Topic starter
23/06/2026 7:02 pm
TL;DR: Digital identity wallets are becoming a practical authentication channel, but integration across wallet ecosystems and standards remains complex, according to OneSpan. The governance issue is not wallet support itself, but whether existing IAM and onboarding flows can extend into new credential formats without creating another layer of fragmentation.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by OneSpan: “Early access to digital credentials capabilities”.
Key questions
Q: How should security teams integrate digital identity wallets into existing IAM programmes?
A: Security teams should integrate digital identity wallets by mapping wallet assertions into existing proofing, authentication, and lifecycle controls rather than creating a separate identity path.
Q: Why do digital identity wallets complicate authentication governance?
A: They complicate governance because the trust chain becomes more variable.
Q: What breaks when wallets, issuers, and verifiers do not implement standards consistently?
A: Inconsistent behaviour can cause credential presentation failures, rejected transactions, mismatched assurance decisions, and uneven policy enforcement across schemes.
Practitioner guidance
- Define wallet trust policy before integration Decide which wallet ecosystems, credential types, and verification rules your organisation will accept before exposing the flow to users.
- Map wallet onboarding to current proofing steps Align the wallet enrolment journey with identity proofing, account binding, and recovery processes so assurance stays consistent across channels.
- Extend authentication architecture, not just the user flow Treat wallet sign-in as part of the existing IAM and authentication stack, with shared policy, logs, and exception handling.
Bottom line: Digital identity wallets do not eliminate IAM complexity, they relocate it into the integration layer between ecosystems, standards, and enterprise controls.
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25/06/2026 2:48 am
Digital identity wallets create an integration governance problem before they create an authentication benefit. The article points to a familiar pattern: new identity form factors succeed only when enterprises can absorb them into existing onboarding and authentication control planes. If wallet support becomes a parallel lane, the organisation has not solved identity modernisation. It has added another boundary to govern, which is exactly where fragmentation usually begins.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should organisations evaluate before adopting wallet-based authentication?
A: They should check whether the proposed wallet flow can fit into existing proofing, authentication, logging, and recovery processes without duplicating them. If the answer is no, the wallet is introducing a second identity stack rather than extending the first one. That is a governance problem, not just an integration issue.
👉 Read our full editorial: Digital identity wallet connectors and the IAM integration problem