Financial services identity infrastructure is broken. Centralized architectures can’t keep pace with AI-driven fraud, and layering more authentication on top doesn’t fix the structural vulnerability. The Indicio–IDEMIA Public Security partnership offers a fundamentally different approach: Verifiable Credentials with authenticated biometrics, held in a digital wallet and verified by cryptography instead of databases. The result is portable privacy-preserving KYC that works instantly across institutions, jurisdictions, and credential formats — and it’s production-ready today.
By Helen Garneau
Despite the effort banking and financial services put into identity assurance, most institutions are hamstrung by the centralized architecture they use to manage identity: it’s inherently vulnerable to identity fraud, which has accelerated in sophistication due to AI; it’s also highly frictional for customers in terms of accessing services, and it’s not interoperable. Identity has to be reverified across departments, organizations, and borders. A customer who is proven trustworthy at one bank starts from zero at the next. As global finance acquires digital speed, identity authentication is chugging along in analogue time.
Not anymore.
Indicio’s recent partnership with IDEMIA Public Security (IPS) is making authenticated identity, including biometrics, fully portable and globally interoperable. This means KYC at the speed of digital and in a way that bypasses the threat from deepfakes.
How? Indicio has combined its Verifiable Credential and decentralized digital identity platform — Indicio Proven® — with IDEMIA Public Security’s biometric binding and document validation. Now, banks and finserv have a simple KYC solution that can be deployed rapidly through a single integration. It’s capable of delivering “government-grade” digital identity that works across jurisdictions, standards, and institutional boundaries.
Centralized identity architecture Is the problem
Identity fraud and centralized identity architecture have evolved together as predator and prey. We usually focus on the damage caused by the attacks but less on how the prey has evolved in that makes it inherently vulnerable to predators.
Centralized identity databases are called “honeypots” for good reason. Every repository of personal data or biometrics is a target, and when one is breached, it fuels the next wave of fraud at scale. No amount of perimeter defense eliminates the single-point-of-failure inherent to centralized storage: a stolen password and login.
Multi-factor authentication adds friction without fixing the structural vulnerability, and this is especially true now that generative AI tools make it easier to phish MFA. Layering more factors onto a centralized model yields diminishing returns.
KYC processes still depend heavily on manual document review. Fraud-as-a-service platforms now offer AI-generated identity documents that bypass legacy checks in minutes. Biometrics, once considered the strongest form of authentication and the solution to the stolen password problem, are increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and synthetic media — with an upgrade in existential risk as, unlike passwords, compromised biometrics can’t be reset.
Meanwhile, digital finance is accelerating. Stablecoins, real-time payments, programmable financial services, and automated treasury operations are scaling globally. New regulatory frameworks, including the U.S. GENIUS Act and Europe’s MiCA, explicitly require robust KYC, CIP, and AML controls. Legacy identity infrastructure cannot deliver high assurance at the speed these systems demand.
The solution: Verifiable Credentials with authenticated biometrics
A Verifiable Credential (VC) is a digital credential that a person or organization (or even a device) holds in a digital wallet. Think of it as a container for data. The data inside is digitally signed. This means that each personal data attribute or a biometric template can be cryptographically verified to determine whether it has been altered. The container itself is also digitally signed, so the issuer of the container can also be cryptographically verified.
Put a person’s identity data and biometrics in a Verifiable Credential means that they can carry their own data, they consent to share their data, and their data can be instantly verified by cryptography without the need for cross comparing it to the same data in a database or contacting the issuer to cross-check the data.
By doing this, we remove the need for centralized architecture to manage identity authentication — in other words, we remove the vulnerabilities that fraudsters exploit.
Instead, if you trust the identity assurance process that created the Verifiable Credential, you can immediately trust that credential when a person presents it because that data has come from a trusted source and hasn’t been altered in transit.
The combination of state-of-the art identity verification and Verifiable Credential technology is what makes the Indicio- IDEMIA Public Security solution so powerful.
By using IDEMIA Public Security’s identity proofing platform, institutions authenticate government-issued documents (passports, driver’s licenses, mobile IDs), verify liveness, and match liveness to the biometrics in government-issued documents at the highest assurance levels (NIST IAL2 and IAL3). Once verified, a bank can issue their customer with a Verifiable Credential containing their validated identity data and their authenticated biometric.
This provides an elegant, simple solution to the deepfake menace. A deepfake cannot forge a cryptographic signature. A remote liveness check can be verified by requesting the person to present an authenticated biometric for the verifier software to compare. A customer’s voice — now staggeringly easy to fake — can be backstopped by an authenticated biometric of that voice rendered as a cryptographic proof. Everyone can carry a bound biometric proof of who they really are — and relying parties can verify it without having to store the biometric information.
The result: you can instantly know your customer, anywhere. And because consent is built into data sharing, data can be selectively shared, and data storage isn’t required, the Indicio-IDEMIA Public Security solution aligns with GDPR, eIDAS 2.0, and every serious privacy framework, radically simplifying compliance.
Portability and interoperability accelerates finserv
Now that we have secure, trustable, fully portable digital identity, customers and their data can go anywhere and be instantly authenticated, over and over again, until their credential meets a compliance-based expiry date or needs to be revoked.
The authentication bottleneck no longer exists. Account access, cross-border payments, digital asset management all become radically simpler and radically more secure, while meeting compliance obligations.
This is because the Indicio platform and digital wallet is built on open standards and supports every major credential format, protocol, and specification: ISO 18013-5 and 18013-7 for mobile driver’s licenses and mdoc, W3C Verifiable Credentials and DIDs, EU Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet standards, Digital Travel Credentials following ICAO specifications.
With Indicio software, a credential issued in one jurisdiction works globally without custom integrations or API dependencies, or — perhaps most important of all — without a customer having to fuss with their digital wallet. Credential presentation is automatic. The software selects the right credential for a specific verifier; all that’s needed is the customer’s consent to share the data.
Get ahead of the market with Indicio
Other vendors are moving into the verifiable credential space. Large IAM providers are adding verifiable credential features. Hyperscalers are exploring decentralized identity. But most of them are bolting new capabilities onto existing platforms. When this happens, features get deprecated. Indicio built foundational infrastructure from first principles, and that infrastructure becomes the layer everything else depends on.
Indicio has been purpose-built for decentralized identity from the ground up, and that shows in three specific ways.
1. Multi-format, multi-protocol support.Indicio Proven handles AnonCreds, SD-JWT, W3C JSON-LD, OID4VC, OID4VP, DIDComm, mDL, mDoc, and ICAO DTC formats. Financial institutions don’t have to bet on a single standard or wait for the market to converge. They deploy now with coverage across every major credential format and protocol.
2.Interoperability by design Indicio’s standards-first architecture platform doesn’t lock institutions into a proprietary ecosystem; it connects them to the broader decentralized identity landscape, which is exactly what regulators and enterprises need as digital identity frameworks evolve globally.
3. Privacy preservation is architectural.Selective disclosure, zero-knowledge proofs, consent-driven data sharing, and no centralized storage of sensitive data. All are foundational to how the platform works align with every major regulatory direction.
The IDEMIA partnership amplifies all of this. IDEMIA brings world-class identity proofing and biometric verification. Indicio provides the decentralized rails that make verified identity portable, interoperable, and privacy-preserving. Together, they deliver a complete, production-ready solution.
The questions financial institutions should be asking
Any financial institution evaluating its identity architecture should be pressure-testing vendors against a few hard questions:
- Does the solution support all the credential formats my business will encounter across jurisdictions?
- Does it eliminate centralized biometric storage, or just add a new layer on top of existing vulnerability?
- Is it truly interoperable with the broader ecosystem, or does it create another proprietary silo?
- Can it scale globally through a single integration?
- And does the vendor have production-grade infrastructure today, or just a slick slide deck about what’s coming?
These questions matter because the competitive landscape is shifting quickly. Large IAM vendors are adding verifiable credential features to existing platforms, but those features sit on top of centralized architectures that haven’t changed: they offer credentials that are verifiable in their ecosystem, not Verifiable Credentials that can be verified in any ecosystem.
Hyperscalers exploring decentralized identity are still early, and their incentive structures favor platform lock-in over open interoperability. Neither approach solves the fundamental problem of portable, privacy-preserving identity across institutional boundaries.
The IDEMIA-Indicio solution answers every one of those questions in the affirmative. And it’s production-ready and deployable today.
The identity layer financial services is missing
The identity systems financial services have relied on for decades are breaking under the pressure of AI-driven fraud, regulatory acceleration, and the sheer velocity of digital finance. The question is no longer whether decentralized identity will become the standard for financial services, it’s who builds on it first and captures the structural advantage that comes with being early.
Verifiable Credentials with authenticated biometrics, built on open standards and delivered through Indicio’s decentralized infrastructure, are the identity layer financial services has been missing. They defeat AI-driven fraud structurally. They make compliance architectural. They make verified identity portable across every institution and jurisdiction a customer touches.
The IDEMIA-Indicio partnership delivers this in production, at global scale, right now.
Read the full white paper: A Decentralized Identity Layer for Financial Services, by IDEMIA Public Security and Indicio. Or contact Indicio to see how portable, fraud-resistant identity works for your institution.