Digital identity dilemmas – and how governments are working to overcome them
If done right, digital credentials can provide the convenience and user experience citizens crave. At the Global Government Digital Summit, public service leaders shared their approaches to digital ID
Citizens will only adopt digital ID systems if they are “human-centred, focusing on solving people’s problems,” said Miquel Estapé, chief executive of Open Government of Catalonia. This sounds obvious – but as Estapé recalled, “I’ve been involved in several projects in the area of self-sovereign digital identity where the focus was on blockchain technology and not on solving real-world problems”. Too often, the civil servants promoting digital ID programmes bring a technological solution to what is actually a human behavioural challenge – creating a neat service that fails to attract either service providers or users.
So what are citizens really looking for in a digital ID service? “They seek convenience and user experience. Trust is extremely important: they don’t care about the specific security measures we’re implementing, but they must trust us. And finally, citizens hate wasting time with government,” Estapé told his audience: 58 top digital leaders from 24 nations and international organisations, gathered at the 2024 Digital Summit in Ottawa for informal discussions on the challenges they face in common.
Citizens join Catalonia’s digital ID system when it’s the simplest way to access a public service, Estapé explained – so the sign-up process has been made “very straightforward, very convenient”. To build trust, the platform provides a complete picture of exactly which public bodies are accessing their data, and for what purpose. To save people time, it connects more than 1,000 public bodies through a “digital credential hub” – enabling users to approve the exchange of data across the public sector. And to strengthen the system’s utility to citizens, it allows them to hold verified documents such as driving licenses and diplomas in digital wallets.
However, as Estapé acknowledged, there is no common standard for the digital wallets provided by different public bodies; and, crucially, Catalonia’s digital ID system cannot be used in interactions with private businesses. “In theory, there’s a clear synergy between the sectors,” he commented. “The private sector has the killer apps, like e-commerce, banking and social networks, which are used by citizens every day,” while government holds authoritative ID markers such as the national ID system.
Yet there is no crossover – meaning that the public only use the public ID system relatively rarely, and it remains an unfamiliar tool. “We have three million users of one of our e-ID systems, and whenever they have to do a new interaction with government, 50% of them forget they already have an account and ask for a new e-ID,” said Estapé. “We really need an e-ID that’s used on a daily basis – and to do that, we need it to work with private sector services.”
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Public-private disconnect: Singapore solves the problem
Singapore offers a powerful example here, showing how promoting adoption of a digital ID system among both public and private bodies can dramatically boost its utility to citizens – and, thus, its adoption across the population. The city-state first required all its public agencies to adopt the SingPass system, explained Eng Pheng Tan, assistant chief executive for Economic and National Development Clusters at Singapore’s digital agency GovTech. This generated “good anchor usage, driving adoption among citizens – and that’s what government can catalyse”.
The government then “went to the insurers, the banks, and they were willing to adopt it – so over time, we grew usage,” he recalled. “Today, we have 90% of citizens and permanent residents using SingPass. And in the last few years, we’ve found that the value can go beyond authentication”.
The system now handles automated exchange of information between public and private organisations, allowing – for example – citizens to grant banks access to aspects of their personal data held and verified by public agencies. “We found that this has tremendous value – especially for financial services’ tightly-controlled and regulated ‘know your customer’ processes,” Eng Pheng Tan continued. “By doing this, the KYC process is simplified tremendously, and the processing time is much reduced. This provides value both for operators in the public and private spaces, and also to citizens.”
The EU’s eIDAS – citizens keep control of their data
The European Union understands the need for digital ID systems to offer applications throughout people’s daily lives, said Konstantinos Kapsouropoulos, an EU digital and research counsellor attached to the EU Delegation to Canada. The EU’s decade-old eIDAS system is being updated “to give more opportunities to use digital credentials or digital identity in the private sector,” he commented. “We are revising the technical specifications that will allow the digital identity wallet to be recognised across the EU member states”.
Kapsouropoulos said eIDAS builds people’s trust “by ensuring that citizens keep control over their data”. The new version also prioritises “data minimisation”, meaning that “any digital service should collect only the absolute minimum of data required to provide the service”.
This is an important principle for the EU, he added, suggesting that the wallet may allow people to interact with private services without losing control of their personal data: “We want to use identity wallets when citizens connect to very large online platforms,” he said. “There you see the coherence of EU action in relation to the Digital Services Act and all the governance tools that we have used in order to avoid big tech and online platforms having control of data.”
The development of eIDAS, said Estapé, is “a great opportunity for us, because it solves all the challenges that I mentioned – at least in theory!” Defining a standardised wallet, carefully protecting citizens’ data, and promoting interoperability – both across the EU, and within both the public and private sectors – the update “opens up the possibility of seamless, secure, cross-border services that can transform the citizen experience,” he said. Estapé also argued that the revised eIDAS may allow the public sector to offer personalised services, as the private sector has been doing for years – but he did add a note of caution, pointing out that “most of the standards are still pending and not defined. It will probably take years”.
Finalising the new eIDAS is certainly a complicated undertaking, commented Wolfgang Ebner, director general for digitalisation and e-government at Austria’s Federal Chancellery. “We are talking about 480 million people, with reciprocal acceptance across the European Union,” he said. “It’s quite a tough process, to be honest. At the moment, we are discussing 43 documents.” Small wonder: the EU is trying to develop a system that will win the support and adoption of both public bodies across the continent – from local councils to national governments – and also major private industries such as banking, e-commerce and social media.
For Ebner, though, the revised eIDAS’s new capabilities will be worth it: “This is one of our major priorities for the next few years: to bring our ID Austria more into the private field,” he said. “We are in deep discussions with the banks and a long list of other businesses.” ID Austria already offers an identity card platform, Ebner explained, along with digital driving and vehicle licenses. There’s also an e-signature system so robust that it can be used to buy and sell properties, and a business service portal providing access to services from a wide range of departments.
Benefits to departments – from reducing fraud to smoothing HR processes
As well as meeting the needs of both private businesses and citizens, digital leaders have another crucial audience, pointed out Christine Bellamy of the UK’s Government Digital Service. “The countries that have done best here have written really good business cases which show massive benefits to the departments themselves,” she said. For example, “these services really reduce fraud and duplication in government: that’s a benefit to the user, but a huge benefit to the organisation”.
There are many such benefits, said Michael Wernick, former clerk to the Privy Council of Canada – covering internal operations as well as public services. “Has anybody had success applying these approaches to internal mobility within their own workforces?” he asked. “People are constantly asked to re-prove their pension number, their pay number, their security clearance, their language testing. A digital wallet could take out some of this friction.”
The Canadian Digital Service is on the case, replied its chief executive Paul Wagner. “We’re developing platforms for single sign-in for Canadians and for the issuance and verification of digital credentials. I attended a workshop to ask how we could leverage these platforms internally for exactly this purpose,” he said. “As an example, I’ve had to show my university degree at least five times over my career to the same employer; I should only have to show it once, have it verified and that’s it. Stay tuned, and you’ll see some movement in this space.”
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International standards and shared good practice
Bellamy went on to stress there are opportunities for countries to think about how they develop compatibility between digital documents – for example giving people the ability to easily verify their identity when travelling to different places. In a discussion held the previous day at public sector innovation conference AccelerateGov, she said, “we talked a lot about interoperability and how we can think about joining up so that we’re doing this on the worldwide stage. Building to international standards and shared good practice will mean the digital documents and credentials have utility in more places – and ultimately unlock greater value for users”.
International collaboration could also help countries save money in developing their approach to digital identity: “We talked about the value of sharing what we’ve done, whether that be our patents are open, our research, the code we’ve written,” said Bellamy, suggesting that such partnership working “could speed up this transformation, rather than many, many years in the making.”
The digital leaders in that discussion had “agreed to meet as a team,” she added. “Watch this space”.
Canada’s Wagner was certainly interested in the opportunities in making digital IDs compatible internationally: “I’ve had some great conversations with colleagues in the EU on the use cases around trade and for students,” he said. “We’re looking at the standards that we need to establish with the EU and other countries to enable the free flow of those credentials.”
The EU’s Kapsouropoulos was in a similar place: “We are open to international cooperation,” he said. “We want to compare notes on use cases with, for example, Canada, and to see how in the future we could pave the way for mutual recognition.”
Estapé had emphasised the need to make digital documents genuinely useful to citizens in their daily lives; Bellamy had pointed out the importance of explaining to departments the potential to save money and improve services. And here too, digital leaders must focus on exploring and highlighting the practical value for public bodies, private businesses and citizens of making digital documents globally portable.
“This is a room full of technical people. We started by talking about sign-in, then about digital wallets,” said Bellamy. “But fundamentally, what we’re hearing from our colleagues in Catalonia and Austria is that this is about mobility; about people’s lives. When we talk about how we’re going to use it across countries, we need to get better at telling that story.”
The invitation-only Global Government Digital Summit is a private event, providing a safe space at which civil servants with senior digital, data and AI roles in government can discuss and debate the challenges they face in common. GGF produces these reports to share some of their thinking with our readers – checking before publication that participants are content to be quoted.
Our four reports cover the four daytime sessions. This article summarises the third session. The first covered how to make AI ubiquitous across government and the second looked at how governments are shifting from a cloud-first to cloud-smart strategy. The final report – on data sharing – will be published soon.
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About Matt Ross
Matt is Global Government Forum's Contributing Editor, providing direction and support on topics, products and audience interests across GGF’s editorial, events and research operations. He has been a journalist and editor since 1995, beginning in motoring and travel journalism – and combining the two in a 30-month, 30-country 4x4 expedition funded by magazine photo-journalism. Between 2002 and 2008 he was Features Editor of Haymarket news magazine Regeneration & Renewal, covering urban regeneration, economic growth and community development; and from 2008 to 2014 he was the Editor of UK magazine and website Civil Service World, then Editorial Director for Public Sector – both at political publishing house Dods. He has also worked as Director of Communications at think tank the Institute for Government.
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