At Mobile World Congress February 26, the GSMA announced that mobile network operators (MNOs) in China and South Korea are among the latest to deploy Mobile Connect to provide identity and authentication services to their customers. China Mobile's identity service, Mobile Authentication, offers a range of authentication capabilities, enabling 76 million users per day in the Chinese market. In South Korea, LGU+ has added the Mobile Connect API to their already successful identity service; with the addition of LGU+, Mobile Connect is now offered by all MNOs in the country and available to more than 44 million mobile subscribers.
'We are seeing the number of operators offering safe and secure digital identity services to their customers rapidly expanding,' said Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer, GSMA. 'Across the globe, mobile operators are fulfilling an important role in the digital identity space, giving users control over their own data and enabling consumers, businesses and governments to interact and access online services in a convenient, private, and trusted environment, regardless of geographical borders.'
The GSMA's Mobile Connect solution enables customers to create and manage a digital universal identity, across multiple online services, via a single login. The service simply and securely authenticates users, enabling them to confirm their identity and their credentials to access mobile and digital services. Mobile Connect works by employing the user's unique mobile number, combined with a unique PIN for more secure use cases, to verify the user's identity, authorise transactions and grant online access.
Mobile Connect is being deployed at a rate of one new operator every month, an increase in operator coverage of around 26 per cent deployment growth year-on-year and is viewed as a trusted solution for secure, consumer-centric digital identity services. In both Brazil and Taiwan, all operators have recently launched interoperable services, and in Russia, four operators - Beeline, MegaFon, MTS and Tele2 - are collaborating in a live pilot with the aim of full commercial service availability in 2018. Orange is currently testing, along with Ariadnext, a new service called 'Mobile Connect et moi' which makes government services available to Orange users on the France Connect portal via their mobile devices. The requirement for digital commerce to ensure secure, consumer-centric digital identity services, combined with the increasing focus on mobile to deliver government services, is driving momentum and creating future growth opportunities.
Around the world, traditional methods of accessing online services via usernames and passwords is reaching the end of its life, so there is a clear opportunity here for operators and industry partners to offer mobile identity services. Research by GSMA Intelligence indicates that the global market opportunity for Mobile Connect to provide authentication, authorisation, identity and attribute services will be approximately US $75 billion by 2022, with a further opportunity to enable cross-border authentication, authorisation and identity services via eIDAS valued at an additional US $2.5 billion in the same timeframe.
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