Mastercard has been officially certified as a digital identity service provider under the UK government’s Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF).
The certification enables Mastercard to expand its revenue opportunities offering its digital ID service, ID, to organisations across the UK. Mastercard’s ID app provides a protective security layer for making transactions online which could be compromised by fraudsters, while giving users more choice over how they verify and manage their identity.
Widely available to download from a variety of mobile app stores, the app offers a user-managed ID enabling users to have more financial autonomy to make everyday purchases, rent a flat, or apply to university.
Mastercard is following the general trajectory in the UK of giving people greater control in proving they are and who they claim to be.
Commenting on the expansion of Mastercard’s digital capabilities, Sarah Clark, Senior Vice President, said the company was excited to be working alongside public and private sectors to build a national identity ecosystem where citizens have trust and confidence that their personal information is safe and secure.
With a privacy preserving global interoperable re-usable ID Network, Mastercard is looking forward to serving the increasing number of regulated use cases for Digital Identity in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Digital identity is one of the key tools available in the age of digitalisation to vastly reducing fraud and improving consumers shopping experiences, which Mastercard latched onto in 2019 and continues to scale globally into a fully-fledged ID network.
The company announced several successful pilots and global partnerships with Samsung and Microsoft, partnership also with Optus, one of the largest telecommunications companies in Australia, to provide digital ID to 600,000 of its customers.
The service leverages Mastercard’s global network and aligns with good data privacy practices and standards to maintain users’ management over their personal data.
The DIATF sets the rules and standards to which ID providers in the UK must abide by to establish trusted digital identity solutions in the market. Certified organisations like Mastercard can work with each other, ensuring that digital attributes and identities are consistent and trusted. Providers conduct annual assessments to verify they meet DIATF requirements.
