Building a New Mobility Ecosystem Around Digital Wallets
Ana Tavares Lattibeaudiere
How can digital wallets transform the automotive industry? That was the central question we asked at GlobalPlatform’s recent “Digital Wallets, Automotive and Mobility Workshop”, hosted by Stellantis in Michigan on 22 September.
The event brought together the digital identity and automotive communities to explore how trusted digital credentials could support a new generation of automotive services—from car sharing and fleet management to EV charging, tolls and in-vehicle payments.
mDL moves into the mainstream
Top of the agenda was North America’s mobile driving license (mDL). There was a clear need to move beyond thinking of an mDL as simply a digital image of a physical license stored on a phone. Instead, the industry is positioning the mDL as a government-issued, secure credential that can function as a digital ID and unlock a plethora of new use cases.
Data shared at the event showed that mDL adoption is accelerating across North America, with 23 jurisdictions now issuing ISO-compliant, interoperable mDLs across the region, accounting for almost half of the population.
But issuing credentials is only part of the equation. Work is also underway to develop the trust infrastructure around mDLs, enabling organizations that accept them to verify that a credential is genuine and has been issued by a legitimate authority.
Coming together to build this trusted mDL value chain will be key to maximizing the opportunity.
From vehicle-centric to person-centric
Another important theme was the need to move automotive services from a vehicle-centric to a person-centric model.
This is becoming increasingly important as vehicles are shared across families, rental customers, employees and fleet drivers. EV charging provides a good example of the problem. A vehicle might authenticate automatically at a charger, but who actually pays? In a company fleet, the answer may depend on who is driving. In a rental car, the driver may want charging billed directly to their own account rather than through the rental company.
We discussed how a wallet-based credential—such as a mDL—could add that missing identity layer. Using remote presentation, a driver could securely present their identity from their wallet, allowing a service to associate the person, vehicle and transaction without permanently tying that identity to the vehicle itself.
Another use case that particularly resonated was vehicle repair. Right to Repair requirements are opening up access to vehicle systems to a much wider range of independent repairers. Being able to securely establish and record who has carried out work on a vehicle could therefore provide an important additional layer of accountability—particularly if the vehicle is later stolen or compromised.
Standards provide the route to scale
The discussion also tackled the problem of fragmentation across the ecosystem. One of the lessons highlighted was that the automotive industry can learn from the example of Apple Pay and Google Pay by bringing together established technologies and standards to create a consistent experience that can scale.
In automotive, that means working with existing standards and technologies from organizations including EMVCo, FIDO and ISO and—of course—GlobalPlatform.
Our technologies form part of that trusted foundation inside the vehicle. Secure Elements and Trusted Execution Environments provide hardware-backed environments for protecting credentials and sensitive data. This builds on technologies GlobalPlatform has standardized for more than two decades and which are now being mapped to automotive hardware-protected security requirements.
What comes next for digital wallets?
Automotive is just one example of how digital wallets are moving beyond identity towards a much broader range of trusted services. The same questions around security, interoperability and trust will be explored at GlobalPlatform’s Digital Wallet Seminar in Brussels on 15 October, bringing together stakeholders from across the wallet ecosystem.
Why not join us? Both in-person and virtual attendance is available. Register at:
https://globalplatform.org/event/digital-wallet-seminar-2026/
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