Mobile driver’s licenses built to ISO 18013-5 are an in-person only digital identity solution. Now you need ISO 18013-7 to verify remotely, where the value of seamless digital identity lies. Your choice? Go back to your engineering team or just buy from Indicio. Here’s why buying is the faster, cheaper, and safer road.
By Helen Garneau
You did the hard work. You issue and/or verify mobile driver’s licenses to ISO 18013-5, and when someone taps their phone at a kiosk, a gate, or a desk, it works. But it doesn’t work remotely — which means a digital identity solution that only works for two people occupying the same physical space. Remote? Well, that wasn’t the remit.
Now, you need ISO 18013-7 so that your customer can take the same credential and open an account from their couch, check in from a hotel room, and prove who they are to a call center at 11pm.
ISO 18013-7 makes remote verification possible, opening up seamless identity authentication to a much larger online market. It’s the standard for presenting an mDL to a verifier who isn’t in the room with the same cryptographic assurance you already rely on face to face.
If you’re reading this, you likely already accept that you need it. So the real question isn’t whether to add remote verification. It’s how: do you build 18013-7 yourself, or do you buy it already built?
The hidden cost of building -7 yourself
The trap in “let’s just build it” is the word just. Consider how much the standard has moved: 18013-7 was first published as a Technical Specification in October 2024, technically revised in a second edition seven months later, and now a third edition is already in progress, one whose target date has slipped more than once and is now slated for delivery in Q3 2026. Three editions in roughly two years, and it still hasn’t settled into a finalized International Standard.
Underneath it, the presentation layer rides on the OpenID for Verifiable Credentials family. OpenID4VP reached its frozen 1.0 release in mid-2025, but 18013-7’s profile still points at an earlier draft, so the standard now has to be reworked just to line up with the version the market will actually deploy. Even a dependency stabilizing generates work you’d be on the hook to chase. And that’s before eIDAS and the EUDI Wallet in Europe, ISO’s parallel mDoc effort, and DTC for travel credentials — an entire interoperability landscape for your team to contend with.
Build internally and you’re signing up to track every piece of that, yourself, indefinitely. Worse, you may clear your own internal testing and still fail to interface with the systems that matter — a bank, a border, a government wallet — and only discover the gap after you’ve shipped. Continuous conformance to standards that keep changing is a full-time job.
Or you can start using 18013-7 now with a license from Indicio Proven.
Buy it today. Add remote mDL verification to what you already run and start using it now.
Get the updates. When 18013-7 revises, when OID4VC firms up, we push you the updates.
Proven interoperability. Indicio Proven is multi-format and multi-protocol by design and works across the ecosystems your customers need to reach. This means you can configure multi-credential workflows when the business opportunity arises and deliver them as seamless experiences to your customers.
What remote verification unlocks
The moment remote verification is live, work that was stuck behind the counter comes loose. Onboarding stops leaking customers, because a new applicant proves a government-signed identity in the flow instead of uploading a photo of a card and waiting for a human to eyeball it.
High-assurance tasks — account recovery, high-value transactions, changes to sensitive records — move out of the branch and off the phone queue. KYC gets faster and cheaper without getting weaker. And deepfakes meet a wall: a cryptographically signed mDL, bound to a real holder and checked against the issuer, is not something a generative model can fake its way past.
Every partner, marketplace, and digital service that needs to know who it’s dealing with becomes reachable.
You did the hard part when you stood up mDL. Now, talk to Indicio about turning your 18013-5 investment into full remote mDL verification.
Indicio makes proving identity simple. It gives people a faster way to prove who they are, and gives the organizations that serve them a cheaper, safer way to be sure. Indicio is an analyst award-winning company serving customers across travel, banking, hiring, and government, in production at national scale today.
