In a world increasingly driven by digital transformation, governments are navigating the complexities of verifying identity in an online environment. Chile is one of the leading countries when it comes to digital government in Latin America but wants to build on that progress by tackling digital identity.
This was the first occasion on which I worked with an external consultant to complete a publication at the OECD. They had already been working on this for a while before I joined so as with the Data-Driven Public Sector working paper, I picked up a piece that was already quite well advanced.
Unfortunately on this occasion that meant I ended up having to do quite a bit of rewriting and rewiring of the content to make sure we were giving the most value to the Government of Chile. I also wrote an additional chapter that in the end wasn’t included here. Edit: It subsequently came to inform work done for the G20 and the OECD Recommendation on the Governance of Digital Identity.
This study tries to detail all the elements that need to be thought about in terms of the roadmap towards implementing effective digital identity in Chile, drawing on the comparative experience of 13 countries.
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What’s the TL;DR?
This paper explores how Chile can implement a fully functional digital identity system that transforms how citizens prove who they are in a digital world. By building on existing national infrastructure, Chile can streamline identity management while ensuring long-term financial and political support.
An Analytical Framework for Digital Identity
This report doesn’t just focus on Chile in isolation, the Chile study draws on the experiences of Austria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Korea, New
Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom and Uruguay to establish a robust framework. The framework we’ve developed assesses everything from national identity infrastructure and adoption levers to transparency and monitoring. It allows Chile to not only evaluate its progress but also ensure its model is positioned for future scalability and international interoperability.
Chile’s Foundations: Leveraging the Cédula de Identidad
Chile has a strong foundation in its existing Cédula de Identidad and ClaveÚnica systems. We think these can serve as the backbone for further development, eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel. We hope that this means Chile can move quite quickly, building on its strengths while simplifying access to digital services for both citizens and businesses.
The road(map) ahead
This report is more than just a technical guide—it’s a roadmap for how Chile can establish itself as a global leader in digital identity. The recommendations provide the building blocks to ensure that digital identity isn’t just about access, but about trust, empowerment, and seamless service delivery.
Chile has already made impressive strides, but with the right governance, collaboration, and long-term planning, its digital identity strategy can become a model for the region and beyond. As the study emphasises, digital identity is not just a technical solution – it’s a societal transformation.
Policy recommendations
The Recommendations are designed to ensure Chile’s Digital Identity efforts are sustainable and impactful. Here are the most critical points:
- Build Chile’s Digital Identity on the existing infrastructure provided by the Civil Registry Service of Chile (Servicio de Registro Civil e Identificación, SRCeI) and the Cédula de Identidad. As a result Chile does not need to pursue the generation of validated identities with the private sector.
- Ensure the focus on Digital Identity within the Government’s Digital Transformation Strategy is sustainable through the provision of long term financial and political commitment.
- Identify or create a senior responsible role with responsibility to shape and deliver identity according to the vision established by the Government’s Digital Transformation Strategy.
- Consider the design of identity management (both physical and digital) as an end-to-end process throughout a citizen’s life from birth, through life and at death. This should consider the future possibilities of technology in the physical identity card, creating the conditions to iterate the service, and ensure a clear understanding of the needs of users both within and outside government.
- Prioritise development of ClaveÚnica to support putting the citizen in control of their data and being able to grant, and revoke, permissions to access and use it.
- Reach an understanding of the identity needs for businesses and develop a shared roadmap with the relevant organisations for the future state of Digital Identity in general. This may need to include the convergence of business and citizen Digital Identity and the transition of users to consolidate usage around a single approach.
- Identify priority private sector services for the use of ClaveÚnica and establish a working partnership to ensure ClaveÚnica works for the private sector as well as the public sector.
- Establish the adequate legal and regulatory framework to manage the use of
ClaveÚnica credentials to access private sector services, particularly where that opens the possibility of personal data being reused.
- Explore with regional partners how interoperability of identity can facilitate crossborder services and meets the needs of Chilean residents abroad.
- Use the expansion of ClaveÚnica as an opportunity to provide citizens with digital literacy and digital skills training through ChileAtiende and other face to face locations whilst people are activating their ClaveÚnica for the first time.
- Include Digital Identity as an explicit topic in spend controls, quality assurance processes,
design guidelines and training and capacity building. This is to maximise awareness and adoption within government and avoid the development of duplicate solutions.
- Make funding available to meet the needs of government teams in seeing
ClaveÚnica as a reliable and respected service. This should ensure the design of ClaveÚnica’s technical solution is easy to implement and supported by ongoing reference materials, guidance and, where necessary, consultancy. It should also include the necessary support to service teams in producing clear cost-benefit analysis and rationale for identifying return on investment when making business cases for implementation and adoption.
- Review the mechanisms by which public agencies agree to exchange data and
provide guidance and boilerplate templates to support a more efficient process. This should complement efforts to implement interoperability standards across both legacy and newly developed systems.
- Identify Key Performance Indicators relating to the time and cost involved in
providing non-Digital Identity enabled services to provide a baseline for measuring, comparing and demonstrating the benefits of implementing Digital Identity. Publish this as Open Government Data and within the performance dashboards detailing the quality of service provision in Chile.
The blurb
In our interactions with the people we know we don’t give any thought to the proof of their identity. When we meet someone for the first time we trust they are who they say they are. Sometimes an introduction is brokered by a mutual, trusted, acquaintance who knows both parties. However, in our transactional dealings with government there is a greater expectation – and need – to be able to prove who we are, where we live and what we can access. The provision of digital identity (DI) is critical to government ambitions for transforming the quality of public services.
This study discusses Chile’s experience of DI alongside a comparison of 13 OECD countries, and aims to support the Government of Chile in developing and enhancing their approach to the development of DI as a piece of core digital government infrastructure and an enabler of seamless service delivery. The study uses a framework that covers the foundations for identity in terms of existing national identity infrastructure, policies and governance, the technical solutions that have been explored, the factors which impact adoption, and the ways in which DI can empower citizens through greater control of their data, transparency and measurement of impact.
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