Identifying the Key Factors in Adopting Digital ID Service and Profiling the Early Adopters

Despite the digital transformation going on around us, the methods of proving our identity remain locked in a traditional physical mode, with paper or plastic documents, and the reliance on these traditional modes of proving identification and authentication is becoming a significant barrier to innovation. Therefore, creating a digital identity and authentication method that is highly secure, ubiquitous and convenient is necessary. A new digital identity system will allow us to do things online that we have traditionally used physical ID for. However, this is a complex and costly undertaking—a task so complex and varied that it does not fully exist yet. Because an identity is both deeply personal and foundational to important matters like wealth and access to services, widespread adoption by individuals and even organizations will depend not only on the technical capabilities of a particular solution, but also (and likely even more so) on the individuals’ trust and acceptance of a solutions provider has been granted. In this research, we aim not only to profile the early adopters of digital ID in terms of demographic and psychological characteristics but also to run some experiments and measure people’s experience with a proof of concept (POC) of a digital

Faculty Supervisor:

Frank Safayeni

Student:

Ahmad Tanehkar

Partner:

Interac Corp

Discipline:

Other

Sector:

Finance, insurance and business

University:

University of Waterloo