With over 3 billion enabled users world-wide and its federated distributed architecture, Mobile Connect is unfolding the success of mobile identity and authentication for governments, the mobile operators and its ecosystem players.
Mobile Connect and eIDAS have large parallels and while Mobile Connect has been designed to meet eIDAS requirements, there are many working areas of collaboration to accelerate Mobile Connect and eIDAS successful implementations. As the deadline for eIDAS mandatory recognition of notified EU identity schemes is rapidly approaching, the momentum for such cooperation is becoming more urgent.
In November 2015, mobile operators and government agencies launched a pilot to demonstrate how Mobile Connect can be used to identify a EU-citizen of one Member State in order to gain access to a public service of another. Spanning Spain Catalunia and Finland, the pilot established proof-of-concept for cross-border authentication to e-Government services, in line with the requirements of the eIDAS regulation.
The pilot enabled customers of participating Spanish operators to login to Finnish eGovernment services and vice versa. The login through a digital identity validator granted access to a complete public services portfolio. After the customer pressed the Mobile Connect button and entered their mobile number on the discover page, a PIN request appeared on their mobile phone. By entering the correct PIN, the user’s identity was confirmed and the customer was logged-in to the eGovernment online service.
The two-month pilot was the result of collaboration between organisations seeking to accelerate the uptake of trusted and secure digital authentication in response to the eIDAS Regulation. The GSMA with major operators, Orange Spain, Telefónica, TeliaSonera, and Vodafone Spain supported the trial, together with technology company Gemalto, Mobile World Capital, the Catalonia Regional Government, the Finnish Ministry of Finance and Finnish Population Registration Centre. It provided a good understanding of the architecture options and key issues that determine the choice of such options
Phase two of the pilot will demonstrate the scalability of Mobile Connect as a Europe-wide solution for eIDAS. It will enable cross-border authentication of EU-citizens from five different countries and served by more than nine mobile operators. The second phase will also test different architectural options to demonstrate the flexibility of Mobile Connect to meet government requirements across the EU.
The overarching goal of the pilot is to create an operational forum for public–private cooperation to accelerate eIDAS implementations/notifications for mobile operators and the wider digital identity ecosystem through Mobile Connect. It will also help to ensure the interoperability of Mobile Connect with eIDAS technical specifications and facilitate a common understanding of terminology and requirements across stakeholders. At the same time, it will serve to clarify the role of new technologies and business opportunity arising from eIDAS in the digital identity ecosystem.
The kick-off call for this pilot is scheduled on Thursday 16th March at 9:00 am GMT time followed by a physical meeting on Wednesday 20th April at the GSMA Brussels offices.
if you are interested please to join this initiative please contact me at mienco@gsma.com with the details of your organisations and email address
We look forward to speaking with you
Best regards,
Marta
Please note that you can find more information about Mobile Connect here