The OECD has released a policy paper titled “Implementing Chile’s national digital identity strategy: Insights from country experiences,” offering a detailed roadmap for how Chile can operationalize its new digital ID framework and, by extension, how other governments might structure governance and financing for high-assurance digital identity systems. The report was prepared at the request of Chile’s Ministry of Finance and is part of the OECD Public Governance Policy Papers series.
According to the abstract, Chile launched a national digital identity strategy in 2025 aimed at delivering secure, trusted, and portable digital identity solutions that can be used across both public and private sector services. The OECD paper synthesizes lessons from other OECD countries to support that implementation effort, drawing on prior technical engagement with Chile during the design phase of the strategy.
The report organizes its analysis around several core themes that will be familiar to digital identity and security practitioners. One chapter focuses on treating digital identity as a form of critical infrastructure, which implies long-term planning, clear service-level expectations, and resilient funding arrangements. Another examines how to manage security and privacy risks, including digital security risk management, data protection, and trust frameworks that can scale across diverse service providers. Additional sections explore regional and global interoperability, including alignment with cross-border trust schemes, and the role of the private sector in delivering credentials, wallets and value-added services on top of government-issued identifiers.
For Chile’s own strategy, the OECD describes an action plan built around three pillars: governance, technological development and financing. The governance pillar addresses institutional responsibilities, accountability mechanisms, and stakeholder engagement. The technological development pillar looks at architecture choices, standards adoption, and the evolution toward wallet-based models that can support portable credentials across channels. The financing pillar considers sustainable funding options, including how to balance public investment with private-sector participation while maintaining equitable access for citizens.
The paper concludes with a set of emerging considerations for each pillar, covering issues such as clarifying mandates between agencies, investing in cybersecurity capabilities, ensuring robust incident response, and fostering an ecosystem of trusted private actors that can integrate with the national digital ID. For CISOs, the report is notable because it positions digital identity not just as a login problem but as an integrated component of national digital security and service delivery, with risk management, privacy, and cross-border interoperability treated as first-order design constraints rather than afterthoughts.
Sources: OECD
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
