Six of the UK's biggest banks and building societies have joined an industry-led initiative to build a digital authentication service that will allow customers to verify their identity through their banking system, a move by the financial sector to establish its role in digital identity. Coordinated by industry body UK Finance and launched on 25 June 2026 at its Digital Innovation Summit, the project is supported by Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest Group and Santander.
The service is designed to resolve common transactional conflicts on the Internet. Many digital processes still require customers to verify their identity repeatedly, often by providing multiple documents to verify a single fact such as their name, age or address. The proposed service will replace it with a secure digital exchange built on the existing relationship between the bank and its customer: the relevant verified information will be shared with a third party only to the extent the work is required, the customer has approved each request through his banking application. The arrangement will be voluntary and based on express consent, with customers retaining control over what data is shared and when.
Banks use different assets. Financial institutions already hold verified information about their customers, which have performed identity checks to meet know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering requirements, and the initiative aims to put that trusted, pre-verified data into wider use. Jana Mackintosh, managing director of payments and innovation at UK Finance, has set out the framework for the sector and is well positioned to deliver a secure and reliable authentication service, arguing that using authenticated information shared only with the customer's consent can make digital transactions safer, faster and easier while keeping people in control of their data. The technology design and delivery is led by Select ID, whose CEO Nick Mothershaw welcomed the move as a way to put bank-verified information to use in making digital authentication safer and easier.
The project is deliberately sidelined, instead of opposing, the government's own work. UK Finance stressed that the bank-led service is separate from the government's digital identity scheme, which has sparked public opposition, and is instead in line with the UK's digital verification services trust framework, which targets the private sector for commercial and retail use rather than public sector applications. By limiting the service to commercial use cases and introducing it as complementary, the industry seeks to take a clearly defined position in digital authentication while avoiding the controversy surrounding government-led identity schemes.
The commercial and security logic behind this system is great. UK Finance's latest annual fraud figures show that criminals will steal £1.28 billion through payment fraud in 2025, a 4% increase, underscoring the pressure on the sector to make digital transactions more secure, and the trusted bank-guaranteed guarantee can reduce the risk of conflict and fraud that comes with the repeated sharing of documents. A widely accepted authentication service could create a valuable position for banks in the digital economy, embedding them in the trading of merchants, platforms and other businesses that need to verify customer information, and UK Finance has invited interested parties to take part in future pilot work.
The program is still in its early stages, with a real-world pilot the next test to see if it works. The project has completed proof-of-concept work using synthetic data to assess technical, legal and operational requirements, and a live pilot in a controlled environment is planned for the coming months. Whether the service gets wider adoption will depend on that pilot, how many businesses choose to accept bank-verified credentials, and whether customers trust banks to handle exchanges – but the backing of the country's six biggest lenders gives the financial sector a credible claim to a key role in how digital ownership develops in the UK.
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