Six of the UK’s largest banks are building shared identity verification infrastructure that would let customers prove personal details through their banking app rather than uploading documents to each individual service. UK Finance announced on June 25, 2026, that Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest Group, and Santander have completed a proof-of-concept and will proceed to a live pilot in a real-world environment in the coming months.
The service would allow a customer to share verified personal information, such as name, age, or address, with a third party through their bank’s app, with explicit consent required each time. The initiative is explicitly separate from the UK government’s mandatory digital identity scheme under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and is designed for private sector and retail use cases only. UK Finance managing director Jana Mackintosh described the aim as making transactions “safer, quicker and more convenient.” The announcement comes against a backdrop of fraud losses exceeding 500 million pounds in 2025, with synthetic identities and authorized push payment scams the primary drivers.
The strategic logic here runs deeper than KYC convenience. If UK banks succeed in building a shared, bank-verified identity layer that third-party services can query with customer consent, they move from being back-end payment processors to being trust infrastructure for the broader digital economy. That is a significant expansion of the bank’s role in the customer relationship, and a potential revenue model based on identity verification as a service rather than lending margin. It also positions UK banks as the compliance gateway for regulated services across sectors including insurance, property, and lending, rather than ceding that ground to standalone digital identity providers. The proof-of-concept completion suggests technical viability; the live pilot will determine whether merchant and service adoption follows.
Related: PayPoint Acquires Aperidata: Open Banking Credit Enters Payment Infrastructure
Source: City A.M.
