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Up to one million expected to join government identity assurance scheme by April 2016


Between 770,000 and one million users are projected to sign up to the UK government's 'Verify' identity assurance scheme by April 2016. 

Verify enables third-party verification of users of online government services. The scheme is aimed at streamlining the identity verification process for both government bodies and the public.

In a blog post about the scheme, the government said that more than 300,000 identities have been verified to date.

Eleven government services are now actively using the Verify service under public or private beta projects, the government said.

The government has five ID assurance providers as part of its 'Verify' initiative, it announced in March. Barclays, GB Group, Morpho, PayPal and Royal Mail will help authenticate the identity of individuals looking to engage with a range of online government services. The Post Office, Experian, Digidentity and Verizon are also suppliers of ID assurance services under the Verify regime.

An initiative with similar aims for UK financial services is in the development stage. The Savings and Investments Policy project (TSIP), a coalition of 50 entities from across the financial services industry established by the Tax Incentivised Savings Association (TISA), is in the process of developing a new digital ID service for consumers of UK financial services.

The digital ID is "a secure store of validated client information, with that information being used to support the identification of the client", David Dalton-Brown, director general of TISA has said.

Financial services and technology law expert John Salmon of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, a member of TSIP's executive committee, said in March that it would be in consumers' interest for the Verify scheme and the financial services digital ID initiative to "follow along the same track" as one another.

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