Editorial

Digital Identity: Global Roundup

Digital identity news from around the world

Posted 14 March 2022 by Christine Horton


Nigeria

There are contradicting view on the effectiveness of Nigeria’s digital identity sector.

On the one hand, the country’s shift towards digital identities has been estimated as capable of contributing seven percent in GDP to the economy by 2030.

A new report, titled: ‘Digital ID in Nigeria: State of the Industry,’ was co-sponsored by digital identity technology firm, VerifyMe Nigeria, and global consulting firm, Dalberg Advisors, with special focus on the nation’s digital identity and eKYC sector. Contributors to the report included Director General, National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Aliyu Abubakar Aziz, digital identity companies in Nigeria and ancillary stakeholders within the industry.

The report said that the digital economy contributed about 18 percent of GDP in the second quarter of 2021.

It observed that the contribution follows the government’s drive to promote a digital transformation agenda aimed at facilitating social and financial inclusion, economic development and transaction transparency in Africa’s largest economy.

However, the World Bank has described the overall implementation progress of the Nigeria Digital Identification for Development (ID4D) project as unsatisfactory. It said the country had only increased the number of issued National Identification Number (NIN) by 34 million in the last two years. According to the ‘Implementation Status Report’ of the project released by the bank from the baseline of 36.9 million in October 2019, the country has so far issued a total of 71 million NIN as of March 3, 2022.

The project’s target is for the country to have issued 148 million NIN by June 2024. To achieve the target, it means the country would have to issue an additional 77 million NIN in the next two years. The slow growth of the NIN database was despite the mandatory registration and SIM linkage exercise imposed on all telecoms subscribers since December 2020.

Global

A World Economic Forum (WEF) think-tank has produced a 46-page report explaining its plans for a worldwide unifying digital data management policy.

The WEF’s report defines digital ID as “an electronic ID (…) equivalent to an individual’s identity card, which is a way to provide verified information about a person to a program for processing.” The ID can be used in both offline and online environments.

The report, Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries, written by members of the Task Force on Data Intermediaries at the WEF, describes how the initiative would centralize data about social media, taxes, voting, food traceability, healthcare, telecommunications, and commercial and personal business transactions.

Effectively, globally positioned central databases would pull together the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Bodies (IoB), and global e-commerce data, among other data points, as it relates to business and personal information.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) is planning to roll out a digital identity wallet later this year in a move that will end the need for physical ID.

NADRA is tasked with digitising all citizen data in the country, which – with more than 220 million citizens – is the fifth biggest in the world in terms of population.

As part of a digital push aimed at generating benefits including greater financial inclusion, the authority is working on an evolution of the existing ‘Pak-ID’ smartphone app – which was itself only introduced seven months ago, the authority’s chairman Tariq Malik told Pakistani media Dawn.

Australia

Remote biometric check technology from OCR Labs has been approved for the highest level of identity proofing under Australia’s Trusted Digital Identity Framework.

The Identity Proofing Level 3 (IP3) accreditation gives OCR Labs the highest strongest level of assurance available in remote digital identity verification under the Framework. IP3 requires face biometrics for user authentication.

IP3 is the same level of assurance myGovID is accredited for, and as when OCR Labs first received IP2 accreditation last year, it is the first private service provider approved.

The technology compares the user’s face biometrics against their passport, through a scan of the embedded NFC chip, and is used to perform so-called ‘death checks.’ With Australian passports issued since 2016 containing NFC chips, OCR Labs’ technology has a continually increasing potential customer base in the country.

Canada

IDENTOS has leveraged the work of Kantara Initiative’s UMA 2.0 specification as the key technology in the Ontario trusted account. The recently launched digital identity service gives patients a convenient, reliable, accessible and secure method for accessing health information and services online. In a statement, Kantara and IDENTOS said they share a commitment to putting patients in control of their personal health data.

Kantara’s UMA 2.0 supports user-centric control of data, especially important as the number of digital and online services continue to grow. IDENTOS worked with the UMA Working Group for insights and feedback to address key customer challenges and help solve long-standing data integration obstacles.

Built on IDENTOS’ Federated Privacy Exchange (FPX), the Ontario offers a single solution for identity across many jurisdictions, healthcare providers and services. The implementation can be scaled to other health regions, and offers a model which other jurisdictions can adopt and learn from.

Thailand

National Digital ID (NDID), Thailand’s national digital identity platform for financial institutions and private companies, has said that following a successful Phase 1 of “verifying natural persons it will move on to verifying legal persons” beginning in 2022 as well as verifying foreign identities, reports Business Today Chronicle, via machine translation at Biometric Update. A partnership with Mastercard’s digital identity scheme for international connectivity has also been announced by NDID.

Company Chairman Pyong Srivanich, also president of Krungthai Bank, made the announcement, saying that in 2021 more than nine million identity requests were made via NDID. The platform has more than 100 members which have 30 million users combined. It is used for private-sector services such as bank account opening and insurance, as well as government services such as electronic filing for taxes.

NDID has used regulatory sandboxes to implement interbanking processes to help standardize the service to build trust. This comes as Thailand’s digital economy grows five times faster than GDP and digital money transfer rates are soaring.

Adding verification of legal persons – against a database rather than a previously registered profile – as well as the identities of foreigners should allow the NDID service to grow and connect more services, the company says.

Americas

IT distributor Ingram Micro has expanded its go-to-market relationship with Okta throughout the Americas and sets the stage to extend the go-to-market relationships to more than 40 countries across all regions of the world in 2022, including Europe and Asia Pacific.

Ingram Micro said the deal strengthens its portfolio of cybersecurity solutions and introduces channel partners worldwide “to the growing opportunity around customer identity and access management solutions (CIAM).”