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11/07/2026 8:31 pm
TL;DR: Digital identity adoption accelerated as governments, healthcare providers, and financial services moved essential services online during COVID-19, with McKinsey cited in the source article as forecasting more than 704 million verification checks in 2020. The governance challenge was not just scale, but consent, privacy, and assurance in remote onboarding and service delivery.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Seamfix: digital IDs and the global response to COVID-19
By the numbers:
- McKinsey forecast more than 704 million digital identity verification checks during 2020.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations govern reusable digital identity across multiple services?
A: Treat reusable digital identity as a governed trust decision, not a convenience feature.
Q: Why do digital ID schemes create privacy governance challenges?
A: Because digital identity systems often collect more data than the immediate transaction requires.
Q: What breaks when identity proofing is weak?
A: Weak proofing lets the organisation issue credentials to the wrong person or entity, which means later access controls are protecting an assumption that was never verified.
Practitioner guidance
- Define assurance tiers for each service Set different identity proofing and re-verification requirements for banking, healthcare, and public-sector use cases instead of applying one digital ID process to every transaction.
- Embed consent and privacy checks into enrolment Capture what data is collected, why it is collected, and how long it is retained at the point of registration, then tie those rules to the service's access policy.
- Map digital ID into continuity planning Document which services depend on remote identity verification and test fallback procedures for periods when physical onboarding or office-based validation is unavailable.
What's in the full article
Seamfix's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The article's original digital ID use cases across financial services, healthcare, and e-government.
- McKinsey-cited context on verification volumes and the remote onboarding demand the pandemic created.
- The source author's examples, including Estonia's online public service model and the service continuity argument.
- The article's discussion of what defines a good digital ID, including uniqueness, consent, and privacy safeguards.
👉 Read Seamfix's analysis of digital ID in COVID-19 service delivery →
Digital ID during COVID-19: what changed for identity governance?
Explore further
11/07/2026 9:00 pm
Digital ID is no longer a niche onboarding tool. It has become a core trust layer for remote access to essential services, and that changes the governance bar for identity programmes. When banking, healthcare, and public services move online, identity proofing becomes an availability and assurance control, not just a convenience feature. Organisations that treat digital identity as a front-end user experience issue will miss the downstream governance consequences for access, privacy, and auditability. The practitioner conclusion is that digital ID now belongs in the identity architecture, not at the edge of it.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when digital ID is used for regulated services?
A: Accountability usually sits with the organisation that sets the identity assurance policy and decides how identity evidence is collected, stored, and reused. In practice, that means IAM, privacy, and service owners must share governance, because a failure in proofing or consent can create both security and regulatory exposure.
👉 Read our full editorial: Digital ID acceleration during COVID-19 exposed trust and privacy gaps
