UK Program Could Create Digital Identities for Businesses

The UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has completed the first phase of a new Digital Business Identity initiative. The program would essentially do for businesses what other digital identity programs have done for individuals, establishing a single organizational profile that businesses could use to streamline their interactions with the government.

According to BEIS, a Digital Business Identity would be particularly beneficial for small businesses, since it would theoretically make it easier for those businesses to bid on government contracts and gain access to grants, tax credits, and other government benefits. It would also increase corporate privacy and security. In that regard, the program would create trusted corporate identities that would reduce the amount of information that organizations need to share to complete a transaction. As a result, businesses would have more control over their data, and there would be less information stored on government servers overall. 

Phrased differently, a trusted Digital Business Identity would make it easier to verify the legitimacy of an organization. That, in turn, would help prevent fraud in corporate interactions.

The first phase of the project was developed in collaboration with KPMG and Layer 7 IT Security. At the moment, the program is only a prototype. BEIS has not yet determined whether or not it will move forward with phase two, and is currently discussing digital identity policy (and its options) with other government agencies that have their own digital identity programs.

The Digital Business Identity would be one of several British identity programs to emerge in the past ten years. The Home Office, the Scottish Government, and NHS have all launched their own in-house identity initiatives, although those programs are geared towards individuals rather than organizations. The country’s Government Digital Service has previously announced that it would not include businesses in its national Verify ID program.

Source: Computer Weekly

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July 13, 2020 – by Eric Weiss