Japan’s My Number ID—a Guide on How to Not Launch a Digital ID

By Ashley Robinson | 4Q 2024 | IN-7606

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Japan announced that, in the spring of 2025, the My Number ID (MNID) will also include your driver's license. Japan is moving one step closer to having a fully digital ID, bringing the total number of G7 countries (Including the European Union (EU)) that have adopted some form of a digital ID to 5.

Japan and Apple had already announced, back in June 2024, that the MNID would be coming to Apple Wallet in the spring of 2025. Japan has now announced that the MNID will include citizens' driver's licenses, starting March 24, 2025, adding another government ID to the digital age of convenience and utility.

However, Japan's journey to a fully digital ID has not been a clear path, with notable issue flare-ups, but also areas of success that can be used as a guide for other schemes.

Japan is adding another part of its government bureaucracy to the digital age, marking another large step for the troubled development of the MNID. To date, the MNID has seen issues with fraud and data leeks, resulting in a mandatory verification app being needed, and a slow uptake initially of the card with only 59.4% of the population having a card in mid-2022, although this number has risen significantly with 77.4% of people having a MNID by the end of 2023.

With a growing need for the digital age being that of convenience and utility most of the G7 governments have either started to implement, or have had discussions around the notion of a fully digital ID. What makes Japan's digital ID stand out from the rest is that it will have taken 10 years from when it was first announced back in 2015, along with the creation of a new cabinet position of Minster for Digital Transformation, for the MNID to become available on both Android and Apple devices. For a country like Japan that is normally at the forefront of technological developments, the issues that have plagued the ID have come as a shock to many within the ecosystem.

Japan's MNID can be used as a great case study for other countries developing their own digital IDs on how and how not to implement a digital ID:

• Japan's MNID project got off to a strong start, launching a new 12-digit ID, which was linked to every citizen and foreign resident. This number was distributed in an unsolicited manner with a unique ID number issued to each citizen without the requirement for manual onboarding. This approach meant that Japan essentially started afresh, developing its large-scale digital framework, meaning limited impact from legacy systems, and at the same time, Japan opened a new cabinet position to oversee the project, helping bridge the gap between various government departments.
• Japan's first ID rollouts came about due to the nature of its governance system, with floppy disks and CD-ROMs used to store government data as late as 2022. In addition, there was a lack of urgency from the government to issue every Japanese citizen a card, with only around 20% of Japan's population issued a card as of 2020, although this did pick up in 2021 with the implementation of the Health Insurance Card into the MNID as a way to help digitize the COVID-19 response. This led to a nearly 120% increase of physical card applications by the middle of 2022 compared to the summer of 2021, with full a rollout expected by the end of 2024. This demonstrates a misalignment between the initial project setup and credential adoption. Although Japan achieved the issuance of the unique ID numbers relatively quickly, citizen card enrollment lagged behind, driven by a lack of meaningful services. Service enablement and expansion should form the foundation for any government ID project strategy. Although the credential is the enablement tool, it is the services that will define the growth trajectory as it relates to citizen demand.
• MNID also experienced widespread levels of data breeches, malfunctioning card readers, and database errors. These errors had become such an issue that a companion app was made mandatory in 2022 to verify that the MNID was being used. These issues could have been countered faster by building into the ID itself a two-step authentication system. This would have helped prevent data breaches being able to gain access to users' passwords and ID numbers. A strong security check apparatus would also lead to high confidence and trust in the service, and thus a high uptake and belief in the system.

In summary, the Japan MNID has been a story of ups and downs with the ID aiming to achieve its goal of a fully digitalizing its national ID by spring 2025. The MNID is being made available on Apple Wallet with the ID bound to the physical and then derived to the digital. With an overarching strategy of combining physical and digital ID counterparts, governments can look toward the MNID project as a case study to better understand how any breakdown or bad implementation in the areas of enrollment, verification, services, and digitization can negatively impact adoption and project timelines.