Digital Identities: The Cost of Waiting
David Birch
Originally published in the GDF Annual Report 2020
There has been a really big change in the environment around digital identity over the past year. The coronavirus catastrophe has required many individuals, companies and organizations who never had to do business online before to shift to the new normal in double-quick time. This in turn has highlighted the need for stronger online identification. We have seen a shift in the perception of digital identity from being a “nice to have” to a fundamental.
I have sat through countless meetings trying to work out business models around digital identity in my time. I have often been met with the kind of natural resistance that you expect in the corporate world. So, when someone from the Department of Whatever asks me to project the value of new revenue streams and the associated costs of delivering digital identities for the year 2033, for example, I am stuck. I can say that there will be winners and losers in the digital identity game, but being an honest sort of person I have had to admit that the magnitude of gains and losses contains guesswork.
While we may be no nearer to calculating the costs of having a digital identity infrastructure, we now have some very accurate figures for the costs of not having that infrastructure. In the UK, recent estimates from the Treasury and others indicate that losses to fraud in the disbursement of government COVID support and aid to both individuals and businesses could be in the region of £50 billion and upwards. In this country, we could have had a fully developed, privacy-enhancing, innovationenabling digital identity platform for a fraction of that cost.
Perhaps now is the time to bang a few heads together (starting with the banking industry) and start work on the digital identity framework that the Future of Finance review noted as crucial in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit and post-password world — not just for finance, but across the whole economy.
Read more from industry leaders, regulators, and policy makers in our Annual Report here.
Press date : 24.02.2020
