Hosted by KuppingerCole, in Berlin, in May 2025, the annual European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC2025) brought together global leaders to tackle one of our most pressing digital challenges: building truly interoperable digital identity ecosystems. Meeco was privileged to participate in four informative sessions that explored the path from today's fragmented solutions to tomorrow's seamless, secure digital future.
Together with our strategic partner, DNP, we collaborated with people from the Asia-Pacific, UK and Europe to co-create the four sessions outlined in this retrospective of the event.
From Digital Identity Solutions To Digital Identity Ecosystems: What It Will Take To Achieve Scale And Interoperability
In her keynote presentation, Katryna Dow, CEO & Founder of Meeco, emphasized a fundamental shift in thinking about digital identity. Despite a decade of significant investment and innovation, we still lack common global infrastructure and cross-border interoperability. The fragmented approach of standalone solutions has created silos that simply don't support how we live and work in an increasingly borderless digital world.
The solution lies in ecosystem thinking, moving from isolated solutions to integrated, interoperable systems built on trust frameworks, standards, and clear governance. As Katryna noted,
"If it takes a village to raise a child, it's going to take cooperative ecosystems to ensure the next generation can enjoy a seamless and secure digital future."
This shift is becoming increasingly urgent with the rise of AI-related fraud, creating a growing need for universal digital identity infrastructure across finance, healthcare, and government sectors. The focus must now move from technical capabilities to usability and international cooperation, building infrastructure rather than isolated solutions.
Katryna’s keynote was a great precursor to the focus of the other sessions, starting with the development of ecosystems in the Asia Pacific Region, followed by the nuances of language in the digital world, and finally the challenges and opportunities in the development of an identity scheme.
Ecosystem Approach to Cross Border Collaboration from the Asia Pacific Region
Following on from last year’s EIC session on cross-border collation, this year Rintaro Okamoto, Team Leader of Business Development for Digital Identity at DNP, introduced some of the groundbreaking work happening in the Asia-Pacific region through the Asia Pacific Digital Identity (APDI) Consortium. This initiative, spearheaded by DNP following the Japanese launch of their decentralized identity network in August 2024, demonstrates how collaborative ecosystems can work in practice.
Jeff Hu, Founder & CEO of Turing Space, which is also an ADPI founding member, explained why focusing on digital identity in the Asia Pacific Region is so important. The region comprises 36 countries, 4.78 billion people, which represents 60% of the world’s population. The region's diversity in culture, languages, and socio-economic backgrounds presents unique challenges and opportunities for digital identity standardization and trust-building.
Spanning Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Myanmar, and Australia, APDI is creating real-world applications that solve practical problems—from streamlining bank account opening to facilitating cross-border student exchanges and tourism.
Rintaro Okamoto from DNP focused in on specific challenges to the tourism sector in Japan and the need for practical solutions that help to address the challenges of labor shortages in hospitality and inefficient traditional identity verification methods.
Building on the use case Jihyun Jang, Head of Overseas Business and Business Planning at LORDSYSTEM, also an APDI founding member, spoke to the showcased demo video aiming to streamline cross-border tourism between South Korea and Japan.
Next up Jan Vereecken, Chief Product Officer at Meeco, provided the technical grounding for what makes interoperability possible through the use of global standards and the Identity Network Verification (INV) capability co-developed by DNP and Meeco. The INV acts as a bridge responsible for mapping between domains, including protocol and data translation.
Jeff Hu wrapped up the session stating that APDI's commitment to global compatibility, including alignment with European frameworks, is what makes it particularly compelling. This sets a precedent for how regional initiatives can contribute to worldwide interoperability.
Verifiable Credentials and the Challenges of Language
One of the fascinating discussions centered on the challenges of Verifiable Credentials across different languages and cultural contexts. The value of Verifiable Credentials lies in their verified, tamper-proof nature, but what happens when the language and characters used aren't supported by verifiers in other jurisdictions?
This session featured Roman Zoun, Value Stream Lead Digital Wallet, Swisscom AG and Rintaro Okamoto from DNP. Both Roman and Rintaro shared personal examples of how their respective names are expressed and recorded differently across languages and writing systems.
The complexity goes beyond simple translation. Issues arise when naming conventions, writing systems (Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese scripts), and romanization standards differ between issuing and verifying countries. These linguistic diversities create real friction in identity verification, highlighting the need for adaptive digital identity systems that respect cultural differences without compromising security and efficiency.
The discussion revealed that solutions must embed identifiers in machine-readable formats while remaining culturally sensitive – a technical challenge that requires both innovation and cultural understanding.
Building an Identity Scheme Needs More Than a Trust Framework
Perhaps most importantly, the conference addressed a critical gap in current digital identity thinking: commercial viability. While significant progress has been made in developing trust frameworks and technical standards, building successful identity schemes requires much more.
Katryna Dow from Meeco, kicked off the session by setting the scene; around the world, there has been significant progress in developing trust frameworks and technical standards. These help to provide alignment on identity assurance, but for an identity scheme to be commercially viable, many more things need to be considered.
Rintaro Okamoto from DNP, framed the session through the importance of legal, technical and commercial clarity in order to accelerate ecosystem development. He touched on some of DNP’s achievements from collaboration with the Japanese Government on the Trusted Web Initiative through to the launch of DNP’s decentralized identity solution. He highlighted the complex challenge of aligning stakeholders across multiple dimensions of governance, technology, and commercial viability.
Steve Pannifer, SVP Digital Identity, FIME, provided an instructive introduction and overview of the role of schemes. His presentation focused on why schemes are so important, what we can learn from the payments industry, and the critical importance of governance vs operation. He shared a very helpful diagram outlining the role of a scheme owner, operator, member and user and their unique relationship to a shared set of rules.
It was great to have Takuya Omura, Managing Director of the Business Development Office, MUFG, back at EIC. This year Takuya focused on why the banking industry is facing the need to redefine its societal role and develop strategies for future growth. He highlighted progress in technological innovation including decentralized identity, expansion of open banking, integrating open data, and offering personalized services to leverage banks’ credibility and networks.
The session was wrapped up by Yasuyuki Imai, Head of Business Development for Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials, MUTB, sharing an overview of the Japanese DID/VC Co-creation consortium. The consortium’s aim is to co-create business opportunities and achieve interoperability across decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. The vision is to achieve interoperability across various decentralized identity platforms through a shared governance framework.
In summary, as regulatory considerations vary by jurisdiction, affecting how schemes can operate globally, the real challenge lies in enabling interoperability across multiple schemes, which is ultimately what will allow digital identity to work at scale. This requires risk management, technical interoperability, and common rules all supported by robust commercial frameworks.
The Path Forward: Cooperation Over Competition
The insights from EIC2025 point to a clear conclusion: the future of digital identity depends on shifting from competition to cooperation. Successful implementation requires viewing ecosystems through the lens of shared utility rather than single-use applications. Key elements for success include:
- User-centric design that prioritizes convenience and trust
- Public-private collaboration that leverages the strengths of both sectors
- Open standards and interoperability that prevent vendor lock-in
- Governance frameworks that provide clear rules while enabling innovation
- Commercial sustainability that supports long-term viability
At Meeco, we're committed to this ecosystem approach. Our work in personal data and digital identity management aligns with the vision articulated at EIC2025 building solutions that put users in control while enabling the seamless, secure digital interactions that our connected world demands.
The conference made clear that while the technical challenges are significant, the greater challenges are organizational and commercial. Success will require unprecedented cooperation across industries, jurisdictions, and cultures. But the potential reward, a truly interoperable, secure, and user-friendly digital identity ecosystem, makes this effort not just worthwhile, but essential for our digital future.
As we move forward, the question isn't whether we can build these ecosystems, but whether we have the collective will to prioritize cooperation over competition, and long-term sustainability over short-term gains. The discussions at EIC2025 suggest that momentum is building toward exactly this kind of collaborative approach and that's cause for optimism about the future of digital identity.
No doubt this topic will continue at EIC2026 where we look forward to participating and showcasing another year of progress!
