The American Bankers Association commissioned the management consultant Oliver Wyman to research the growing importance of digital identities on the U.S. Financial Services sector.
A previous paper Oliver Wyman developed with the International Banking Federation (IBFed)11 explored the role of banks in digital identity ecosystems and set out the business case for their doing so. Currently there is no such bank-led ecosystem in the U.S. Recently, the three largest U.S. wireless service providers (i.e., AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile) withdrew their combined support for Zenkey, which was arguably a bid
towards creating a national, federated identity scheme that leveraged phone-centric ID information [11].
The bank-owned consortium, Early Warning Services (EWS), after successfully launching Zelle, now appears to be entering this space with a recently launched product Authentify, which currently represents a “single sign up” service that leverages the previously verified customer data of the banks that own EWS. The implication of this in the medium-term is that smaller banks might be able to rely on (and perhaps pay for) services provided by Authentify to verify, authenticate, or perhaps even authorize their customers, in the same way that the Zelle payments product has been integrated into many other banks’ native mobile banking apps.
There is not yet the equivalent of a ubiquitously recognized, granular consumer credit score for digital identities.
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