The OpenID Foundation has published two new papers proposing a standardized framework to help U.S. financial institutions accept mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and other verifiable credentials for Know Your Customer (KYC) and Customer Identification Program (CIP) compliance.
Developed through the foundation’s KYC and Identity Assurance Working Group, the publications detail a model for machine-readable trust metadata, allowing relying parties such as banks to evaluate the provenance, assurance level, and authentication context of a digital credential. The goal is to enable verifiable credentials and mDLs to be assessed using consistent technical and regulatory criteria, improving interoperability across issuers, wallet providers, and financial institutions.
The initiative aligns closely with ongoing work by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) under its “Building Assurance in the mDL Ecosystem” project at the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. NIST’s framework addresses assurance gaps in current digital ID deployments and recommends encoding information about credential issuance, authentication methods, and compliance indicators – such as REAL ID status – directly within credential metadata.
Both efforts reference and extend the OpenID Connect for Identity Assurance specification, mapping credential assurance data to NIST’s SP 800-63A/B guidelines. The approach also builds on the OpenID Foundation’s recently finalized OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance (OID4VCI) 1.0 standard, which defines interoperable methods for issuing and presenting digital credentials.
Together, the OpenID and NIST initiatives represent a coordinated move toward a common assurance model for mobile IDs and verifiable credentials, designed to help financial institutions verify digital identity data with higher confidence and regulatory clarity.
Sources: OpenID Foundation, NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence
—
By Ali Nassar-Smith
