Singapore and India engage in cross-border DPI through verifiable employment credentials

A Singaporean business looking to hire talent across borders typically takes weeks to manually screen and verify the backgrounds of overseas candidates. 

It could also run the risk of being a victim of fraud, with one in four hiring profiles expected to be fake in 2028. 

For overseas candidates, they would also need to manually submit their documents to multiple employers repeatedly. 

But this verification process for career-related credentials for candidates from India applying to Singapore for work is set to become more secure and efficient, with a new pilot launched by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) last December. 

IMDA is collaborating with employment background companies to leverage Affinidi’s decentralised tech solutions.  

By tapping into digitally verifiable credentials and decentralised identifiers, the pilot transforms a candidate’s credentials into a “reusable professional passport” that is cryptographically signed and stored in the candidate’s digital wallets. 

This is expected to cut the verification time from weeks to minutes for candidates and employers alike. 

While the pilot starts with employment, the infrastructure is intended to transform access to other sectors like healthcare, education, and financial services, says Affinidi’s CEO Glenn Gore in an official release.  

He shares more about key lessons from the building this reusable credential ecosystem for cross-border identity verification. 

Verification as the key to unlock cross-border DPI? 

Cross-border verification provides the trust layer needed to scale digital public infrastructure (DPI) beyond national borders.  

Being able to securely unlock data mobility allows governments to evolve DPI from a domestic conversation into a global one, enable governments, businesses and individuals to transact around the world with confidence. 

Speaking to GovInsider, Gore shares that enabling cross-border interoperability takes more than just implementing technical standards. 

What is more important is a clear commitment from the government to adopt open standards and have a governance structure to put these standards into practice. 

The IMDA’s infrastructure is built on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credentials and Decentralised Identifiers, which are a set of standards for self-sovereign digital identity that allows individuals to own and control their digital information. 

Equally important is establishing the governance structure to allow for equal participation by all partners like issuers, verifiers, and those working with credentials. 

“The moment anyone tries to lock data up, they go against the standards and the ecosystem's purpose,” he explains. 

He adds that it is important for governments to establish and enforce a separation of duties between data issuers, holders and validators; consent management at granular levels; verified presentation of data; search and discovery mechanisms; and trust registries for authenticity validation. 

“This governance structure, built on open standards, enables strategic partnerships among issuing authorities, verifiers, and data holders, fostering a common understanding that allows data to flow across borders while protecting citizen rights,” he notes. 

Citizen-owned data and DPI 

“Whenever new data becomes accessible with individual control, it drives significant innovation around use cases,” Glenn says. 

Innovation isn’t in speeding up existing processes but unlocking the possibilities of what the private sector can offer to citizens through citizen-owned data, he stresses. 

“This creates opportunities for the next generation of startups to build solutions that leverage more individual data, with citizens choosing what to share,” he explains. 

For governments, establishing a cross-border verification system may be the first step.  

To take this further, governments can define use cases to encourage private sector collaboration and run pilots to test the possibilities to create value through citizen-owned data. 

To truly serve citizen interests over commercial agendas, partners must be aligned with reliquishing control over data and promote citizen data ownership, Gore stresses. 

Even when solutions overlap, partners need to “recognise that the data belongs to citizens who choose what to do with it, not to any platform or commercial entity,” he explains. 

To try to reach this alignment as much as possible, he suggests creating a coalition of implementation partners across governments and the industry. 

This coalition will align on what type of data shared and for what purpose; how the data is used; rights and obligations of credential holders; liability frameworks; consent management; and adherence to privacy regulations that may differ across jurisdictions. 

Start small and design with foresight 

On key takeaways from this particular pilot for other sectors, Gore highlights the need to define a simple, end-to-end use case with clearly articulated benefits. 

The pilot was focused on validating education and employment credentials for people applying for work from outside Singapore. 

“This tangible, understandable flow prevented over-engineering and allowed for rapid integration,” he shares. 

Another lesson was identifying the right participants early, which is the issuer and verifier who would stand to benefit from this innovation and would be keen to be part of it. 

The right use cases and willing participants enable the value to be demonstrated rapidly, he says. 

The third lesson has been to design solutions with foresight. “While the IMDA pilot addressed today's verification challenges, it also anticipates tomorrow's threats.  

“As artificial intelligence (AI) makes synthetic identities and impersonation much easier, cross-border systems without cryptographic proof of identity will face exponential fraud.” 

By starting small – in this case, establishing verifiable trust infrastructure sector by sector – nations like Singapore build resilience against emerging risks while unlocking innovation opportunities, he summarises.