There is a particular frustration familiar to anyone who has opened a new bank account, signed up for a new investment platform, or registered with a new insurance provider. The process begins with identity verification — the same identity verification you completed last month for a different provider. You photograph the same government ID, take the same selfie, enter the same personal details, and wait for the same approval process. The information has not changed. The person has not changed. But the system treats each interaction as if you have never been verified before.

This redundancy is not just annoying for users. It is expensive for businesses. Every new verification is a cost centre — document processing, biometric matching, manual review for edge cases, and the fraud losses that occur when the process is too slow and users abandon onboarding. Industry estimates suggest that the average cost of a single identity verification ranges from two to fifteen dollars depending on the jurisdiction and complexity, and that onboarding abandonment rates due to friction hover around 40 percent for financial services applications.

Identity portability is the concept that a verification performed by one trusted party should be reusable by another, with the user's consent. You verify once, receive a credential, and present that credential to any subsequent service that needs to confirm your identity. The verification is done. The data follows you — or more precisely, a cryptographic proof of the verification follows you, without the underlying personal data needing to be shared again.

The technical foundations for this already exist. Verifiable credentials, underpinned by decentralised identity standards, allow a trusted issuer to create a tamper-evident digital credential that can be independently verified by any relying party. The EU's eIDAS 2.0 framework is building this into continental-scale infrastructure, with digital identity wallets that will allow citizens to carry verified credentials across borders and sectors.

The business case is compelling from both sides of the transaction. For the user, it eliminates repeated friction and reduces the amount of personal data scattered across multiple databases — each one a potential breach target. For the business, it reduces verification costs, accelerates onboarding, and improves conversion rates. A customer who presents a pre-verified credential can be onboarded in seconds rather than minutes or days.

The regulatory framework is also evolving to support portability. Open banking regulations in the UK and EU already established the principle that financial data should be portable with user consent. Extending this principle to identity data is the logical next step, and several jurisdictions are actively legislating in this direction.

The transition will require businesses to adopt verification systems that can both issue and accept portable credentials. This means moving beyond one-time document checks toward infrastructure that produces reusable, standards-compliant verification results.

For organisations looking to reduce onboarding friction while maintaining compliance, deepidv provides identity verification infrastructure that is designed for the portable identity future — producing verification results that can be leveraged across customer journeys, reducing re-verification overhead while maintaining regulatory confidence.