Who pays when a citizen proves who they are? A Lens on the World Bank guidance for national wallets
Source: Tullis, Christopher; Black, David; and Cooper, Adam. 2026. Digital Wallets: Implementation – Practical Guidance for Deploying Wallets at National Scale. Digital Wallet Policy Note Series. © World Bank.
A note of rare quality
I want to start by applauding the World Bank team. The third note of the Digital Wallet Policy Note Series, after A New Paradigm and Trust Frameworks, is the kind of document practitioners rarely get: precise, honest about trade offs, and full of methods a ministry can reuse the next morning. It maps the ecosystem of issuers, holders, verifiers, trust service providers and wallet providers. It shows how to define a use case, offers a menu of standards in layers, sets out sourcing and financing options, and gives deployment phases from discovery to production. It also draws a distinction I wish every terms of reference made: a use case is a job to be done, not a credential.
I read it with the question I bring to every wallet programme I advise: ten years from now, who pays every time a citizen proves who they are?
The trust framework, not the provider
The note says that whether a wallet is public or private does not decide trust; the trust framework does. That is the line I defended after Global Digital Collaboration: the standard is the language, and the trust framework decides who may speak. A government does not have to build every wallet. It has to own the list of who may issue and who may verify. The note even recommends turning trusted government apps into wallets rather than starting from scratch, with Austria as its example.
The financing chapter is the one to read twice
The note is clear that revenue is not built into wallet ecosystems and is hard to launch early. When verifiers have to pay, many of them do not join. A paid verification interface discourages relying parties from checking the trust anchors. And the privacy we want, with the issuer kept out of the transaction, breaks billing per transaction by design. Its answer is balanced: a full revenue model is not needed to launch. Public money funds the foundations, possibly for good, and targeted fees sit only where value and liability are real, such as identity checks for opening a bank account.
In July, reading Inji with a value proposition lens, we called pay per verification a perpetual tax on your own success. The note reaches the same place through economics and privacy. In budget terms, registries, PKI, trust lists and revocation are public operating costs. The verification of a trust anchor must never become a toll booth.
Open source is necessary, not sufficient
The note does not idealise open source. Lock in can move to the integrator who customised the code, and projects without active maintainers age. That is the test of time we discussed at the Open Source Symposium in Abidjan. The protection sits in the contract: source code ownership, exit management, open formats.
What I would underline for the Global South
The note keeps alternatives to the smartphone: chip cards, cloud wallets, credentials printed on paper. For many of the people our programmes serve, these are the starting point, as ID30 set out in options for inclusive digital wallets. The note also asks for a single Product Owner accountable for coherence. In my experience this is the most decisive recommendation and the hardest to fund. It belongs in the operating budget, not in a project loan.
The question is no longer which wallet to buy. It is who operates the trust, and who pays for it, ten years from now.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the authors, Christopher Tullis, David Black and Adam Cooper, and to Stela Mocan, under whose leadership the note was prepared. Thanks also to the institutions behind it: the World Bank and the Digital Public Infrastructure and Services Umbrella Multi Donor Trust Fund (DPI TF), with its Identification for Development (ID4D) and Government to Person Payments (G2Px) initiatives and its Data Sharing workstream, and to the DPI TF funders: the Gates Foundation, UK International Development, the French Government, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and Omidyar Network.
This Lens is ID30’s own reading. It does not commit the authors or the World Bank.
Sources: Tullis, Christopher; Black, David; and Cooper, Adam. 2026. Digital Wallets: Implementation – Practical Guidance for Deploying Wallets at National Scale. Digital Wallet Policy Note Series. © World Bank.
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