Topic starter
02/08/2026 12:04 pm
TL;DR: Government digital ID policy and liveness assurance are maturing as Yoti reports 62% revenue growth to £29.0 million in 2025, more than 1 billion age checks over seven years, and a Digital ID wallet download surge to 5.55 million globally, according to Yoti. The governance issue is no longer just adoption, but whether identity proofing, age assurance, and verified credentials can be trusted at scale.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Yoti: “Thoughts from our CEO: Yoti sees major improvements in liveness and age estimation models”.
By the numbers:
- Revenues grew 62% in 2025 to £29.0 million, up from £17.9 million in 2024.
- UK downloads grew from 1.00 million in 2024 to 2.02 million in 2025.
Key questions
Q: How should organisations govern business wallets in regulated identity programmes?
A: They should treat business wallets as part of the identity governance stack, not a side channel.
Q: Why do liveness checks matter more as identity moves online?
A: They matter because digital journeys remove face-to-face confirmation, which used to provide a basic reality check.
Q: How should teams evaluate facial age estimation models before deployment?
A: Teams should use a separate, representative test set to evaluate whether a facial age estimation model generalises beyond the data it was trained on.
Practitioner guidance
- Define wallet trust boundaries Specify which relying-party decisions may use digital ID wallet credentials, which require re-authentication, and which must still fall back to stronger proofing.
- Validate liveness controls against spoofing Test selfie capture and presentation attack detection against replay, mask, and synthetic attack conditions before approving age assurance in production.
- Set explicit age-estimation policy thresholds Document where facial age estimation is acceptable, what error tolerance is allowed, and which services need higher-assurance checks.
Bottom line: Digital ID wallets and age assurance are converging into a single governance problem where reuse, re-authentication, and assurance quality must all be controlled.
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02/08/2026 1:09 pm
Digital ID wallets are becoming a lifecycle problem, not just a registration problem: once a wallet is used for repeated proofing, re-authentication, or age checks, the control plane shifts from initial enrollment to ongoing trust governance. That changes what identity teams must monitor, because acceptance decisions now depend on the persistence and reuse of credentials rather than a single verification event. The practitioner conclusion is that wallet assurance must be governed as a living identity state.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should IAM teams do when digital ID and age checks are reused across services?
A: Establish a clear trust policy for reuse so each service knows whether a prior verification can be accepted or must be refreshed. Reuse changes the control model because assurance can decay over time, channel, and context. IAM teams should align credential presentation, re-authentication, and assurance level to the risk of the transaction.
👉 Read our full editorial: Digital ID growth and age assurance controls are converging