To accelerate the development of a “digital identity ecosystem”, Desjardins Group is injecting $845,000 into the Digital Identity Laboratory of Canada, an organization that coordinates the compliance of this type of initiative across Canada.
The goal: to accelerate the co-operability of digital identity solutions across the country and province.
Deployed on a large scale, digital identity would make it possible to identify and authenticate citizens and customers in a secure and confidential manner, says Mathieu Desrosiers, head of digital identity at Desjardins. This is based on the digital certificates that could be issued over the years by governments, financial institutions, companies and other organizations. In 2020, the Government of Quebec announced the investment of $41.8 million to facilitate the creation of a digital identity here.
Smaller-scale solutions already exist in the private sector. The Verified.Me application from Secure Key — a company acquired in October by Interac — was developed in collaboration with major Canadian banks and Desjardins. In particular, it makes it possible to verify a person’s identity by using personal information already disclosed to these institutions.
“But in a more mature world of digital identity, there will be multiple attestations that will be added to a person’s digital identity portfolio,” says Desrosiers. A university may issue certificates of university studies; [une entreprise de télécommunications] may provide a customer certificate. »
It is still necessary to coordinate the initiatives. This explains why Desjardins is injecting $845,000 into the Canadian Digital Identity Laboratory (IDLab). Created in 2020, the organization seeks to ensure the compliance and interoperability of the various digital identity solutions by deploying, among other things, the cloud computing infrastructure necessary for its realization.
To date, not only does she work with organizations, but she collaborates with five governments: those of Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan, and the federal government.
The managing director of IDLab, Pierre Roberge, recalls that, in fact, each citizen must juggle with a hundred identities which differ according to the circumstances: “I can be a Quebec citizen, employee or director of a company; I can be insured to be an Uber driver for the City of Montreal. Of course, the “level of confidence” of attestations differs depending on the organization that issues them, and each verification system must take this into account. “A passport or driver’s license is not the same value as a library membership card,” he says.
The “fundamental identities” will be those issued by authorities and governments. In Quebec, four government organizations collaborate in the design of such certificates: the Quebec Revenue Agency, the Ministry of Labour, the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec and Retraite Québec.
If the concept of digital identity is not new, “we are in the process of arriving at a version which makes it possible in a cryptographic and mathematical way to know who issued the certificate and to verify that the document is authentic and that it has not been modified. This ability to do these three things is relatively new,” he explains.