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2026 looks like a transition year for privacy technology. Digital identity wallets are moving from pilots and standards work toward regulated deployment, compliance technology is becoming an operating priority, and confidential computing is offering a way to protect data while AI systems process it. The evidence does not yet support a single global privacy-spending total or prove that any one technology will dominate. It does support a more practical conclusion: organisations are combining identity assurance, governance and technical safeguards rather than treating privacy as a standalone product.
Are digital ID wallets actually taking off?
Yes, but “taking off” means expanding infrastructure and mandated availability—not that everyone is already using a wallet every day. The strongest evidence comes from separate market estimates, government deployment requirements, pilots and forecasts that should not be conflated.
The UK market is broadening, with estimates rather than audited totals
The UK Digital Identity Sectoral Analysis 2026, commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA), estimates 275 firms providing digital-identity products and services. That includes 233 dedicated providers and 42 diversified firms. It estimates annual sector revenue of £2,027 million in 2024/2025.
Those figures are modelled from sources including audited accounts, web data and proportional allocations for diversified businesses. They are not audited accounts for every firm. The report also warns that comparisons with its 2025 baseline are affected by revisions, a larger weighted consumer survey and improved supply-side coverage. The safest reading is that the UK ecosystem is becoming larger and more varied, not that one policy caused a precisely measured jump.
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Investment activity is real, but it is a UK slice of the market
OfDIA’s 2026 annual report records £49 million across 14 UK digital-identity deals in 2025. This is investment activity in that UK sector and period; it is not a global privacy, compliance or confidential-AI total. Approximately three in ten dedicated UK firms had received external investment since incorporation.
The same report lists 64 services from 46 providers on the UK register and nearly 4,700 unique businesses, organisations and partnerships across providers. It reports that 77% of UK consumers had used digital-identity services, rising to 85% among adults under 45. Among non-users, the two most common explanations were preferring physical ID and not having needed to prove identity, each cited by 29% of respondents. Service use is therefore established, but those figures do not demonstrate universal wallet adoption.
Europe has a legal deadline, not a claim of universal use
Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, commonly called eIDAS 2.0, each of the 27 EU member states must provide citizens, residents and businesses with at least one European Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026. The intended wallets can hold verified identity details and credentials such as licences or qualifications, then share selected information with public or private services.
The EU’s Architecture and Reference Framework sets common protocols, data formats and security requirements. Four large-scale pilots conducted from 2023 to 2025 involved more than 250 organisations across nearly every EU member state, as well as Norway, Iceland and Ukraine. A legal obligation and pilot participation indicate deployment momentum; they do not mean every wallet was already generally available or interoperable for ordinary users at the time of the OECD’s 2026 assessment.
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Gartner’s user number is a forecast
Gartner forecast in 2024 that at least 500 million smartphone users would regularly make verifiable claims through digital identity wallets by 2026. That is an analyst forecast, not a measured 2026 adoption count. Gartner analyst Akif Khan described the market as entering a transition in which maturing portable digital-identity solutions could reduce demand for standalone identity verification over the following five years. Whether that substitution occurs depends on acceptance by relying parties, usable alternatives and cross-border standards.
What is changing inside a wallet?
A wallet is more than a scanned identity document. In the model being developed in the UK and Europe, a holder service receives information from a trusted issuer, helps an individual prove a fact and lets that person confirm the fact to another party.
- Selective disclosure: a service can receive the attribute needed for a transaction—such as an age threshold—without automatically receiving every detail on an identity document.
- Credential variety: planned European wallets cover identity and other verified credentials, while UK services include identity verification, age assurance, liveness detection and related trust services.
- Interoperability: common protocols and data formats are intended to let credentials work across participating public and private services instead of locking users into one provider.
- Governance: the UK Digital Verification Services Trust Framework addresses organisational governance, information security, privacy and data protection, technical specifications and user experience, including rules for orchestration and holder services.
- New use cases: the UK sector analysis identifies behavioural analysis and AI-agent identity as emerging areas, alongside more established screening and data-brokerage services.
How much are companies investing in compliance?
There is no substantiated worldwide 2026 figure in the available public evidence. The clearer development is that compliance, privacy, cybersecurity and AI governance are being managed as connected operational requirements.
What the published signals show
| Signal | What it establishes | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| UK OfDIA investment report | £49 million in 14 UK digital-identity deals during 2025 | A global privacy or compliance-spending total |
| IAPP RegTech Report 2026 | Organisational adoption of compliance and governance technologies amid privacy, AI and cybersecurity obligations | A publicly substantiated worldwide spending number |
| IAPP Data Privacy Day 2026 discussion | Practitioner attention to AI governance, privacy and digital responsibility | A verified prediction attributable to a particular speaker without a published transcript |
| Gartner Hype Cycle for Privacy, 24 June 2026 | Board and executive concern about personal-data misuse and a recommendation to prioritise scalable protection | A quantified market forecast or proof that one technology will win |
For a finance team, this means “privacy investment” should be read as a portfolio: staff and legal work, controls and evidence, secure infrastructure, identity services, incident readiness and vendor oversight. A wallet rollout may reduce repeated document handling, while an AI project may require new access controls, testing and monitoring. Neither automatically eliminates the other cost.
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Will privacy spending rise in 2026?
The direction is upward in priority, but the size of the increase is not established. Gartner’s 2026 Hype Cycle for Privacy says AI is renewing concern among boards, executives and consumers about safeguards against personal-data misuse and urges cybersecurity leaders to favour investments that can scale. The IAPP’s 2026 material likewise places privacy programmes alongside AI governance, cybersecurity and broader digital responsibility.
These are analyst and practitioner signals, not a global budget survey. Spending will vary with an organisation’s data holdings, sector, jurisdictions, AI use and existing controls. A regulated bank, a small online retailer and a public agency can all face “privacy investment” while buying very different capabilities.
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- Data state: does the control protect data at rest, in transit, in use, or several states?
- Threat model: which attacker or failure is in scope, and where is the trust boundary?
- Regulatory scope: which laws, sector rules and assurance obligations apply?
- Interoperability: can credentials, logs or security evidence move between providers?
- User control and accessibility: can people understand, limit and correct what is shared, and is there a workable alternative for those who cannot or do not want to use a wallet?
- Operating burden: who manages keys, updates, incident response, support and supplier risk?
- Independent evidence: what testing, certification, attestation or audit material can a buyer verify?
What is confidential AI?
Confidential AI generally means running an AI workload so that sensitive models, prompts or datasets receive protection while they are being processed—not only when stored or sent over a network.
NIST’s Hardware-Enabled Security: Confidential Computing of Data in Cloud Workloads (IR 8320E) was published as an initial public draft on 29 May 2026; its comment period closed on 13 July 2026. NIST describes confidential computing as extending encryption to data in active use, including while it is processed in memory. Its example approach uses encryption, secure enclaves and attestation to constrain access to an AI model and its data in cloud infrastructure.
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“Confidential computing addresses data security and privacy concerns for organizations that move sensitive workloads to the cloud.”
That sentence describes the purpose of the draft’s approach, not a guarantee. The protection depends on hardware, configuration, key control, attestation and the surrounding application and cloud architecture. Confidential computing does not by itself answer whether a dataset was lawfully collected, whether an output re-identifies someone, whether access rules are appropriate or whether an organisation satisfies a specific legal obligation.
What the security layer can and cannot cover
| Question | Confidential-computing contribution | Additional control still needed |
|---|---|---|
| Can cloud operators or malware inspect data during execution? | Memory encryption and an enclave boundary can reduce exposure, subject to implementation assumptions. | Verified hardware, secure configuration, patching and incident response. |
| Can a customer know what code is running? | Attestation can provide evidence about an approved environment. | A policy for what measurements are trusted and how keys are released. |
| Is the AI use legally permissible? | It can support a technical safeguard. | Data-protection analysis, lawful basis, retention, access governance and documented accountability. |
| Can the model avoid harmful or identifying outputs? | It protects processing conditions. | Model evaluation, output controls, privacy testing and human oversight. |
NIST’s separate cybersecurity, privacy and AI work also highlights re-identification risks and the possibility that predictive systems reveal more about people. Technical isolation should therefore be paired with updated privacy and cybersecurity risk management.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Can I prove my identity without sharing everything?
That is the principal privacy promise of verifiable credentials and selective disclosure. In a suitable transaction, a wallet could prove a required fact—such as being over a legal age threshold—without handing over unrelated fields such as a full address or document number.
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The outcome depends on the issuer, wallet, relying party and protocol. Before using a service, check:
- What exact attribute is being requested?
- Is the service receiving a yes/no proof or the underlying personal data?
- Who issues and verifies the credential, and under which trust framework?
- Can uses be linked across different merchants or public services?
- What happens if the phone is lost, the credential expires or the service is unavailable?
- Is a physical or non-wallet route available?
Selective disclosure reduces unnecessary sharing; it does not make a transaction anonymous. A relying party may still hold account, payment, device or transaction records, and a wallet ecosystem can create linkability if identifiers and logs are designed poorly.
How organisations should plan for 2026
For businesses accepting identity proofs
- Define the minimum fact needed for each journey rather than requesting a complete identity document by default.
- Record which issuer, assurance level and evidence are acceptable for each regulated use.
- Test wallet and non-wallet routes for accessibility, recovery and service outages.
- Separate identity verification, age assurance, fraud controls and account profiling; they are related but not interchangeable.
For teams deploying AI with sensitive data
- Map data flows and decide whether the real exposure is storage, transport, active processing, model access or output.
- Use confidential-computing designs where their threat model fits, then validate attestation, key release and cloud portability.
- Document data provenance, retention, access rights, re-identification risk and human review.
- Demand independently verifiable security evidence rather than treating the word “confidential” as certification.
For individuals
- Prefer services that explain the specific claim being verified and the data retained afterward.
- Keep recovery options current and understand how to revoke or replace a credential.
- Do not assume a wallet is mandatory merely because a provider offers one; ask about physical or alternative verification.
What the evidence does—and does not—say about 2026
Digital identity wallets have measurable market activity, a UK operating framework and an EU end-2026 deployment requirement. Their adoption trajectory is still described partly by forecasts and pilots. Compliance and privacy are clearly rising on corporate agendas, but no reliable worldwide spending figure is established. Confidential computing is a credible technical layer for protecting AI data in use, while NIST’s guidance remains an initial public draft and does not turn security engineering into automatic legal compliance.
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