United Kingdom
Companies including Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest and Onfido signed up to a digital ID programme aimed at keeping customers’ digital identities safe.
The Investing and Savings Alliance’s (TISA) digital ID programme for financial services is expected to go live this summer and several of the UK’s major investment managers, retail banks, wealth managers, and financial advisers will take part.
The programme aims to develop a digital identity for consumers so they can create and reuse identities while interacting with financial institutions.
Barclays, OneSpan, Signicat and Daon, Fidelity, MoneyHub, Profile Pension, the Post Office, Yoti, Digidentity and Ardent are also involved.
The scheme will also explore how digital identities can be used across other sectors.
Jamaica
Jamaica has reached a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with financial institutions for a pilot on the identity verification and authentication services component of the national digital ID.
Biometric Update reports that the move comes amid reports that thousands of Jamaicans are yet to receive their share of the Covid-19 welfare relief funds via the COVID Allocation of Resources for Employees (CARE) because they cannot show proof of their identity.
The government said in April that about $300 million Jamaican dollars (US$1.95 million) was still uncollected by applicants, although JM$17 billion (US$111 million) had been disbursed to 500,000 beneficiaries.
Prime Minister Holness regretted that this would not have been the case if the country was further along with the implementation of the NIDS.
Pakistan
The government of Sindh is partnering with the Federal Ministry of Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety to run social support initiatives that will distribute cash transfers, scholarships, nutrition and vaccinations to poor women and children using the Benazir card.
Authorities say all women eligible for the scheme will be informed by text messages specifying where they can pick up their cash, and they will be able to do so only through biometric verification.
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The objective of the scheme is to assist the poor and less privileged by reducing their socio-economic vulnerability, said Sindh’s Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, as he also disclosed that negotiations with the World Bank for $200 million of support over the next five years were well on course.
Pakistan this week announced that it has issued one million Afghan refugees with biometric ID to access services.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Bhutan has also announced the launch of its National Digital Identity (NDI) programme, for which a biometrics capture campaign was announced last October.
Philippines
A further six million people have joined to the 60.4 million that have completed the biometrics enrolment of Step 2 registration for the national digital ID, PhilSys.
The government’s Philippine News Agency says more than 72 percent of the 92 million people targeted have registered, and more than 8 million Filipinos have received their first bank accounts. More than 11.5 million PhilID cards have been issued so far.
United Kingdom
UK-based self-sovereign digital identity and payment platform Nuggets has announced a partnership with biometric face authentication technology iProov.
Nuggets has integrated with iProov’s Genuine Presence Assurance and Liveness Assurance technology to ensure compatibility with Self-Sovereign principles and open standards, including W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs).
According to the company press release, the integration enables users to own and control their biometric template, which can then be used to authenticate transactions using iProov in a private and secure manner. Nuggets have implemented iProov’s technology in conjunction with its own NFC Passport onboarding and re-verification to enable truly trusted transactions.
United States
A postponement that requires US trademark applicants to verify their identities remains in place. There has been no explanation or a date for a new deadline.
The US Patent and Trademark Office in January, said late last year that domestic and international applicants faced an April 9, 2022, deadline to use a one-time digital identification verification service provided by ID.me or submit notarized paper-ID documents.
In March, trademark officials said, “feedback on our online digital identity verification option” prompted them to delay the deadline for mandatory verification. “A new effective date will be announced at the appropriate time with reasonable advance notice.”
