Government funded acquisition of verified wallets
ID.me
The key strategic point is that ID.me turns customer acquisition upside down, because institutions fund the hard part of building the user base and then brands monetize the installed base. A federal agency, state program, or hospital pays to get a person through document checks, selfie and liveness checks, and fallback review. Once that person has a reusable credential, the next merchant or agency can accept it without paying to reacquire the user from scratch.
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This is why the wallet matters more than a one time API call. ID.me reported 157 million total users and 80 million users verified to federal IAL2 standards by December 2025, plus 409 million authenticated logins in 2024. That means each new contract adds credentials that can be reused across many later transactions.
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The buyer split creates a real network effect. Government and healthcare buyers pay for identity proofing, then 600 plus brands pay to accept verified attributes like age, military status, or student status. More relying parties make the wallet more useful, and more verified users raise conversion for relying parties because fewer people need to start verification from zero.
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The trade off is cost structure. ID.me wins in workflows where failure and exclusion are unacceptable, because it can escalate users from automated checks into video, scheduled, or in person review. That makes it behave less like pure auth software and more like a trust utility. It also differentiates ID.me from Entrust after its 2024 Onfido acquisition, which can bundle identity proofing into broader security procurement but does not have the same consumer wallet reuse layer.
Going forward, each large public sector award strengthens ID.me twice, once as revenue and once as distribution. The more agencies and regulated institutions route access through the wallet, the more ID.me can expand into healthcare, age verification, and benefits workflows, turning identity proofing from a single service into a shared trust layer used across the economy.