CANBERRA company Edentiti is leading the world in the emerging digital identity industry after recently picking up the prestigious Novay Digital Identity Award in The Hague for best new concept or product in the field on digital identity.

This is the first time the online identity verification business received a nomination for an international award judged by industry peers.

“Australia’s got quite a strong reputation for being innovative,” Edentiti CEO Ken Burrows said.

“This award just proves a small Canberra company can stand up on the world market and hold its head up high and take a lot of pride in the work it does.”

Edentiti, an online identity verification business, was up against Qiy, a Dutch personal data store initiative; WAYF, a Danish identity federation and tiQR, an open-source and standards-based authentication solution.

The company currently has nine staff servicing 70 clients including Australia Post, Macquarie Bank, Bank of Queensland, Community CPS and Aura – office of renewable energy.

“At first we started in the anti-laundering money space, but it has spread,” Mr Burrows said.

“We have clients in the Lotto space, Lottery West in WA and we have a client in Melbourne that has a site called Wishbooks.”

Its online identity verification product prevents identity theft by checking information from various online data sources, under the control of the user.

What the Novay Digital Identity Award jury found appealing about Edentiti was the efficient and innovative manner in which they rely on existing online identities that a user has, and use these as a basis for identity proofing for new online services.

“The opportunities for this is quite broad ranging,” Mr Burrows said.

“It’s really wherever you need to know that the person coming on to your website is the person they say they are.”

Currently, the Edentiti identity verification product is also provided through Deloitte Digital under the brand name greenID.

“They’ve got a lot of branches in Europe, so we hoping to leverage our success with the award through their channels,” he said.

The company also recently signed up its first NZ client that offers prepaid credit cards.

Mr Burrows said the win gave his team the opportunity to get their head out of the work and realise they “are actually doing something quite exceptional”.

“There are very few times, in a person’s career you have an opportunity to work on something from scratch and something quite different, that’s going to affect so many people’s lives,” he said.

“It’s very much a team effort. We have a very close-knit team, and the guys get on and do it.”