Digital Identity Modelling for Digital Financial Services in Zambia

Identification and verification have always been at the heart of financial services and payments, which is even more the case in the digital age. So, while banks have long been trusted to keep money safe, is there a new role for them as stewards of digital identity? Governments should, in consultation with the private sector, develop a national identity strategy based on a federated-style model in which public and private sector identity providers would compete to supply trusted digital identities to individuals and businesses. Back then, when the world seemed smaller, slower and more local, physical identity documents were adequate for face-to-face transactions. However, the Internet changed everything. It shrank distances, created new business models and generally sped everything up. From the innovation lifecycle to access to information, processes and the clock-speed on risk, the Internet has accelerated everything. The use of Internet in doing business has grown over the years in Africa and Zambia in particular. As such, the incidences of online identity theft have grown too. Identity theft is becoming a prevalent and increasing problem in Zambia. An identity thief only requires certain identity information to decimate a victim's life and credit. This research proposes to identify and extract various forms of identity attributes from various sources used in the physical and cyberspace to identity users accessing the financial services through extracting identity attributes from the various forms of identity credentials and application forms. Finally, design a digital identity model based on Shannon’s Information theory and Euclidean metric based Euclidean Distance Geometry (EDG) to be used for quantifying, implementation and validating of extracted identity attributes from various forms of identity credentials and application forms, in an effective way.