• Howard Berg , Senior Vice President at Gemalto


• 13.12.2018 12:15 pm
undisclosed

The rise of digital identities

The meshing of the physical and digital world will bring significant changes to how we think about our identities. In 2019 we’ll see a global shift towards digital identification systems, driven by banks, mobile operators, OEMs, service providers and governments. 

Digital identity is the technological link between a physical being such as a person and their multiple digital entities used for identification in the virtual world. It includes a collection of electronically captured and stored identity attributes including biographic and biometric data, and something the person has—like a smartphone—that can uniquely describe a person within a given context.

Verifying all these identity attributes creates a trusted digital ID, which could in theory be used to securely log into any online service. Trusted digital IDs will become more widely adopted in 2019 and will play a key role in enabling connected living. From providing easy access to financial services and payment authentication through to enabling online voting and better social services, digital identities will drive service innovation at scale leading to a long term vision where we have a single secure digital identity mirroring our single physical identity that we can use in all our interactions.

Biometrics will transform payments

In 2019 we’ll see the rise of IoT-driven ecommerce and biometric payments. This will require the close collaboration of retailers, IoT providers and payment providers delivering goods and services which take advantage of technologies such as machine learning, AI, drones, and blockchain, amongst others. Imagine a world where AI ensures you have goods and services based on your need and not on your ability to remember to re-order.

Turning this into reality will require a seamless payments infrastructure and easier ways to authenticate users without compromising on security. Biometrics and trusted digital IDs offer a great solution to this challenge. We have already ran successful pilot projects on biometric cards where users can authorise payments with fingerprint authentication as opposed to a PIN code.

Next year we expect to see the first commercial rollout of these biometric payment cards in the UK and Europe, followed by the mainstream adoption of this type of payments in developed markets.

In the longer-term, it seems only logical that biometrics will take over PIN code for cards and will also become commonly used in new areas such as authenticating wearables and other devices. As digital IDs and biometrics become fully embedded into the consumer purchasing journey, they will become both an identification step at the stage of check-in and an authentication step at checkout. This means that our digital identity will become our payment token, enabling a seamless purchasing experience.