The Digital Identity Wallet: From Cape Town to Amsterdam
“A wallet is going to be an integral part of the experience of users going forward.” This was the bold announcement made by Ramesh Narayanan, CTO of MOSIP (the Modular Open Source Identity Platform), at this year’s ID4Africa Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Cape Town.
Founded in 2014, ID4Africa — which describes itself as a “Pan-African movement” — is a multi-stakeholder body that promotes and supports the development of digital identity systems on the African continent. Every year, it holds its annual meeting in a different African city. At these events, biometric and digital identity providers, UN bodies, financial institutions like the World Bank, funders such as the Gates Foundation and Co-Develop, and African ministers and government officials intermingle, make deals, and discuss the latest developments in the field. The events are, in no small part, marketing opportunities for digital identity and biometric vendors.
What was notable about this year’s ID4Africa AGM were the sheer number of presentations and marketing pitches about digital wallets and mobile- and cloud-based verifiable credentials. Narayanan, for example, introduced MOSIP’s latest project: the Inji wallet. We learned about the Thai Health Pass (a mobile wallet used for travel and entry into Thailand) and heard from representatives of Mauritius and Bhutan, both of which are rolling out a national digital ID wallet. This “wallet turn” can be at least partly attributed to the launch of the EUDI wallet (the European Union’s new digital wallet), whose influence and impact have been evident across many industry spaces and conferences of late.
On several occasions in Cape Town, digital wallets were touted as a way to “future proof” national identity systems. The future, however, is notoriously unpredictable.
Which raises a number of questions: In a continent dominated by centralized registries for civil registration and national identification, where smartphone penetration and digital connectivity are often spotty, will digital wallets and verified credentials take off? Or are wallets simply part of the latest hype cycle in the sector? And if and when they are adopted, will wallets be confined to a very specific and limited set of use cases, such as e-KYC or international travel–services designed mostly for the relatively privileged?
While on stage moderating one of the plenaries on digital wallets, Joseph Atick — who often appears like the one-man show behind ID4Africa — suggested that wallets and verified credentials could serve as an “additive” that would complement identification systems without disrupting existing ecosystems, thus offering citizens more options. In response to Atick, one panelist described wallets as a way of producing a “digital twin” of a physical ID card, which would supplement (but not replace) traditional IDs.
Perhaps this is the future: the growing use of digital wallets as an additional layer on top of existing national ID systems. But this, in turn, leads to other questions: Who are the intended users of digital wallets? And who are wallets really designed for?
In Europe, we are already seeing a clear differentiation emerge. When, in 2021, the European Commission proposed the creation of the EUDI wallet — a mobile app that will store identification documents such as driver licenses; education credentials; health cards and prescriptions; and travel documents — it clearly had “digitally literate” European citizens in mind as potential users. The underlying ethos behind the EUDI is its promise to “give back control” to individuals, enabling them to manage their personal data and identity through their mobile phone. The EUDI wallet is currently being piloted across Europe and its exact use cases are still to be determined.
We heard a lot about the EUDI wallet at this year’s Identity Week Europe conference in Amsterdam–an annual industry event that brings together policymakers, consultants, and vendors working across Europe. But, as I learned in Amsterdam, very few of the people involved in the pilots seem to be thinking about third country nationals, beyond perhaps permanent residents of EU member countries. It is far from clear whether the EUDI wallet will be accessible to people or third parties from outside Europe or whether it will be interoperable with other national digital wallets. And it will likely be completely inaccessible to irregular migrants and asylum seekers, as well as to many citizens who either lack smartphones or simply struggle to obtain traditional forms of identity documents and credentials.
At the same time, as presentations by Frontex at Identity Week made clear, the EU also has ambitious (some might say unachievable) plans to integrate and expand its use of centralized, non-voluntary, and (in many cases) highly invasive biometric systems for third country nationals. See, for example, recent regulations that will enlarge the scope and amount of data collected in EURODAC (the European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database). Under the EU’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum, EURODAC will include biometric data on a broad array of irregular migrants and asylum seekers, including children as young as six. Civil society and human rights groups have raised alarms about this new and invasive surveillance regime.
These differential identification regimes speak to what Lydia Morris (drawing on David Lockwood) refers to as civic stratification — the systems of stratified rights for migrants and citizens across different EU member states. They also point to an emerging regime in Europe where differential political membership is reflected in and (re)constructed through different identification infrastructures.
What patterns will, in turn, emerge in Africa? Will ostensibly privacy preserving, consumer- and citizen-centric digital wallets be made available only to a select few: for example, those with high-quality smartphones and recognized citizenship or permanent residence in a relevant state? Despite an increasingly loud chorus championing digital and financial inclusion, will wallets be deployed only for select use cases, such as onboarding at banks or accessing e-visas? Such services tend to be available only to those from certain class and national backgrounds, who have clear legal status.
And is such stratification in user experience even something to be concerned about? Is it okay if digital wallets remain confined to a select (and perhaps largely elite) group of users on the continent? Or can digital identity wallets be made as accessible as Kenya’s M-Pesa financial wallet, which has been widely adopted across East Africa, partly because it can be used on feature phones? (There is, for example, talk of having users interact with wallets on the cloud through USSD text messages.) Such accessibility, however, may be neither necessary nor desirable.
These are some of the many questions and issues that we will continue to explore as part of our ongoing project. What is critical is to keep an eye on developments in the increasingly hyped digital wallet space and to remain attentive to potential exclusions. The success of projects like the EUDI wallet will depend on many things, including user uptake, private sector and relying party buy-in, and the dominance of Big Tech (namely, Apple and Google, which have popular wallets of their own). But if the EUDI (or equally influential state-led digital identity wallets) do end up taking off, where will that leave the many people who may not have access to them–from migrants to the under-documented to the digitally excluded?
