Papua New Guinea has tried to build a national identity system for more than a decade, and it has mostly failed. Of the country’s 10.1 million people, only 4.2 million had been registered under the National ID system by early 2026, according to figures reported by GovInsider Asia, a publication covering digital government across the region.
Of those registered, just 5 percent had actually received a physical card. Everyone else was still sitting in a processing queue, more than a decade after the system started in 2014.
A different system, one that skips the physical card entirely, is now moving faster than anything PNG’s identity infrastructure has produced before. It is called SevisPass.
Since its launch at the Digital Transformation Summit in Port Moresby in late 2025, it has been wired into bank account opening, superannuation onboarding, SIM card registration and government tender eligibility.
In May 2026, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) began drafting a law to give the whole system legal standing.
Full mandatory use across banking, telecommunications and government services is not expected for another 18 to 24 months, per government estimates cited by Digital Government Network.
The legislation meant to anchor the whole framework has not yet passed parliament. What SevisPass has, at this stage, is not dominance. It has a trajectory, and a growing list of institutions betting early that the trajectory holds.
The unbanked problem SevisPass was built to solve
Papua New Guinea’s financial exclusion numbers have stayed stubborn for years. Somewhere between 40 and 45 percent of adults remain unbanked, concentrated in rural and informal sectors, according to figures DICT cited when it launched a digital account opening pilot in late 2025.
A separate government estimate puts the number of unbanked but eligible citizens at 4.5 million people. Either way, close to half the adult population sits outside PNG’s formal banking system, most without the paperwork a bank has traditionally required to open an account.
SevisPass attacks that problem from the identity side rather than the branch network side. Citizens enroll with a face scan and basic demographic details, and receive a verifiable digital credential held in a companion app called SevisWallet. Setup costs the individual nothing.
The underlying data architecture is federated rather than centralized, meaning agencies keep custody of their own records instead of feeding everything into one government database, a design choice DICT has said was necessary given how fragmented PNG’s identity records already are across banks, telcos, health services and civil registry offices.
The clearest proof of concept so far involves MiBank, a microfinance bank with a heavy rural footprint. Customers can now open an account in under ten minutes using SevisPass inside SevisWallet, with no paper forms, according to a DICT announcement covering the pilot.
The bank paired the integration with a new savings product called MiAkaont, built specifically for low income and rural customers, students and first time account holders who typically lack formal identification.
MiBank chief executive Trudi Egi said the bank’s customer base includes many subsistence farmers who travel long distances to reach a branch, and that the barrier has rarely been willingness to bank. It has been the lack of valid ID.
DICT Secretary Steven Maitahano framed the MiBank partnership as proof that digital identity can close PNG’s banking gap without loosening the compliance checks banks are legally required to run. That balance, inclusion without weaker Know Your Customer standards, is one of the hardest problems in PNG financial policy, and it is the problem SevisPass was built to solve.
Built to fit AML rules, not bypass them
PNG’s banks operate under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Act 2015, with the added weight of the country’s history on the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list. Every onboarding decision has to satisfy Customer Due Diligence obligations that scale from simplified to enhanced depending on risk.
The government’s own National Digital ID Policy document states plainly that SevisPass is meant to serve as the primary identifier banks can use to run that due diligence in real time, replacing static paperwork that goes stale the moment it is filed.
The policy also draws a firm line. SevisPass verifies who a person is. It does not run transaction monitoring, sanctions screening or set account limits. That stays with the bank, under existing law, with no overlap intended. Audit reports on how eKYC checks are used flow to both the Bank of Papua New Guinea and a dedicated Digital ID Regulatory Authority, keeping oversight inside the country’s existing financial regulatory structure instead of creating a parallel one.
That explains why the Bank of Papua New Guinea has stayed close to the rollout without formally endorsing it as complete. Central bank representatives sat alongside MiBank, other commercial banks, superannuation funds, telcos and universities at a technical workshop DICT convened in March 2026 specifically to work through how SevisPass could satisfy KYC requirements across the banking sector, not just at MiBank, according to a report from Biometric Update.
A separate government technical team met directly with Bank South Pacific, PNG’s largest commercial bank, to scope the same use case. Acting Deputy Secretary Jessy Sekere, who led the meetings, said the week had been packed with sessions across agencies and institutions working to define their own use case inside SevisWallet, in comments shared on LinkedIn and reported by Biometric Update.
Bank South Pacific has not confirmed a live SevisPass integration for account opening. The bank has built its own digital payment rail in parallel, an internet payment gateway integrated with PNG’s Finance Department that lets citizens pay for government services such as police clearances and firearm licenses by card, according to reporting from The National and Tech Pacific.
The direction across PNG’s banking sector is clear even where individual integrations are not yet finished. Identity verification and payment execution are both moving onto digital rails, and DICT is positioning SevisPass to become the identity layer that eventually connects to most of them, provided the rollout holds its current pace.
NASFUND, superannuation and the quiet expansion beyond banking
Banking is the most visible use case, but it is not the only one. In February 2026, DICT signed a memorandum of understanding with NASFUND, one of PNG’s largest superannuation funds, to use SevisPass for onboarding and authentication, with SevisWallet storing digital NASFUND membership cards for QR code and near field communication based verification, according to a DICT statement.
That agreement matters beyond its own sector. Superannuation funds hold some of the largest pools of long term retail capital in the country, and bringing them into the same identity framework as commercial banks means a citizen’s verified identity, once established, could eventually travel across the formal savings and retirement system rather than staying locked to a single account at a single institution.
The same push is extending into telecommunications, where the stakes for SevisPass are arguably highest. From 2026, adults registering a new SIM card are required to link it to a SevisPass, and unregistered SIMs are expected to eventually stop working, according to reporting from Digital Government Network.
DICT brought Digicel PNG, Vodafone PNG and Telikom PNG together at a Telco Integration Workshop in June 2026 to work through SIM self registration and identity binding, with representatives of the Australian Cyber Security Centre also attending, according to a DICT summary of the event.
DICT Secretary Steven Matainaho described the department’s approach as collaborative rather than mandated from above, and said at least one operator was discussing an immediate start to self registration services.
For a financial sector increasingly dependent on mobile money, a government backed identity check at the telco layer would close one of the oldest fraud gaps in PNG’s digital economy: the unverified SIM. It has not closed that gap yet. The workshop was about getting there.
SevisPay is the part still furthest from proof
The most consequential piece of this whole architecture is also the part with the least evidence behind it so far. Alongside SevisPass and SevisWallet sits SevisPay, described on the government’s own SevisPNG platform as PNG’s identity linked payment network, with the government explicitly comparing it to India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix.
Those are not small comparisons to invite. UPI processes billions of transactions a month across India and rebuilt the country’s retail payment system around a shared, interoperable rail. Pix did something similar in Brazil in under two years, pulling tens of millions of previously unbanked Brazilians into instant digital payments with minimal fees.
SevisPay’s stated design borrows from both models. Citizens would use SevisWallet itself as a payment account without needing a traditional bank account, send and receive payments even without live internet by syncing later, and transact through a QR code without merchants needing to buy point of sale hardware, according to the SevisPNG platform’s own description.
Because every payment would be tied to a verified identity rather than a card number, the government argues the system is inherently harder to defraud, with biometric verification standing in for the PIN and signature checks that anchor card payments today.
PNG’s National Digital ID Policy describes SevisPay as a neutral digital payment gateway meant to sit underneath commercial banks and fintechs rather than compete with them, developed in partnership with the Bank of Papua New Guinea.
If SevisPay reaches even a fraction of the adoption UPI or Pix achieved in their own markets, it would represent the biggest change to how money moves inside Papua New Guinea since the arrival of mobile banking. But that is a big if.
Where SevisPass has MiBank, NASFUND and three telcos in active integration talks to point to, SevisPay remains largely a description on a government website with no publicly reported pilot. The distance between SevisPass’s operational traction and SevisPay’s conceptual promise is the clearest unresolved question in the entire SevisPNG build out.
The law is still catching up to the technology
For most of 2024 and 2025, SevisPass ran ahead of the law meant to govern it. A pilot launched in 2024. A policy was endorsed by the National Executive Council in 2025. The platform went live months before any binding legislation existed.
That started to change in May 2026, when ICT Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr announced DICT had begun drafting the Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials Bill, the instrument meant to formally underpin SevisPass, SevisWallet and SevisDEx, the government’s consent based data exchange layer.
Tsiamalili summarized the shift for Identity Week: SevisPass verifies identity, SevisWallet holds and presents credentials, and SevisDEx handles the exchange between them. He called it a move from policy to implementation.
The bill draws on foreign digital ID models including India’s DigiLocker, Singapore’s Singpass, Estonia’s e-ID system, the UAE Pass, Saudi Arabia’s Absher and Nafath platforms, Brazil’s gov.br, Argentina’s Mi Argentina and the European Union’s digital identity framework, according to reporting from Biometric Update.
DICT set an internal target for issuers, verifiers and relying partners, meaning banks, telcos, superannuation funds, education institutions and professional bodies, to reach technical and regulatory readiness by the end of July 2026.
That window covers eKYC processes, SIM registration, secure onboarding and digital verification of tax identification numbers, driver’s licenses, and superannuation records. That deadline has now arrived, and the bill itself has not yet cleared parliament, a gap worth watching closely in the months ahead.
Papua New Guinea has already made SevisPass mandatory for business entities bidding on state tenders, extending the identity requirement from individual citizens into the corporate procurement pipeline. For any company doing business with the government, a category covering much of PNG’s formal private sector, SevisPass is no longer optional. It is a condition of participating in state contracts, whether or not the wider legal framework has caught up.
Not without friction
None of this has happened without criticism. A Carnegie Endowment analysis of digital transformation across Pacific Island nations, reported by Biometric Update in November 2025, named Papua New Guinea and Fiji as comparatively strong performers, less dependent on donor funding than smaller Pacific neighbors.
The same report was blunt about the region’s broader pattern. Many Pacific digital ID projects have been imposed top down with limited public consultation, and digitalization across the Pacific remains heavily donor driven, with Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the European Union and China funding infrastructure while often neglecting the maintenance and local capacity building that keeps systems running afterward.
Australia has already committed AU$1.5 million toward PNG’s cloud infrastructure and digital government systems, an amount its High Commissioner announced at the 2025 Digital Transformation Summit.
PNG’s own connectivity numbers explain why that consultation gap matters. As of 2025, only about 48.2 percent of the population held an active mobile connection, and online penetration stood at 24.1 percent, according to DataReportal figures cited by GovInsider Asia.
A digital identity system can only be as inclusive as the network carrying it, and for roughly three quarters of Papua New Guineans, that network access does not exist yet. DICT’s own policy documents acknowledge the gap directly, citing rural connectivity limits, infrastructure shortfalls and low digital literacy as structural risks to the rollout, alongside cybersecurity threats and data protection gaps still being built out.
Birth registration compounds the problem at the root. UNICEF found that as of 2024, 87 percent of children in PNG had no birth certificate, making it harder for them to obtain any identification later in life, a gap the government has tried to close since 2024 through mobile registration kits deployed with UNICEF support.
The system has also drawn criticism for reaching well beyond finance. Under PNG’s proposed Social Media Policy 2025, users aged 14 and over would need a SevisPass before logging into platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and X, a provision that drew pushback over what critics called a heavy handed approach to online regulation, according to reporting picked up by Waatea News.
That expansion matters to the financial infrastructure story because it shows how far DICT intends to push SevisPass as a default verification layer across sectors that have nothing to do with banking. It raises the cost of getting security and governance wrong the first time, since a breach or misuse controversy in one domain would damage trust in every other domain riding on the same credential, banking included.
Funding sustainability is the other open question, and it has not been fully answered. PNG’s policy documents describe a funding model built around a small revenue levy on transactional use, held in trust and administered through a Digital Transformation Service Trust developed with the Kumul Technology Development Cooperation, the state enterprise arm overseeing the project.
Core identity issuance is meant to stay free and publicly funded, with cost recovery limited to value added services such as eKYC checks purchased by banks and telcos. Whether that levy model can generate enough recurring revenue to maintain a system built to international standards, including ISO/IEC 27001 cybersecurity compliance, without continued donor support is a question Papua New Guinea has not yet had to answer at scale, because the system has not yet run long enough to test it.
What would need to happen next
The test for Papua New Guinea was never whether it could build a digital identity system. SevisPass already proves it can, and faster than the physical National ID system ever managed. The real test is whether that identity layer can eventually carry the weight the government wants to place on it: satisfying a central bank’s AML standards at scale, reaching a genuinely unbanked population estimated at 4.5 million people, supporting a UPI style payment rail that barely exists yet outside a website description, and holding up as the default gatekeeper for everything from SIM cards to social media, all before connectivity, legislation and long term funding fully catch up to the ambition.
The Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials Bill is still working through the legislative process. For now it remains what MiBank and NASFUND have already treated it as: an early bet on where PNG’s financial identity infrastructure is heading, made before the destination is confirmed. The institutions moving early will help shape what that infrastructure looks like. The ones waiting for full legal certainty may find, by the time it arrives, that the shape has already been set without them.
Editorial Note: Reporting for this piece drew on statements and documentation from Papua New Guinea’s Department of Information and Communications Technology, the National Digital ID Policy 2025, and reporting from Biometric Update, Identity Week, Digital Watch Observatory, GovInsider Asia, Digital Government Network, Waatea News, The National and Tech Pacific.
