A new study from Juniper Research reveals that the number of users of digital ID worldwide will reach 6.5 billion by 2026, a growth of 50 per cent from this year’s 4.2 billion users. Digital ID is a digital representation of someone’s identity that promises to offer easy and secure access to a wide range of services. Accelerated by the pandemic, the trend highlights the importance of digital ID in several sectors, such as government services. The study also cautions governments to partner with verification vendors to mitigate risks.
Titled Digital Identity: Key Opportunities, Regulatory Landscape & Market Forecasts 2022-2026, the study reports that critical factors for using digital ID in government services are ease and equality of access. To ensure an inclusive digital transformation, the research recommends that governments partner with identity vendors sporting diverse datasets.
The study also states that the use of digital identity cards (with digital data embedded into the card) will grow from 2.5 billion people this year to over 4 billion in 2026. Such a digitization is a requirement for several government initiatives, allowing major digital enablement over the next five years.
As research co-author Damla Sat declared: “Identity cards have been controversial in some countries due to privacy concerns, but they are a well-established mechanism for digitising identity practices. If third-party access is governed correctly, identity cards can be at the centre of the digital identity market, but they need to be backed by robust processes.”
With ecommerce fraud so widespread, government services must not be ignored from a verification viewpoint. Compromised government-issued documents are a big risk, as they are critical to identity processes, so governments issuing digital identity documents must work with verification vendors offering different verification scenarios, otherwise, they could fail to secure this high-risk fraud avenue.