What happens when identity verification becomes a single, government-issued digital credential?

Onboarding that is ten times more convenient for end users, and ten times harder to fake.

No more messing around, taking awkward photos of passports and driving licences, worrying where the data will end up.

Whether or not the new digital ID scheme that’s been in the news succeeds, the future of identity is clearly digital. The government has set a far-off deadline of 2029 to get it implemented, but digital ID is already here:

• 2 million veterans can now create their digital Veteran Card.
  
• 4 million people have eVisas.
  
• 41 million Brits use mobile banking and could theoretically use their bank account to prove who they are, just as Sweden’s BankID allows.
  
• 42 million driving licence holders will soon be able to create digital versions.
  
  

Statistically, we all have at least one thing on us that counts as “digital ID”.

The missing piece is acceptance. This is all pointless unless you can use the IDs to get stuff. The question now is whether businesses are ready to accept it.

How mandatory digital ID will change KYC and AML strategy

Today’s ID verification systems are an awkward kludge.

While there are a few high-security outliers that validate passport NFC chips, most rely on taking pictures of passports and driving licences.

The expiry date for these systems has come and gone.

They are security theatre, only giving an impression of safety.

The next generation of KYC/AML tools need to centredigital ID acceptance, and apply layered background checks to properly understand risk.

What AI-driven fraud looks like today, and how to defend against it

When the Online Safety Act went live earlier this year, the web was filled with teens boasting that they’d managed to defeat the checks in various inventive ways.

That was just to get onto porn websites. Imagine if there was real money at stake.

AI models and agents make it easy for someone determined to make convincing-looking fake documents, fool biometrics or even lay plausible traces of a completely made-up identity around the internet.

For the first time, fraudsters can also automate the whole thing and run it at high frequency.

That means sophisticated multi-million pound systems built over decades, defeated by teens in minutes.

It’s not because the people who think up these systems are stupid. It’s not because the people who break them are particularly smart. It’s certainly not because there’s a flaw in the algorithms.

At the end of the day, all today’s ID verification systems share a common vulnerability; the user and the attacker are the same person.

Relying on pictures of ID documents is only getting less secure. We need to shift away from trusting what the user uploads to things that can be verified independently.

How to balance security, inclusion, and usability in digital onboarding

There’s 11 million people in the UK who don’t have a passport or driving licence right now. If the government puts out a new digital ID scheme, calls it “mandatory” and “universal”, then there’s a real risk that those in ID poverty end up truly stuck.

We often hear people talking about security and inclusion as though it’s a trade-off. That’s legacy thinking disguised as prudence.

The truth is: normal “high-security” modes of onboarding with pictures of photo IDs are nowhere near as secure as we think.

Vouchsafe solves the problem by giving people options. We accept and recommend using digital ID where available, and if not, we fall back to other evidence.

We can afford to be liberal about what that evidence is, because either way we perform an extensive list of background checks to gauge the risk of different kinds of identity fraud. That’s where the real security comes from.

Our customers call it “layered assurance”, but it’s really just being sure.

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