Lessons from Singapore and Hong Kong on bridging the identity gap

By, Kartik Krishnamurthy, Vice-President, Asia at Docusign

How does your organisation prove customers’ identities? How do you know that someone on the other end of an email or digital document is who they say they are? Identity verification and its evil twin, identity fraud, present huge headaches for organisations today. 

Right now, identity fraud costs the average business USD 7 million a year. In financial services alone, more than half of organisations lose over USD 1 million to fraud each year. Usernames and passwords remain the most common attack vector, accounting for 51% of fraud cases ; while systems that add facial biometric liveness detection see that figure drop to 21%.

The impact goes beyond fraud. Across the agreement lifecycle, 52% of organisations wait for identity and notary verification before closing a deal. That delay translates directly into lost revenue, slower onboarding, and a negative experience for customers and partners.

Why is identity verification such a persistent problem? Most markets in Asia still lack a unified way to verify who’s on the other side of a digital transaction. 

In these markets, businesses and individuals navigate a maze of disconnected systems. There are different providers for banking, another for government services, yet another for contracts. And none talk to each other. The result: repeated identity checks, inconsistent security, and friction at every step.

The problem is compounded when cross-border trade comes into play. When each market has its own patchwork of identity systems, there’s no shared trust layer to speed things along. But, as Singapore and Hong Kong have proven, there is an easier way.

Singpass and iAM Smart give citizens a secure digital identity

As citizens in Singapore would know, Singpass is the gateway to a myriad of government and private sector services. The government-built digital identity tool gives residents an easy way to do everything from checking pension balances and filing taxes, to opening bank accounts and signing legal documents. Today, Singpass covers 97% of eligible residents, processes over 41 million transactions monthly, and connects to more than 2,700 services across 800 agencies and businesses.

Critically, Singpass was not designed as an add-on. It was built as shared infrastructure, a trust layer that any service, public or private, can plug into. And, through Docusign’s partnership with Singpass, users can apply a legally binding electronic signature simply by authenticating through their Singpass app. The signature is linked to their verified identity and validated instantly, and it’s all backed by Singapore’s National Certification Authority. No printing, no scanning, no waiting for a notary.

Hong Kong’s iAM Smart  follows a similar logic, providing centralised, consent-based identity verification across government and commercial services. And, again, Docusign’s integration with iAM Smart+ (the advanced version of Hong Kong’s one-stop digital services platform) through Tradelink gives citizens the ability to perform digital signing on top of all the other iAM Smart functions – like using a single digital identity to log in to various government and commercial online services; automated form-filling; and receiving personalised updates on government services, bill payment reminders and more.

The key thing to note in both Singapore and Hong Kong is that the issue of identity verification is solved at the infrastructure layer. Identity is embedded in every transaction, rather than treated as a separate hurdle.

Agreement platforms can help bridge the gap

In countries still catching up to Singapore and Hong Kong in the ID verification stakes, agreement platforms like Docusign can help. Our identity verification tools include ID document checks, biometric matching, knowledge-based authentication and more – embedding verification into the signing workflow to negate the need for a separate identity step.

But to be clear, these are workarounds and not permanent solutions. As the threat of identity fraud continues to grow, we believe that every country would benefit from government-backed digital identity services. One that’s secure, interoperable, and built for scale. And the sooner more markets treat it that way, the better.