Facial Recognition - The future of payments?

Safer, faster, simpler - How a digital identity could transform our day-to-day lives

Proving your identity is a chore, whether you’re buying a bottle of wine, getting a senior fare on the bus, buying a house or opening an investment account. There can be some serious ID hoops to jump through just to get even basic admin tasks done. We dutifully get out our licenses, photocopy documents, scan our passports, and make in-person trips to banks and government agencies whenever we need to verify our identity. It’s not fun, but we’ve become resigned to it.

Good news – a better way is on the horizon. Digital identity technology is going to transform the way we prove who we are. It will save enormous amounts of time and money, make our information safer, and give us more control over our data.

A digital wallet will securely hold all your old cards

A digital wallet, stored on a mobile phone, can do exactly what your physical wallet currently does – and more. It will hold your methods of payment, driver's license, proof of address, and loyalty cards.

Here at Worldline, we already have the technology to connect a loyalty scheme to a mobile digital tap-and-go payment, and we are working on connecting proof of age to a contactless payment as well. This would allow you, for example, to pay for your groceries in the supermarket without needing to show ID to buy alcohol. That change alone would be a massive time-saver, both for customers and merchants.

Information in a digital wallet is more restricted and safer than in a physical wallet. Currently, when you show a supermarket worker your driver’s license, you expose all the information on it, including your date of birth and possibly your address. A digital ID simply answers the one question, ‘Is this person over 18?’ with a yes or a no.

Similarly, a digital ID will verify your identity without you needing to send a copy of your passport to a bank or a prospective landlord. At every stage, you control what information you share, and who you share it with.

Digital identity infrastructure is underway

Worldline is actively working to put the infrastructure in place that will allow merchants to accept digital IDs. This includes working with potential identity providers such as the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) to connect to their system to test age validation and other use cases in-store. Ultimately, there will be a range of identity wallets and providers which we want to support being used by Kiwis at every store on our network. This requires device specifications for payment terminals, and we’re currently ironing out the details on that, with a plan to launch the capability later this year. We know that terminal vendors and point-of-sale integrators see real value in digital IDs, so they are already on board. This means it will be possible for digital IDs to start being accepted from 2025.

Digital ID technology is certainly exciting, as it will make our lives easier and our data more secure – and it’s coming soon.