By Rahul Parthe, TECH5 Co-founder, Chairman, and CTO
We believe that 2025 will be remembered by the industry as a turning point for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). For the first time, countries across different continents moved beyond strategy papers and began implementing biometric-powered and digital identity led by super-DPI (combining multiple DPIs) solutions at national scale. From Africa to Latin America and the Pacific, governments in countries such as Ethiopia, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea have laid down the foundational rails of digital identity, trust frameworks, and secure data exchange. Several more are actively piloting similar initiatives.
What makes this shift significant is not the technology alone, but the intent behind it. Governments are no longer building digital identity systems, data exchange, or payments as isolated projects. Instead, they are going for a combined approach to build a comprehensive super-DPI and treat it as a foundational layer of a broader digital ecosystem that connects citizens, public institutions, and private service providers through trusted, interoperable infrastructure.
In 2026, we will see the real impact of these investments. With foundational DPI components in place, countries will begin onboarding relying parties at scale. Banks, telecoms, healthcare providers, e-government platforms, and many other public and private entities will plug into national DPI ecosystems. At the same time, citizens will gain access to hundreds of new digital use cases, ranging from eKYC and digital payments to single sign-on and offline verification.
This transition will fundamentally change the way and the speed of digital transformation at a national scale. Biometric Digital Identity-led DPI and robust trust frameworks enable trust by design: strong encryption, selective disclosure of data, and decentralized verification significantly reduce fraud, identity theft, and other risks. As trust will increase, so will adoption, accelerating digital transactions, improving service delivery, and strengthening national security.
Importantly, in 2026 the countries adopting such approaches will also actively address one of the most critical challenges in digital transformation: inclusion. We believe that with properly designed DPI, ecosystems people will not need constant connectivity or smartphone ownership. By supporting offline verification and biometric-backed credentials, countries will be able to finally serve people that have traditionally been left behind: rural communities and individuals without access to modern phones and the internet.
This vision may sound ambitious, even idealistic. But at TECH5, we truly believe in it and have spent the last several years working closely with governments to design and deploy DPI solutions that are sovereign, privacy-preserving, and scalable. What we are seeing today is not a distant future, but the early stages of this shift.
In 2026, DPI will move from infrastructure to impact, becoming one of the main drivers of trusted, inclusive, and sustainable digital ecosystems worldwide.
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