Australian company eftpos, a debit card and electronic payment founded in the 1980s, has partnered with Maven, a South Australian disability consulting service that’s owned by Scope Global. Maven consults with businesses, governments and other nonprofits on digital content accessibility and disability awareness training. The collaboration is launching its pilot program, which strives to simplify digital identity strategies for people living with disabilities, yielding greater independence in their business transactions.

Eftpos and the Origins of Digital Identity

The company rolled out a new digital identity platform, connectID, in July of this year. Its priorities were simple: defend online identities and protect them from fraud. The pilot will run through the connectID platform, with particular focus on people who are visually impaired, experience cerebral palsy, or those that, for medical reasons, use assistive devices to access the digital spaces.

“The pilot will allow a joint assessment of the market need and commercial opportunity for identity service providers linked to the eftpos ecosystem while designing improved identity verification methods for people with a disability,” says Scope Global Chairman David Travers. Their main goal in this project is to consult and gather feedback on technological approaches to ability-appropriate digital services.

Who Is It For?

About 17% of people in Australia live with a disability, and as the world shifts to a digital reality, more and more of that population have expressed significant challenges as a result of trying to use these technologies. Zel Iscel, Scope Global Maven Disability Inclusion Advisor, for example, is legally blind. She has expressed disdain over the inaccessibility of digital identification processes and hopes the collaboration will mitigate that.

“If the form fields are not coded or labelled properly, I’m unable to input basic details such as my name,” Iscel says. “Visual captchas are impossible for me, so I have to wait for someone sighted. I just want to get it done when I want to—and it’s just super annoying when that doesn’t happen!”

She also commends eftpos’s work in accessibility for its digital identity tool: “I would absolutely use the technology as it means I can complete what I need to online and wouldn’t have to rely on anyone,” Iscel said. “Also, if the technology allows for various ways to verify and manage identification, I believe people with disability would use it. We cherish our right for independence, choice and control, and we appreciate opportunities that allow us to exercise these rights.”

A Collaboration For the Ages

In the words of Rob Allen, Entrepreneur in Residence at connectID, the platform could be used to verify a consumer’s identity using proof of address, age and bank account information, alongside e-commerce transactions or to ensure government payments.

“The interoperable connectID solution is designed to work within the TDIF and the Australian payment industry’s TrustID framework, as well as emerging international standards, potentially opening much more of the online world to Australians with a disability,” Allen says.

ConnectID acts as a broker between identity providers and merchants that need to verify the identities of their consumers; while the platform facilitates the verification process, the data is not stored.

ConnectID, along with Maven and eftpos, prides its services on one thing in particular: security and rightful ownership of identity.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Olivia Baker is a Tech Innovation Fellow at Identity Review from Columbia University, where she writes on tech policy and national digital identity technologies.