Onfido, Deloitte, Evernym successfully trial reusable digital identity solutions

The trial has confirmed that their reusable digital identity solution has been proven with market participants. Testing began in February 2019, shortly after these companies were accepted into the UK’s FCA Regulatory Sandbox (Cohort 5) to evaluate how reusable or ‘portable’ identity can improve customer onboarding journeys and reduce compliance costs for financial institutions.  

Portable identity enables people to re-use their verified identity safely and securely across financial services and other organisations, so that they don’t need to be re-verified every time they want to access new services. End-users have control over their identity from their smartphone, being able to provision its reuse across any service they want to access.

In creating the ecosystem, the participants gained input from across the financial services industry, as well as the FCA while keeping the UK government informed of its progress. 

How the model works:

1. Credential providers can verify any relevant information about an individual or organisation and issue digitally verifiable credentials to that person;
2. People hold multiple digital credentials on their phone and accept or reject requests to share information with institutions (we call these Relying Parties);
3. Relying Parties request information from the consumer and receive digital credentials.

The participants were also encouraged by being able to hold, manage and control their own data which reduced the risk of their data being breached, since it was encrypted in distributed locations.

In terms of regulatory acceptance, updates to the UK’s Money Laundering Regulations that came into force on January 10, 2020, should allow the use of digital credentials - this will help pave the way for the next phase of this portable identity pilot, a production-ready solution for the UK market.