Kia ora,
While New Zealand voted on 7 November, thanks to a paper system we won’t get the official result until 27 November. Close to 400,000 special votes, about one in seven, are checked by hand because the voter was overseas, outside their electorate or enrolled late. The voter is always right, and the system should serve the voter, not the other way round. Trusted digital identity done right, sovereign, decentralised and held by the person, puts the ballot in the voter’s hands: eligibility proven once, a vote cast from anywhere, counted as it is cast, and more people taking part. Estonia has voted that way since 2005.
The building blocks are arriving here. On 28 October the Trust Framework Authority accredited the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Emloyment’s (MBIE) NZBN Business Passport, the first government-issued digital credential, and the Westpac trial opened on 3 November. A business can now prove who it is and who may act for it in one presentation. For payments, productivity and the fight against fraud and scams, that is world-leading.
Also inside: our 2027 strategy, the first cross-sector workshop on identity in payments, and the Trust Survey report. Executive Council voting is now open.
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Ngā mihi nui,
Andy Higgs
Executive Director,
Digital Identity New Zealand
DINZ Update
NZBN Business Passport: a government first
On 28 October MBIE became the first government agency accredited under the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework. On 3 November the NZBN Business Passport trial opened with selected Westpac business customers. The credential sits in the Govt.nz app wallet, is built from information already on the NZBN Register, and lets a business prove its identity and that the person holding the phone is authorised to act for it. Presented alongside Westpac’s bank account credential, it gives a verified business and a verified account in one flow.
Supplier onboarding, invoice payment and business account opening are where invoice redirection and impersonation do the most damage. A verifiable business credential settles trust before the payment is made, and it removes the paperwork every business repeats for every new relationship. NZBN Business Passport supplier onboarding is a YourID Adoption Pattern in the Your ID, Your Way initiative. Congratulations to the MBIE NZBN team and to Westpac, it is so good to see DINZ members leading the way!
Read MBIE’s announcement
2027 strategy: three initiatives
Our 2026/2027 strategic plan has been endorsed by our Executive Council, which sets three initiatives alongside our standing work on the Trust Survey, Hui Taumata and working groups.
- Your ID, Your Way. The public education and trust platform, supported by the Government Digital Delivery Agency and built on the YourID Adoption Patterns from the TCA Working Group (lost phone and SIM replacement, bank account opening, proof of bank account, qualifications and professional credentials, visitor registration, and age verification). Partner interest has been strong across banking, payments, telecommunications, security, education and government. The full site goes live in February 2027, timed to the credential roadmap so it launches when there are credentials to point to. Later this month the Digital Identity New Zealand website gets a major update on the progress the TCA Working Group has made, including the YourID Adoption Patterns.
- Cross-sector trust infrastructure for fiduciary agents and portable memory. The infrastructure that lets a person, business or community run an AI agent that holds their keys, data and rules, and acts for them rather than for a platform. A Māori-led verifiable trust network is the proposed model, to be validated with partners. There is promising interest from offshore, and funding is being sought for Māori-led pilots in 2027.
Māori organisations that want to lead or take part in a funded pilot should get in touch. - A neutral namespace and proxy identifier layer. The shared infrastructure beneath the first two: identifiers and credentials that nobody owns and everyone can build on, run as a consortium rather than as any one platform’s QR code. We are looking for the right home for it.
Identity in payments: first cross-sector workshop
On 30 October the first cross-sector workshop on digital identity in payments was held in Wellington, convened by Andrew Dodd with DINZ, Government Digital Delivery Agency (GDDA) and Payments NZ, and facilitated by Creative HQ. Banks, acquirers and payments technology providers were in the room. Our scene-setter, Identity Is the Rail, made one point: the Reserve Bank’s Payments Modernisation Issues Paper scores the identity and credential layer as the most broadly useful measure in its Appendix F, then leaves it out of the options. Trust established before a payment executes beats loss allocated afterwards. The workshop outputs are being written up and we will report the working group’s next steps in December.
Towards Universal Trust: the 2026 Trust Survey report
This month we released the full report of our 2026 Trust Survey, with fieldwork by Yabble and a foreword from our Chair, Maria Robertson. Nearly half of New Zealanders have been targeted by a scam, 52% walk away when a business over-asks, 77% are comfortable proving a single fact such as being over 18, and 61% are ready or open to a reusable digital identity. A trust mark would lift trust for 68%, yet only 29% know one exists.
Briefing the incoming minister
The election brings the prospect of a new digital minister, and there is real talent across the spectrum. We will brief the incoming minister as part of the Tech New Zealand briefing process. Two priorities: accelerating sovereign digital public infrastructure, and public education on trusted digital identity, with Your ID, Your Way as the programme that carries adoption. The NZBN Business Passport shows what happens when the public sector issues a credential and a bank accepts it.
Members with priorities for the briefing, send them to us this month.
Executive Council elections
Nominations closed on 3 November with members standing in all three categories. Voting is now open and the results will be announced at our Annual Meeting on 3 December. Thank you to everyone who put their name forward.
Read more and register for our Annual Meeting.
Industry News
Move the authorisation, not the key
Glenn Gore, CEO of Affinidi, published the second piece in his series on agent trust in October. The argument: an agent should never carry your signing key. It carries a bounded, checkable authorisation for one task, and the key stays where it is, like a notary’s seal that never leaves the room. The open-source Verifiable Trust Agent in the OpenVTC project under LF Decentralized Trust already works this way, and its Trust Spanning Protocol passed a public conformance suite across five implementations in September. It is the architecture behind our second strategic initiative.
Read it on LinkedIn
Portable memory is the next identity question
The Global Portable Memory Workshop at Stanford Human-Centred AI (HAI) in October asked who owns the memory an AI agent builds about you, and how it moves with you when you change providers. It is the same question as who holds your credentials, and the answer has to be the same: the person.
Cyber attacks up, all sectors exposed
In October I met senior figures in the industry, and two things came through. Cyber-attacks are on the rise, with anecdotal evidence of a tenfold increase. And AI simulations run by the World Bank are reported to show the sector as particularly vulnerable. Attackers now use AI to impersonate at scale. The defence is the same layer that stops scams: verified people, verified businesses and verified agents, with trust established before a transaction executes.
Read the full newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/digitalidentity/trust-in-the-future-november-newsletter