Last week, SITA, the multinational IT company supporting the air travel industry, announced that it would be the lead investor in the Series A funding for Indicio, a decentralized digital identity (DDID) solution provider. The aim of investment will support Indicio’s plan to enhance usage of digital identities in a traveler’s mobile wallet for air travel, meeting International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards for visas, passports, boarding passes, and other travel documents and credentials. It is also worth noting that COVID vaccination certificates that ICAO used were DDID standards-based.

An interesting coincidental and synergistic event with the SITA/Indicio announcement is that the NFID Foundation (which is responsible for standardizing near field communication technologies) has announced plans to promote DDID standards (W3C, DIF, ToIP, and the OpenWallet Foundation) in the security industry and mobile device space. Forrester expects that this announcement will have the largest influence on physical security, as well as mobile device first access control.

Why are these announcements important in the evolution of DDID? The reason is simple: Finding and supporting use cases (such as presenting secure, standardized digital travel documents) in standard mobile wallets on standardized frameworks (such as OpenWallet) in mobile devices will significantly accelerate DDID adoption and alleviate concerns around DDID technologies becoming fragmentated or proprietary. These standardized use cases will drive interoperability and usability and help grow DDID adoption.

For Forrester clients, we have a series of recent reports on DDID: Read The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2023; The State Of Decentralized Digital Identity (DDID); The Future Of Decentralized Identity; and The Architect’s Guide To Decentralized Digital Identities to learn more about this exciting new identity technology.