Identity Week 2021 – Its Good to See You, Again!

A morning of beautiful sunshine and clear blue skies in London heralded an equally unfamiliar sight of crowds of ID and secure document professionals assembling in the ExCeL centre for the start of Identity Week 2021 (22- 23 September).

Numbers were well down on previous years, understandably given the travel restrictions. Even so, and maybe it was the unseasonably warm London weather (22° is warm for London in September!) or the prospect of meeting up again with clients and friends after months of travel restrictions, but the mood in the trade hall was buoyant.

The tradeshow

Due to COVID restrictions, Identity Week 2020 was held online and there was a real sense of relief from exhibitors to be out of the office and in front of customers again for the 2021 event.

Representatives from departments of state, police federations and border management organisations joined ID and secure document professionals to catch up on months of lost face-to-face networking.

Whilst not all exhibitors could match the sheer scale of the event’s title sponsor, Mühlbauer, who had deployed a fully converted heavy goods vehicle (HGV) to house its exhibition stand, many others such as Thales, Regula, ATT, Opsec and IQ Structures had made the trip to London to show off new technologies and products from their more modest booths.

The conference

Major themes covered in the conference included the role of digital identity in healthcare, biometric elections, proposed new identity guidelines and the ongoing transition from physical to digital identities. There were eight streams to the event, supported by roundtable discussions, over the two days.

Hans Constadt, a digital health consultant, made a strong case for giving people control on deciding how much medical data to share, with whom and when. His vision is that digital informed medical consent could ultimately allow the whole world’s medical experience to become a clinical trial.

Vladimir Kostiviar, senior technical consultant at London-based hardware and software developer Innovatrics, talked about the company’s experiences in biometric elections in sub-Saharan Africa. The addition of under-age detection facial analysis to detect where children were being put forward fraudulently as voters proved successful. The company trains its algorithms on datasets of photos of local populations around elections – both adults and minors.

Kostiviar also noted how facial recognition based on a biometric electoral roll was rarely used on polling day, and that Innovatrics has found that voter cards issued during an election period are often highly trusted locally and become de facto ID systems.

New proposed guidelines from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were promoted by Aware’s CCO Rob Mungovan.

He described it as a government’s attempt to define the concepts of digital identity, best practice and suggestion of mandatory requirements at the federal level. The capacity for incorporating biometrics at the higher levels could make digital identity more convenient with support for passwordless authentication and remote identity proofing.

On the topic of physical to digital transition, Harriet Plumb, Sales Director at Portals Paper, said that ‘digital is part of the solution and not the whole solution.’ Acknowledging that this is what one would expect from a paper supplier, she explained how there needs to be ‘closer proximity between competitors and manufacturers.’ 

Plumb stated that passport issuers are often far removed from the civil registry and that contracts for different credentials are awarded to different companies, which then engage multiple suppliers. Contracts for the digital versions are again awarded to different companies, increasing the distance between identity providers and the civil registry. ICAO digital seal standards could help bring together disparate elements of identity.

Bearing in mind that this was a first step to opening up the ID and secure document event sector after the easing of some travel restrictions, it was great to see so much of the industry well represented.

The next big step in opening up the sector will be Optical & Digital Document Security conference, which takes place 17-19 January 2022 in Vienna. The programme for what is billed as the technical conference for physical, digital and virtual document security will be available shortly.