Wayne Chang, the Founder and CEO of SpruceID, shares more about their approach to user-controlled data, mobile driver licenses, and financial integration.
At our core, SpruceID is a company building a future where users own their identity and data across all digital interactions. Our company's credentialing infrastructure is standards-compliant, production-ready, and extensible to enterprise and government IT systems. It’s built on open-source software to provide transparency and collaboration.
At SpruceID, we aim to let users control their identity and data across digital interactions. As a technologist, I could see inefficiencies in how people’s personal information is managed and felt strongly that individuals should have more control over their data without navigating through red tape. This vision became the foundation for the company’s thesis — shifting from people logging into platforms to platforms accessing data from a person’s personal ‘data vault’ on their terms.
Physical driver's licenses were created long before the advent of the Internet. Having a mobile driver's license and other digital credentials is critical to transitioning our existing government bureaucracy into the 21st century. Already 37 countries and 12 states have mDLs. An mDL provides benefits to users and governments by creating a seamless experience for both in-person and online identity verifications. They offer enhanced privacy and security features while reducing fraud and easing the burden on DMV administrators, but we think that this is only one example of a digital credential ecosystem that can create convenient and private user experiences for anything from professional certifications to educational credentials.
One of our industry’s bottlenecks is the need to bridge the gap between the recognised value of user-controlled identity and the global standardisation required to support practical implementation with larger institutions, especially in sectors like financial institutions. This year, the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) within NIST is hosting a project to bring together technology vendors (including SpruceID), government agencies, regulators, standards bodies, and other private sector institutions to develop a reference implementation for further adoption of mobile driver’s licenses. The first use case for this initiative is demonstrating how mobile driver’s licenses can be used for Know Your Customer (KYC) programs for financial institutions. We believe this effort will help to guide and encourage the adoption of user-controlled identity across both the public and private sectors.
Digital identity solutions offer significant benefits for financial institutions. Traditional identity verification methods rely on webcam selfies and pictures of plastic ID cards, both of which can be susceptible to AI impersonation with recent advancements in AI model sophistication. Mobile driver’s licenses and other digital credentials can provide quicker, more secure ways for users to verify their identity for compliance purposes and account creation. They can also be used for re-verification to help prevent account takeover fraud or unauthorised access to a user’s accounts from phishing attacks. These solutions also offer better data governance, allowing banks to comply more easily with stringent and ever-changing regulatory requirements.
The panels I participated in at European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) featured several key themes crucial for financial institutions and banks. First was building trust in AI through decentralised identity, where we emphasised the importance of secure and trustworthy AI systems.
Integrating digital identity into digital wallets was another focus, highlighting the need for seamless and secure digital transactions. In support of that, we discussed practical applications of decentralised identity in production, showcasing real-world examples of how this technology can enhance security and efficiency.
For consumers, digital identity provides individuals with greater control over their personal data, enhancing privacy and security. For banks, this means improved customer trust and satisfaction. Digital identity solutions streamline the management of digital identities and credentials, making it more convenient and secure for customers to access financial services.
Realising our long-term goal—letting users control their data across the web—requires major buy-in from institutions, including governments, banks, and social media platforms. However, with the escalating severity of identity vulnerability instances—whether it’s unemployment insurance fraud or deepfakes—people are starting to take these issues more seriously and welcome solutions.
In the near term, we are focused on defining reasonable disclosure and trust frameworks for digital credentials across various use cases. These initiatives aim to integrate both policy and technical aspects, promoting a sense of privacy in data-sharing interactions — for instance, disclosing age without revealing specific personal details like address.
About Wayne Chang
Wayne Chang is the CEO of SpruceID, a technology company with the mission to let users control their identity and data across all their digital interactions. SpruceID provides open-source credentialing infrastructure that is standards-compliant and extensible into typical enterprise and government IT systems and plays an important role in the development of the California DMV’s mobile driver’s license system that aligns with NIST, ISO, and W3C standards. SpruceID ensures digital identity credentials can be used across wallets and are interoperable across state, federal, and private sectors with use cases including finance, cross-border, healthcare, and more. Wayne has an engineering background and has participated directly in technical standards development as both a contributor and chair.
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