Following earlier announcements about its plans to launch a national digital ID, the government of Costa Rica has now revealed that the project has been developed by secure solutions provider GET Group, in partnership with the state-owned Radiográfica Costarricense.
The announcement provides the first concrete details on the technology partner behind the country’s ambitious digital transformation effort. The app built by GET Group will serve as the official, state-issued digital identity credential for Costa Rican citizens, part of a broader push to modernize public services and streamline citizen-government interactions.
The selection of GET Group, an established international player with extensive experience in national ID, passport, and driver’s license projects, is telling. It highlights a common model of public-private partnership for foundational identity infrastructure, particularly among mid-sized nations. Rather than attempting to build a complex and mission-critical system entirely from scratch in-house, governments often choose to leverage the pre-existing platforms and deep domain expertise of specialized private sector firms.
This decision reflects a strategic prioritization of speed-to-market and proven reliability. By partnering with an experienced vendor like GET Group, the Costa Rican government de-risks the project and significantly shortens the timeline from policy conception to public rollout. This pragmatic approach favors execution efficiency and a predictable outcome.
The trade-off, however, is that such a strategy may do less to cultivate local technological capacity compared to a project led by a domestic consortium. It also tends to lock the country into a specific vendor’s technology stack for the foreseeable future, which could make subsequent pivots to different architectures, such as decentralized identity models, more complex and costly. For Costa Rica, the choice appears to be a calculated one, valuing rapid and reliable implementation as the primary goal for its foundational digital ID.
Costa Rica’s digital identity initiative fits within a broader Latin American trend toward modernized identity systems. Uruguay and Brazil are planning a digital ID broker for cross-border services, demonstrating regional cooperation on identity infrastructure. Meanwhile, Mexico has approved a national biometric ID system and is rolling out voluntary biometric CURP IDs, with the government having opened a tender for the biometric CURP platform.
The digital ID rollout complements Costa Rica’s other digital infrastructure initiatives. The country has been strengthening its border security capabilities, recently expanding cooperation with the United States on biometric screening. The nation has also modernized its physical identity documents, having previously introduced a biometric passport system, though not without some initial implementation concerns.
Across Latin America, digital identity infrastructure is accelerating. Mastercard and Brazilian partners previously aimed to develop a LATAM digital ID, while World ID 3.0 launched in Brazil to provide biometric identity verification services.
For Costa Rica, the GET Group partnership represents a pragmatic path forward, balancing the need for rapid deployment with the complexity of building foundational digital identity infrastructure that must serve millions of citizens across diverse use cases.
–
By Cass Kennedy
