Ajay Gupta, Chief Digital Transformation Officer for the California Department of Motor Vehicles has joined the conversation and like-minded agenda of promoting digital credentials at this year’s Identity Week America to create a stronger identity ecosystem.
Ajay will present on digital public infrastructure and how it’s evolving to meet global demand.
While millions of Californians can put an MDL in their phone wallet, adoption, does hinge on the external acceptance from the ecosystem.
Ajay agrees.
We asked about his strategy for encouraging businesses and local government agencies to adopt MDL readers.
“I think the success depends on the adoption of it and not just adoption from the people who are holding the digital credential, but adoption from people who will be consuming it. The business entities, the individual, small businesses, large entities, and public sector services and service providers as well”, Gupta said.
He discussed taking a few approaches, unique to California, which include implementing an open source project to “enable an online consumption of digital credentials” via websites and creating a test credential programme.
The CDMV has also carried out two hackathons and recently an MDL showcase to create awareness in the industry and discuss what use cases can be implemented to reduce fraud, friction, and cost in the ecosystem.
Since 2023, the Californian mDL has embedded within the Apple wallet, provisioning over 100,000 users in a single day and more as they scaled for 1 million users in a single day upon launch.
Gupta continued, “when we are provisioning a new digital credential holder or a requester onto our platform since we support additional platforms like Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet, working with them we have come up with sort of a framework that we believe is privacy preserving, and yet still provides the high level of assurance that we need to be able to provision a credential that will then be used for some high value transactions like financial transactions, public sector transactions.”
The Californian Mobile driver licence pilot programme has expanded significantly with the participation of 60% of drivers and licence holders.
Adoption stands at 2 million unique mobile driver licenses issued and additional credentials are being added such as, vehicle title, disabled
place card, and even a disaster response related credentialing.
In general, a high level of assurance is needed to provision a credential that will then be used for some high value transactions like financial transactions.
“We have been working with the federal team, the NIST team, looking at the various standards out there, for example we follow the NIST effort, a VT1 to one photo matching standard to make sure the algorithms are not biased and they are effective”.
Hear Ajay Gupta speak on the “Integrating digital identity into digital public infrastructure” panel at Identity Week America 2026.
