Block Joins NIST Program to Promote Mobile Driver’s Licenses

Block is working with the U.S. government to promote the use of digital identity tools.

The FinTech conglomerate announced Thursday (Aug. 29) that it was working with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), a division of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to identify standards for mobile driver’s licenses, or MDLs.

“Whether boarding a plane, creating a bank account, or making an online purchase, mobile driver’s licenses and other digital credentials have the potential to improve the way we conduct transactions, both in person and online,” said Bill Fisher, co-lead of the NIST mDL project.

“To help realize this potential, the NCCoE is collaborating with more than a dozen partners from across the mDL ecosystem to build out reference implementations and to accelerate the adoption of mDL standards and best practices,” Fisher added.

According to a news release, Block is part of a consortium of companies involved in the project, and will lobby for the implementation of “established, open standards” for digital identity tools, which the company says allow for greater transparency and security while reducing the risk that consumers will be wedded to proprietary systems from individual vendors.

“Digital identity is a major focus for TBD, a part of Block that is building decentralized technologies,” the release said. “Building on open standards from the W3C, the OpenID Foundation, the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and others, TBD and its partners are developing digital identity technology that will give individuals greater control over their online identity and data while making the financial system more efficient, secure, and accessible.”

In addition to Block, other participants in the project include the motor vehicle departments of California, New York and Maryland, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Wells Fargo and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, NIST said last week.

PYMNTS spoke last year with Mike Brock, CEO of TBD, about the company’s efforts in the digital identity space.

“We never really thought about, what does it mean to identify a person on the internet in a way that is portable,” Brock said. “Nothing is really practicable without a strong way to do identity … you have to know who people are, and you have to know who you can trust. All the roads in are around digital identity.”

And as noted here earlier this year, there are now more than 20 states working toward adopting mobile driver’s licenses for their residents, while Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Maryland support mobile IDs on the iPhone’s Apple Wallet. And TSA has piloted a program for accepting digital IDs, and even touchless biometric access, at some airports.