While the rise of ever-faster digital payment methods has accelerated the sophistication of money movement for both businesses and individuals, what has stayed the same is the need for businesses to provide their customers with the payment methods they prefer and ensuring those channels stay secure.
Digital identity innovations, whether via tokenization or through a digital wallet, aim to provide the foundational technology that will allow governments and authoritative issuers, including platforms, wallet providers and identity vendors, to create secure digital identities that can be used across various digital use cases.
We never really thought about, what does it mean to identify a person on the internet in a way that is portable and doesn’t require you to rely on a single private platform,” Mike Brock, CEO of TBD, a business from Block focused on open-source decentralized technologies, told PYMNTS.
“Through the lens of competitiveness, when you think about building a new service today you are under a lot of pressure to create an onboarding flow that allows you to sign in with Google, with Apple, with Facebook … and this means that those platforms are intermediating your customer relationships,” he added.
But as the world transitions away from physical identity documents like passports and drivers’ licenses to digital versions of these authentication hallmarks, identity is evolving from a static attribute to a dynamically digital currency that unlocks new dimensions of possibility.
Already the broader marketplace is reacting to, and embracing, the digital identity opportunity.
Samsung last month (Oct. 5) partnered with global identity technologies provider IDEMIA to bring mobile driver’s licenses and state IDs to Samsung Wallet; and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a pilot program for issuing digital green cards and potentially digital credentials for airports.