"The US is moving toward verifiable credentials. This will go global." - Finextra

Recognising Trust Architecture Opportunity Signals
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From Finextra:

by Bo Harald

Chairman/Founding member, board member,
Trust Infra for Real Time Economy Prgrm & MyData,

"The US is moving toward verifiable credentials. This will go global.

Europe has set a direction with its digital identity wallets. Now US financial regulators have clarified that banks and credit unions may use government-issued verifiable digital credentials, including mobile driver’s licences, to verify customers—even when an account is opened remotely.

It is a clarification of existing rules, not a new mandate. Still, it removes a question banks needed answered. Now the question is if this will encourage banks to - for their part - start using their trust position to issue portable Bank-ID credentials. In any case at least account-holder and number IBAN-like credentials for trust and automation.

A credential should travel with verifiable evidence of who issued it. The receiving organisation must still decide whether to trust the issuer, whether the credential is valid and current, and whether it is sufficient for the task.

Identity is only the beginning. Businesses will also need to verify qualifications, licences, payment details, proof of purchase and a person’s power to act. AI agents will need verifiable authority too: who authorised this agent, to do what, for how long, and can that authority be withdrawn?

Europe can help shape the global approach if we very soon move to issuing a critical mass of all sorts of credentials and make them work across wallets, sectors and borders. That takes shared rulebooks, interoperable semantics and public–private implementation—not simply more wallet apps.

Begin with the trusted transaction in mind. Now also for AI-agents - moving into payments.
US regulators’ FAQ: **https://lnkd.in/dQVv2Heq**"

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The interesting story isn’t “US banks can now use digital driver’s licences”. It’s that a major financial regulator is formally accommodating cryptographically verifiable credentials as evidence in regulated processes.

Another signal that things are moving from organisations exchanging PDFs, certificates and assertions that somebody then has to manually trust, toward digitally signed claims whose issuer, integrity and provenance can be machine-verified.

That’s exactly what UNTP is doing in another domain. A conformity credential, for example, is issued as a signed W3C VC by the assessment body and can say that a particular product, facility or organisation was assessed against specified criteria. UN Transparency Protocol A traceability event similarly records what happened to goods, where, when and by whom, with each event independently verifiable.

Is this another signal that different industries are independently arriving at the same architectural answer to the trust problem?