We firmly believe that your digital identity should be in your control, safe and yours to use as a basic human right. You must be able to connect securely to the products and services you want at a time that is convenient to you. You should have the controls to share and revoke information about you for a multitude of use cases as well as approve and sign documents online. Our work supporting the core national identity infrastructures in the Netherlands and UK has allowed us to build a robust and scalable system that can operate globally connecting citizens and organisations securely and conveniently in real-time.
In the past weeks we have seen and felt the power of COVID-19. Influencing the world economies and directly impacting daily life for billions of people. A lot of people are now asked and/or forced to work from home. Use of online services have seen a steep rise and the strain that comes with that. And yes, this includes us…
The ID verification challenge is in the details
Digidentity’s services are compliant to the eIDAS Regulation and subject to external certification. As a service supplier and ID broker we know what is needed to equip anyone with a proper, certified and internationally accepted Digital ID. To obtain a digital identity, you have to meet the requirements defined and pass a series of verification checks. This includes supplying evidence that confirm your identity. We check this evidence with authoritative sources such as government databases and Interpol to ensure your data is correct and that someone is not impersonating you. This includes ID validation and photo comparisons.
Scale to the max
On an average week day we process 6.000 – 8.000 identities in the UK market. In the last two weeks we have seen peak volumes of 100.000 – 125.000 new users per day. Today we have a system that enables us to onboard 250 identities per minute… and we are working to increase our performance. This unprecedented rise brought on many new challenges that no one could have expected or predict
We had to introduce a virtual waiting line. Scale our Amazon, cloud-based systems 44 times. Adjust processes and improve the flow. We developed and implemented online training for 70+ people across locations in Europe to process all manual checks. We made sure our partners weren’t overloaded when we were ready to accelerate. Our tech and development teams have worked have worked 24/7 to get this done in record time. Nevertheless, people had to wait for long periods, sometimes for 3-4 days to get verified.
This inspired us to go beyond the current platform and find new ways to support our customers and users. One such way was to accelerate the development of NFC support (read the NFC chip of your ID with your mobile phone). This implementation will optimize our registration process for most of the new customers onboarding on our systems: reducing friction, making the process faster and more secure.
Human touch
We have seen many responses from people feeling the pain of waiting a long time and being unsure if they could get verified and connect to Universal Credit. Our partners in the UK team at DWP have seen their share of pressure too. In a normal week they would see 55.000 calls whereas in one day whereas in March they received 2.2 million calls alone. Dealing with this level of demand is not physically possible for any organisation
Summary
We are very much aware we are not there yet. Digidentity has learned a lot and evolved its platform quickly to become much more flexible and capable to deal with large numbers of people using our services. We continue to learn and test new ways to support our customers. Some of these new innovations need a bit more time for evaluation and implementation. We will focus not only on the technical side of these challenges but also in other areas of our operation. Through our dedicated service desk, we will find more ways to inform and engage with our users more effectively and more frequently. The past weeks have inspired us and brought us to the heart of our mission. Helping you being the digital you, for everyone to use.
