Governments, international organisations, standards bodies and industry came together in Geneva for the recent Global Digital Collaboration Conference (GDC26). 

The event is an important forum for shaping the future of digital public infrastructure, and the OpenID Foundation was proud to play an active role, taking part as a co-organiser.

Over three days, the OpenID Foundation ran several sessions and contributed to other key ones, including the Age Assurance, Device API for ID Solutions (DAISi) and Trust Registries tracks. More than 80 people attended through the OpenID Foundation.

Gail Hodges, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation, said: “GDC26 was a valuable opportunity to share the OpenID Foundation’s work with a truly global audience. Our sessions covered some of the most important topics in digital identity today, from digital credentials to age assurance and conformance. I want to thank every member and partner who gave their time to prepare, present and take part. Their contributions are what make this community work.”

Getting to work early

For many OpenID Foundation members, GDC26 started before the doors opened. 

Two days before the global event all kicked off, Joseph Heenan and Thomas Darimont (OpenID Foundation) took part in interoperability testing focused on digital photo IDs, an opportunity for implementers globally to prove out their deployments with the Foundation's OpenID for Verifiable Credentials conformance tools. 

They worked with implementers to test real-world implementations based on OpenID Foundation specifications. The sessions helped confirm interoperability and identify areas for further improvement.

During this time, members of the Digital Credentials Protocols Working Group (DCP WG) and Digital Credentials Harmonized Presentation Working Group (DCHP WG) met in person to agree priorities before the main programme began.

Sharing our work with a global audience

Harmonizing the presentation of credential exchange protocols in ISO/IEC 18013-5 and OID4VP

Joseph Heenan, Oliver Terbu (MATTR) and Andrew Hughes (FaceTec, Inc.) joined Bjorn Hjelm (Yubico) and Loffie Jordaan (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) to present this session.

The session introduced the new OpenID Foundation DCHP WG. The group is developing a specification that brings together in-person and online presentation of digital credentials. It harmonizes ISO/IEC 18013-5 and OpenID for Verifiable Presentations (OID4VP). While designed to be completely credential format agnostic, it initially supports both the mdoc and SD-JWT VC formats. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 17 WG 10 and the OpenID Foundation DCP Working Group jointly support the work. Speakers also set out a roadmap for managing the specification in future.

The session gave attendees a clear view of how the OpenID Foundation is helping digital credentials work across different ecosystems.

The slides for this session can be found here.

Designing a VC/wallet architecture 

More than 30 countries plan to have verifiable credential (VC) and wallet architecture live by the end of 2026. Another 20 have confirmed plans to follow in the next couple of years. Ecosystem decision makers are confronted with a maze of acronyms, standards, and open source options to chart their own course, a course to serve their own priority use cases, cultural and legal context. The same architecture underpins user-centric data sharing, electronic signatures and a growing set of payment use cases, and it has to fit the digital infrastructure a country already runs.

The session took participants through the main architecture options and the key trade-offs decision makers face. It also covered which choices countries have made so far. Participants heard about resources from the World Bank, the OpenID Foundation and open source providers to support decision makers and implementers.

The session was moderated by Dima Postnikov, Vice Chair and Ecosystem Support Community Group Co-chair for the OpenID Foundation. 

Speakers included Mark Verstege (Austroads), Goran Vranic (World Bank Group) Christopher Tullis (World Bank Group), Kristina Yasuda (OpenID Foundation) and Abee Narayan (Unique Identification Authority of India). 

The slides for this session can be found here. 

Conformance, conformance, conformance

The benefits of digital identity standards depend on every implementer in an ecosystem being conformant, and staying conformant. That is why many governments and ecosystem managers require conformance before implementers can join. With the increasing pace of verifiable digital credential and wallet deployments around the world, the European launch later in 2026 being one example, there is a growing number of implementers to support.

Part 1 recapped the conformance requirements of leading jurisdictions, along with best practices, the resources available to implementers, and what remains to be done. Part 2 was an open Q&A. It looked at conformance from two angles: how decision makers develop and run a conformance programme, and how implementers meet global standards and local requirements.

The discussion highlighted the rapid development of conformance infrastructure. Speakers stressed the need for closer coordination between public and private stakeholders, so conformance can support trust at scale.

The sessions were facilitated by Gail Hodges, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation. Speakers included:

• Joseph Heenan (OpenID Foundation)
• Oliver Terbu (MATTR)
• Loffie Jordaan (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators)
• Roland Atoui, (FIDO Alliance)
• Inigo Barreira, (ETSI)
• Sabat Barada, (UIDAI).

The slides for this session can be found here.

Age assurance

Age assurance is a fast moving policy area. The OpenID Foundation contributed to two sessions that brought technical and policy perspectives into the same room.

Deep Dive on Technical Solutions for Age Assurance

Leif Johansson (SIROS Foundation), Gail Hodges (OpenID Foundation) and Christian Bormann (SPRIN-D) led a technical deep dive into age assurance. They framed it as three design decisions. Determination is how a person’s age is established. Communication is how age is shared safely. Enforcement is where and how restrictions apply. Each option has trade-offs. For example, self declared age is easily falsified, and document based checks are not yet widely available.

The speakers compared approaches in Australia, the UK, the EU, California, and Utah, Texas and Louisiana. Each jurisdiction has chosen a different point to be strict about. Gaps in legal guardianship and support for children in care were flagged in most of them. The session found fragmentation, but also some convergence on similar patterns that could be standardised. The speakers advised decision makers to work through the three decisions, learn from peers, layer solutions and use standards where possible.

The slides for this session can be found here. 

Protecting Children in Practice: Learning Across Jurisdictions for Proportionate and Interoperable Age Assurance

This session drew on experience across jurisdictions to identify shared insights, contextual limits and areas where the Age Assurance Task Force could contribute. Speakers included:

• Vinicius Silva (Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services, Brazil)
• Armando Manzueta (Ministry of Public Administration, Dominican Republic)
• Jo Brooks (DSIT, UK)
• Florent Tournois (France Identité, ANTS)
• Christopher Bramwell (Chief Privacy Officer, State of Utah)
• Ani Popiashvili (World Bank Group)
• Elizabeth Garber (OpenID Foundation).

OpenID Federation (Parts 1 and 2)

Part 1: What it is, who is using it, and why it is critical, 2 September, 12pm

Part 1 set out what OpenID Federation is and how it is being used. Ryan Galluzzo (NIST) explained where OpenID Federation fits in NIST guidelines. Michael Jones, Co-chair of the OpenID Foundation AB/Connect Working Group and editor of the OpenID Federation specification, introduced the specification. Case studies followed from:

• Niels van Dijk (SURF/eduGAIN) and Klaas Wierenga (GÉANT Association), on education and research
• Giuseppe De Marco, OpenID Federation editor, on Italy’s federation for verifiable credentials and wallets
• Michael Fraser (Raidiam), on the UK, Australian financial services and agentic AI federations.

Part 2: Requirements and Adoption Whiteboarding Discussion

Gail Hodges set out the scope for a possible cross-border demo and interop. Italo Borsatto shared high level requirements from the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Tamga. Juliana Cafik (an independent Identity Standards and Solutions Architect) and Gail Hodges then led an expert and audience discussion.

Participants discussed whether current X.509, PKI and static list models can meet the needs of cross-border verifiable credential and wallet ecosystems. Themes included:

• the limits of static X.509 certificates for key rotation, revocation and offline use on low-cost readers
• the scale of relying party onboarding and revocation in large ecosystems, with India’s Aadhaar verifiable credentials cited as generating more than one million revocations a day
• fragmentation between separate PKIs, including in financial services
• interest in cross-border pilots, with education and a UK property test case among the examples raised
• composable trust marks, so entities can show several operational capabilities and compliance requirements at once.

David Kelts (Decipher Identity) recorded the session. His notes are available here.

The slides for this session can be found here.

Closing the assurance gap

Juliana Cafik presented alongside Ryan Galluzzo, Loffie Jordaan and Mark Verstege in “Closing the Assurance Gap for KYC”, a session on securing financial account opening. The speakers spoke of the increasing risk to current heuristic identity documents from AI-generated forgeries, presentation attacks and injection attacks. The session looked at how financial institutions can close that gap with verifiable digital credentials, such as state issued mobile Drivers Licences (mDL) at account opening.

Ryan Galluzzo outlined NIST’s practice guide for accepting mobile driving licences at onboarding (SP 1800-42A), developed by the NCCoE with state issuers, AAMVA and financial institutions. The session also covered the trust services that confirm issuers. They include AAMVA’s trust framework and VICAL trusted-issuer list in North America, and the Austroads Digital Trust Service in Australia and New Zealand, which expects over 90% of eligible residents to have access to mobile driving licences by mid 2027.

The session also presented the Identity Proofing Extension, developed by the OpenID Foundation’s eKYC and Identity Assurance Working Group and currently at draft 00. It defines standard claims that describe how rigorously a holder’s identity was proofed, so relying parties can make risk-based decisions and show examiners the verifiable evidence behind them.

The slides for this session can be found here.

Thank you to our community

None of this would have been possible without the time and expertise of our members and partners. Our thanks go to everyone who prepared, presented and moderated sessions, and to all who joined the discussions.

GDC26 showed the value of bringing standards bodies, governments and industry together in one place. The OpenID Foundation looks forward to building on these conversations in the months ahead.

The full record of each session is available in the GDC26 Book of Proceedings, and official photos from the event can be found here.

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to building trusted identity ecosystems. Our mission is to lead the global community in identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy respecting. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts. The Foundation's OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. More recently, the FAPI security profile - built on OAuth 2.0 - has become the standard of choice for interoperable Open Banking and Open Data implementations, while OpenID for Verifiable Credentials specifications are underpinning a new generation of digital wallets. Today, the OpenID Foundation's standards are the connective tissue that enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling "networks of networks" to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.