The UK CertifID trust mark went live on 1 September, giving certified identity providers a government-backed badge. It helps consumers and organisations check whether a digital identity and verification service (DVS) complies with UK government standards. A further certification deadline lands on 1 October – from then on, employers and landlords must use a registered provider.
Meanwhile, earlier in the year, the Home Affairs Committee told the government its digital ID plans were "doomed to fail".
It seems that Westminster still hasn't settled on a single approach to digital identity and MPs remain split on whether identity should be verified by the state or by private providers.
Watching this from inside the property sector, the argument feels increasingly beside the point.
The property sector is already making moves
Back in June, the industry-led MyIdentity project paused its work on reusable identity for home-buying, citing "repeated delays and false starts" in government strategy. MyIdentity had cross-industry backing and a sensible goal: verify a buyer or seller once, and let that verification travel with them through the chain.
Its pause says more about the difficulty of attempting to meet ever-changing government guidance than it does about whether the underlying idea works.
The property sector is beginning to get tired of waiting around. Lenders, brokers, and conveyancers still have to meet the same AML Regulations whether or not Westminster has settled on a national model for verifying identity, and some of them have already built or adopted systems that verify a client once and share that verification, securely and with permission, across a transaction.
The government-versus-private framing treats digital ID as a single national decision still waiting to be made. In practice, it's already making some headway, just unevenly.
Verify once, use many times
The idea is a good one: A de-siloed future for home moving. One where a full dossier of financial information is created at the start of the transaction, letting other parties in the chain draw parcels of information that they need to satisfy their own checks when required.
The Lloyds Digital Home Buyer Service pilot is one of the furthest the industry has gone in making this a reality. Under the new pilot, the mortgage broker asks the home buyer to prepare information required for ID and source of funds much earlier in the home buying journey. Once instructed, other property professionals can then retrieve this verified data securely from Credas and Armalytix via LMS’s National Property Transaction Network (NPTN), with the homebuyer’s consent.
In the end, it means that home movers prepare their information only once and can approve access to the parties that need it, and property professionals across the chain are freed from chasing clients for missing information, allowing them to focus on progressing the transaction.
What's still missing is consistency at an industry-wide level.
What CertifID and the 1 October deadline change
UK CertifID puts a government-recognised mark on services that meet a published standard, giving certified providers a place on the government’s Digital Verification Services Register, and allowing lenders and conveyancers to see at a glance that an identity check was carried out by a certified provider, rather than an unregulated one.
HM Treasury guidance has clarified that certified services on the register can be used by regulated entities as part of their customer due diligence processes, including to fulfil identity-verification obligations under AML Regulations. Non-certified services can't reliably be treated the same way.
The trust mark gives firms a defensible answer when a regulator or auditor asks why they relied on a particular check. It also starts to make an ID check done by someone else in the chain something a firm can trust rather than something it has to redo – which is the whole point of a trust mark, and what the property sector actually needs regardless of where the government/private debate ends up.
The industry doesn’t need to wait
Standards for what "good enough" verification looks like vary between the professions involved in a single transaction, and there's no single obligation forcing interoperability between systems.
Closing that gap doesn’t necessarily need to wait for a national ID verification model. It needs the players in the property market to agree on shared standards for reuse – something the industry can build well ahead of any decision Westminster eventually makes.
