Digital identity urgency
Our lives are being fundamentally reshaped by an increasing reliance on digital forms of connection. With people, organizations and internet-enabled devices all interacting with one another virtually, we urgently require solutions that enable us to establish
trust between ourselves and other people in the digital sphere, as well as carry out interactions that feel meaningful.12 The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to identify and verify the identity of individuals and organizations across a wide
range of sectors, in contexts as varied as the introduction of health-status certificates to remote onboarding for employees. This shift has also exposed the urgent need for greater international consistency, and
collaboration across borders and sectors to enable individuals and organizations to both use and share their identity data more effectively and more securely.
From the number of recent announcements relating to new legislative digital identity
initiatives made by administrations around the world (e.g. the European Digital Identity Wallet scheme), as well as proposals to regulate private sector organizations globally,
it is clear that the transformation of how we identify and verify ourselves has already begun.15 Organizations are beginning to reap
the benefits of this cultural shift; for example, in India, costs to identify a customer (Know Your Customer (KYC) costs) were reduced by 86% via the new nationally recognized approach to digital identity, Aadhaar, and
in Estonia, the time taken to register a new company in a paperless way using digital identity was reduced from 5 days to 18 minutes.16,17 As governments invest in and create new policies in this area, organizations need to understand how this will impact their future and reap the benefits. Digital identity
has the capacity to transform both how
organizations operate and how they interact with their users, and the trust and value that will be built as a result of embracing it will be critical to their success. It’s vital, then, that
organizations act now and begin to define their journey through that transformation.
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