Mobile Identity: enabling the digital world

‘Mobile identity’ refers to the mobile technologies, devices and networks used to facilitate digital identity services. With over 5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide in 2019, cellular networks have the ubiquity needed to underpin identity services which can scale across borders – and operators have a unique set of tools to help create the trust needed to grow the digital economy. The ‘mobile identity toolkit’ is already enabling services from risk scoring to national identity schemes used by nearly 1 billion monthly active users globally. This report sets out the capabilities operators have in this area, some of the more important use cases to which those capabilities can be put, and some of the key issues to bear in mind while doing so.

For identity systems to help build trust between enterprise and their customers, they must themselves gain the trust of subscribers – only then will they be able to acquire the user data needed and sell products derived from it. We therefore look in detail at three factors essential for trust: security-by-design, transparent trust endorsements, and user privacy and control. To convert that trust into commercially viable propositions, however, identity solutions must be capable of scale – so we examine too three elements crucial for scale: interoperability and federation, partnerships and collaboration, and compelling business value.