaps instituting situations where companies can compete to provide the best service and let the best user experience and service lead out in the market? Is that a fair assessment?

Jonas Brännvall: I would say yes, and I would say, like, let the end user decide. Of course, being in the position working at BankID, I promote the open model. But it’s also something that I truly believe in. And why would it be contradiction to have two wallets or several wallets, that you could still have a governmental-issued wallet because there are people who want to see that, don’t want to be part of a commercial-driven product, let’s say. But I think, again, to provide the options, I think would be the best way forward. And as I said before, I think banks are in a perfect position to do it. They are used to regulations. They are used to cyber threats. They are used to fighting fraud. They are in a good position. Looking at Sweden, we haven’t had a state digital identity issued before, but most likely we will in the future. Most likely the Swedish government will issue eIDAS or EUDI Wallet in the future, and that’s great because there’s options. There is more than one solutions in the market. I think that is great. So I think, yes, we would promote the open model.

Jonas Brännvall: I think maybe governments can create a great user experience. I don’t know, but these are quite complex things. I don’t think the end consumer will care if this is an eIDAS 2.0 certified wallet or not. The easy to use will solve my problem, and I’m protected. My data is protected. It cannot be stolen. It cannot be hacked. So those are the things.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Jonas, this has been a really great conversation. Unfortunately for me, I’ve thought of probably 10 more questions that I would love to dig into. So we may need to do this again at a future date because there’s so much here that we could be discussing. It’s a statement on how interesting of a conversation it is and how interesting of a case study BankID Sweden is for… So many other things going on around the world, including other Bank IDs in other countries, which I didn’t even get to, which would be a fascinating one. But for today’s conversation, I always like to wrap up the podcast by asking our guests to look into the future a little bit and forecast, like, what might the world look like in a few years? So I want to ask you, what does the future of identity look like to you, and why does that matter for the world?

Jonas Brännvall: There’s great potential, the wallet moving forward. I think that sort of payment wallets and identity wallets will sort of merge in the future, especially in Europe, but let’s see, of the rest of the world. And I think that identity will play an even bigger role in the future, like everywhere, not only online, but also in the physical world.

Riley Hughes: I think that that’s a great place to wrap. Really compelling vision of the future. Do you have anything to plug? If there are people who are interested in learning from BankID, or who are working on BankID-type products, or who want to consume BankID in their own service, or something like this, where should they go? And if they want to get in touch with you, where would you direct them?

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, I guess the easiest way to reach me is on LinkedIn, Jonas Brännvall on LinkedIn. BankID.com is a great place where you can find more information about BankID and the service and how you integrate demos, demo system, and if you want to download BankID and get your test version up and running on your smartphone now.

Riley Hughes: That would be great. I definitely should do that. Thanks a lot for the suggestion. Great. Well, with that, thanks a lot for coming. I think people are going to really enjoy this episode. So thanks a lot, Jonas, and we’ll wrap up there.

Jonas Brännvall: Yeah, thank you.

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