Proving that you are who you say you are can be hard at the best of times – my local GP requires two forms of identification to sign up, signing up for a bank account requires a passport or birth certificate and I’ve even had jobs where I’ve needed to supply my passport for photocopying before they’d take me on.

When you take your interactions online the problem becomes substantially more complicated, as there aren’t many brokers of identity information that’re trusted enough to replace physically viewing a passport or birth certificate. This results in a worst-of-both-worlds situation, where you complete half of your interaction with a third-party online and are then forced offline to supply the relevant credentials before firing things off at the mercy of the postal service.

There are solutions. Providers exist who will – once you’ve proven who you are to them physically in a Post Office or similar (and with associated identity documentation) – verify your identity to third-parties on your request. However, they suffer a number of issues:

• The scope of identity information required to authenticate with the identity broker is fixed
• Your identity isn’t necessarily re-validated, and certainly not automatically (unless you’re going to head into the Post Office once a month with your passport to re-confirm your identity) – this makes the claims the identity broker make about your identity less compelling the further away we get from the original validation time
• You’re still required to go offline to provide relevant credentials

miiCard is an Edinburgh-based start-up that’s hoping to change that. Instead of providing physical verification of your identity you instead utilise your existing online trust relationships with people like financial providers – you then share your verified identity with as few or many people as you like. By basing their identity assurance on something that required physical proof of identity in the first place (e.g. a bank account), that level of assurance can then be passed on and consumed. Even better – because the sources of that identity are online, your identity can be validated and re-validated whenever is necessary – it doesn’t become stale over time.

Proving who you are in such a way will allow you to complete split online-offline interactions purely online. It’ll also let you rest assured that the person who just contacted you on LinkedIn, who you’re buying from an auction site or who you just received a sales inquiry from is both a real-life person (and not a sock-puppet) and that they are who they claim to be.

It’s so compelling an idea that I’ve signed up for one and validated my identity. And then I’ve gone one step further and joined them as a software developer. I’m delighted to be part of the team, and know that there are some exciting ways to both validate and consume identity as part of a very pacy roadmap.