Digital public infrastructure
Digital public infrastructure (identity, payments and data exchange operated for a whole population) can widen access dramatically and can also become a single point of failure, exclusion or surveillance if its safeguards are weak.
- Institution
- The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
- Service level
- R0: information and enquiries
The short answer.
Digital public infrastructure as a field covers the shared digital systems, such as identity, payments and data exchange, that deliver services at societal scale, and their governance and safeguards. In the Nexus Consortium it is studied as science at GCRI by Digital Public Infrastructure, governed at GRF by AI and Digital Governance, and understood financially at GRA by Fintech Nexus as well as Payments and Market Infrastructure; this gateway links those platforms and the methods they share.
The field, seen three ways.
Scale, safeguards and failure modes.
A national identity system or fast-payment rail serves everyone, so an outage, a data breach or an exclusion error is national in scale. The design choices that matter for risk are interoperability, data minimisation, grievance redress, vendor independence and the legal basis for each use. These are assessable before deployment.
- Exclusion: people without documents, connectivity or biometrics that read reliably.
- Concentration: one vendor or one data centre for a national rail.
- Function creep: data collected for one purpose used for another.
Principles and safeguards.
| Framework or body | What it governs or supplies |
|---|---|
| Principles on Identification for Sustainable Development | Inclusion, design and governance of ID systems |
| Universal DPI Safeguards Framework | Safeguards for DPI design and operation |
| CPMI-IOSCO Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures | Payment system risk management |
| Global Digital Compact | Intergovernmental commitments on DPI and data governance |
DPI and the systems it carries.
- Cyber: national-scale attack surface.
- Society: social protection delivery and inclusion.
- Financial stability: fast-payment rails.
The science sits on Digital Public Infrastructure; methods start from digital identity.
The methods behind the field.
- Digital identity and public digital systems
- Data engineering, interoperability and stewardship
- Cybersecurity and cryptography
- Payment and financial market technology
- High-performance, cloud and edge computing
- Distributed ledgers and digital assets
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- AI evaluation and assurance engineering
- Policy, institutional and decision science
- Network science and contagion
- Reliability and resilience engineering
- Quantum computing, sensing and communication
Terms used on this page.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Digital public infrastructure | Shared, interoperable digital systems such as identity, payments and data exchange, governed to serve the public at scale. |
| Digital identity | A set of attributes and credentials that lets a person prove who they are in digital transactions. |
| Interoperability | The ability of systems and organizations to exchange data and use it with shared meaning. |
| Digital public good | Open-source software, data, models, standards or content that meet the Digital Public Goods Standard. |
Where this page's references lead.
The bodies and documents this page is read against. Status and editions change; each link goes to the issuing body.
Questions and answers.
Why does GCRI host field gateways?
Around GCRI.
Start with an enquiry.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.