In the first blog in this series, we explored a core reality of the North American identity market: fragmentation is not a temporary condition, but the environment in which organizations operate.
Unlike regions pursuing centralized national identity frameworks, North America has evolved through a combination of private sector innovation, state-led initiatives, sector-specific requirements, and overlapping regulatory structures. Financial institutions, mobile network operators, healthcare providers, government agencies and digital platforms have each developed identity capabilities aligned to their own risk models and business needs.
The result is not a unified ecosystem, but a collection of identity systems that operate independently.
Interoperability: the next critical challenge.
This fragmentation leads directly to the next major challenge facing the market: interoperability.
The question is no longer whether organizations can establish identity. Most large enterprises already can. The problem is that identity rarely transfers cleanly across channels, institutions, or ecosystems. In many cases, trust stops at organizational boundaries.
That creates friction at every stage of the user journey.
Consumers are required to verify themselves across different services, devices, and journeys. Businesses absorb the cost of duplicated onboarding, repeated authentication, fraud exposure, and fragmented customer experiences. Even when strong identity signals exist, they are rarely reusable in a trusted and consistent way.
In practice, users are still asked to prove who they are again and again.
A consumer may verify their identity with a bank using government documents, biometric verification, device intelligence, and telecom signals. Yet when interacting with another financial institution, healthcare provider, or government service, the process often starts from scratch. The underlying issue is not necessarily a lack of data portability. Increasingly, systems can exchange data.
The challenge is trust portability. That distinction is critical.
Data portability is not trust portability.
A key distinction underpins this challenge. Data portability refers to the ability to move information from one system to another. Trust portability, however, means that one organization can confidently rely on an identity assertion, credential, or authentication event without rebuilding the entire verification process themselves.
Those are fundamentally different problems.
North America has made meaningful progress on data exchange through open banking initiatives, API frameworks, and standards-based integration approaches. But enabling trust portability requires much more than moving data. It requires confidence in how identity was verified, how credentials are managed, how authentication is performed, and how assurance levels are defined and measured.
This is where interoperability often breaks down.
Assurance models differ between organizations. Authentication policies vary across industries. Risk tolerance depends on the use case. Regulatory obligations are not always aligned. Even terminology is often interpreted differently across sectors.
As a result, interoperability remains difficult to achieve, even when technical connectivity is in place.
Where friction becomes visible.
These challenges become more apparent in real-word user journey.
A customer may open an account online but be required to visit a branch because identity confidence cannot be reused across channels. A user successfully authenticates through a mobile app but faces additional friction during a high-risk transaction because downstream systems lack confidence in the original authentication event. A verified healthcare credential cannot easily support onboarding into adjacent financial or insurance services because assurance models are disconnected.
The friction is not isolated. It compounds across ecosystems.
Moving beyond identity silos.
This challenge becomes even more important as digital identity moves beyond onboarding and into continuous trust models. Increasingly, organizations need to evaluate not only who a user is, but whether a specific action should be trusted in real time across devices, channels, and environments.
That requires interoperable trust frameworks, not isolated identity silos.
Standards alone are not enough.
Standards bodies, such as FIDO Alliance, World Wide Web Consortium, and International Organization for Standardization have established important foundations around authentication, verifiable credentials, device trust, and identity architecture. These frameworks matter because they create shared technical models that enable broader interoperability over time.
However, standards alone do not create interoperable trust.
The market has repeatedly shown that publishing specifications is only the beginning. Real interoperability depends on implementation consistency, testing, certification, governance, and operational alignment across ecosystems. This is where many initiatives struggle.
Organizations often interpret standards differently. Integration approaches vary. Certification requirements may be inconsistent or incomplete. Even well-designed frameworks can fail to deliver interoperability if implementations diverge in practice.
This is where Fime and Consult Hyperion play a critical road. Operating at the intersection of standards and deployment, they help translate technical specifications into tested, certified and interoperable solutions that organizations can trust in real-world environments.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as North America moves toward broader digital trust frameworks.
Building the trust layer.
The future of digital identity in the region is unlikely to emerge through a single universal identity system. More realistically, it will evolve through interoperable trust layers that allow credentials, authentication events, and identity assertions to work reliably across fragmented ecosystems.
The organizations that succeed will not necessarily be the ones that control identity. They will be the ones that enable trust to move across systems consistently, securely, and at scale.
That is the real interoperability challenge now facing the market.
Discover more in our North America Digital Identity blog series:
Chapter I: The North American identity reality: fragmented by design.
Howard Hall, Vice President of Growth
Howard Hall is Vice President of Growth at Fime, a global leader in payments testing, certification, and advisory services. He brings over 20 years of experience across strategy, product marketing, business development, and corporate development in the IT, electronic security, business intelligence, digital identity, and payments sectors, with a strong track record of driving revenue growth and market expansion.
Prior to joining Fime, Howard served as Managing Director of Chyp USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Consult Hyperion. He founded and scaled the company’s North American operations, building the U.S. office, recruiting the team, and delivering strategic consulting and technology initiatives for leading enterprise and financial services clients. He also held senior leadership roles at Vericept, Trustwave, and RiverGlass, contributing to growth and successful acquisitions.
Howard began his career at Goldman Sachs & Co. In addition to his operating roles, he is an active investor and advisor to startups, supporting go-to-market strategy, fundraising, and operational scaling. Howard is a graduate of Northeastern University.
