Visa Isn't Centralized and Neither Is First Person Identity
Visa isn’t centralized. Instead, it’s a trust framework that lets thousands of participants interoperate. First-person identity brings that same model to digital identity, enabling not one “identity Visa” but thousands of them, each tailored to the needs of different ecosystems.
Recently, I heard someone describe Visa as a “centralized” model. That’s a common misconception. Visa doesn’t operate a single, central database of all transactions. Instead, it provides a trust framework—a set of rules, standards, and infrastructure—that allows thousands of banks, processors, and merchants to interoperate. The actual accounts, balances, and customer relationships remain distributed across the network.
We already live with another example of a trust framework in the physical world: the driver’s license. By law, states issue these credentials according to a well-defined process, and other parties—from bars to TSA agents to car dealerships—accept them as proof of age or identity. What’s striking is that most of those parties have no formal contract with the issuing state. The framework itself, enshrined in statute and social practice, creates the trust. People rely on the attributes the license carries, not because they have negotiated agreements, but because the framework guarantees its validity.
This is a helpful way to think about first-person identity. Credentials, issued according to this model, make it possible to build trust frameworks for many different ecosystems, just as Visa did for payments or states have done with licenses. A trust framework defines how participants interoperate, but it doesn’t centralize everyone’s data or relationships.
Here’s the key difference: payments is a relatively simple domain compared to identity. You can imagine one Visa handling payments worldwide. Identity, by contrast, has vastly more requirements, policies, and contexts. There won’t be a single “identity Visa.” Instead, there will be tens of thousands: ecosystem-specific trust frameworks for finance, healthcare, education, workforce, commerce, government services, and beyond. Each will be tailored to its own needs, but they will all be possible because of the same first-person identity foundation.
Fraud prevention, auditability, and traceability are absolutely essential. But those aren’t functions of centralization. They come from well-designed credentials and trust frameworks. First-person identity doesn’t reject the Visa model—it makes it possible to replicate it, many times over, in the far more complex world of identity.
Photo Credit: Young woman paying with Visa generated using ChatGPT (public domain)
