In this blog series, our CEO Robin Tombs will be sharing his experience, whilst focusing on major themes, news and issues in the world of identity verification and age assurance.
This month, Robin chats about Yoti’s record year, major advances in our liveness and facial age estimation models and shifting government attitudes on digital ID.
Yoti’s revenue growth accelerates
2025 has been a record year for Yoti. Revenues grew 62% in 2025 to £29.0 million, up from £17.9 million in 2024. That compares with £11.5 million in 2023, meaning 2024 revenues were already 56% higher year on year.
We’ve been EBITDA profitable every month since March 2025.
About 33% (£9 million) of our annual costs relate to our continuing investment in our digital ID and verified credentials services. The majority of returns from this 11-years investment to date are expected to come over the next 10 or 20 years.
Globally, Yoti is best known for our world-leading age assurance solutions. Over the last 7 years, we’ve completed over 1 billion age checks for approximately half a billion individuals.
Our flagship service is the Yoti Digital ID wallet. After a slow build-up, we’re now seeing stronger growth in downloads.
- Global downloads increased from 1.62 million in 2024 to 5.55 million in 2025.
- UK downloads grew from 1.00 million in 2024 to 2.02 million in 2025.
- Cumulative global downloads now exceed 21.5 million.
- UK downloads exceed 7.3 million.
- French downloads grew by 1.87 million in 2025 and now exceed 2.28 million cumulatively.
- US downloads increased from 0.40 million in 2024 to 0.78 million in 2025.
The vast majority of individuals download Yoti because:
- businesses offer them the opportunity to use Yoti to prove their identity or age
- individuals request a peer-to-peer share of identity (mostly) or age
- individuals trust Yoti as a privacy-preserving ID wallet and recommend it to friends or family
- individuals read about Yoti and our app in the press
Yoti spent very little on UK consumer marketing of the Yoti app in 2025 (less than £120,000). In addition, 3.5 million non-UK individuals downloaded Yoti in 2025 without any Yoti marketing spend in their countries.
It’s very hard to predict future downloads. There’s such little historical data on individuals downloading private-sector digital ID wallets, and significant uncertainty remains around when key use cases will be unlocked by updates to outdated regulations across many countries.
However, some trends are easier to predict:
- hundreds of millions of individuals globally will create a government digital ID wallet over the next 5 years
- hundreds of millions will create an Apple or Google ID wallet over the next 5 years
- hundreds of millions will create an alternative (non-Apple or non-Google) private-sector digital ID wallet over the next 5 years
Many believe that most individuals in most countries will create both a government digital ID wallet and an Apple or Google ID wallet.
We believe many individuals will also choose to create an additional, highly secure, highly trusted, privacy-preserving and highly useful alternative ID wallet, such as Yoti. Time will tell.
In the UK, provided the government (finally) changes the law to allow certified digital proof of age for alcohol purchases in supermarkets and hundreds of thousands of other licensed premises by Spring 2026, I believe 12-15 million UK individuals will have downloaded Yoti by Spring 2027. That implies 4-7 million UK downloads between Spring 2026 and Spring 2027.
The next 3 years will be transformational for digital ID in the UK and many other countries.
A tipping point for digital ID in the UK
Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, is super clear in The Times that a voluntary government digital ID app will make life easier for UK citizens.
For citizens who want to interact with the government, “it needs to feel more like your banking or shopping app. It’s in your hand. It’s easy to do”. The minister also emphasises that “digital ID is always a foundational technology for building the new state”.
Yoti has always assumed that many countries will offer a government digital ID app to speed up interactions with the government, reduce inefficiencies, improve citizens’ experiences and lower costs to taxpayers.
By removing mandatory use of government digital ID for right-to-work checks, the government now aims to use the digital ID consultation to gain much broader support from the public, business and other stakeholders. This should also help firm up key principles and executional details.
A UK government has around 50 months from taking office to preparing to be judged at the next election, so delivering positive outcomes quickly is crucial.
Millions of UK citizens have already verified their identity using the GOV.UK One Login app. Millions more will do so over the next couple of years as more government departments join, and as public sector bodies like Companies House recognise One Login for identity verification and then re-authentication.
The government has been publicly silent on the role of UK-certified private-sector digital ID wallets. Some commentators worry that the UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (UKDIATF) – the now-legislated private-sector framework for digital ID and attributes – has no sustainable future for certified Digital Verification Service (DVS) providers, their businesses or their end-user customers.
Personally, I believe that by the end of the consultation, the government will get behind UKDIATF because:
- UKDIATF offers citizens and businesses choice and flexibility. It encourages innovation and growth in features and services that the government (or a government app) isn’t well suited to provide, or that many citizens do not want to use a government app for.
- UKDIATF is already proven in the wild. It is widely used by millions for right-to-work, right-to-rent and criminal record (DBS) checks.
Soon (🤞🏻), tens of millions of adults will be able to use UKDIATF-certified proof of age on their phone – from providers such as Yoti and Luciditi – for free when buying alcohol. Using certified digital ID will also be hugely valuable in the UK’s massive financial services sector.
UKDIATF empowers citizens, delivers quick wins, costs taxpayers little and could help puncture opponents’ claims that a government-only digital ID system (without UKDIATF-certified alternatives) will usher in a “big brother” surveillance society.
Digital ID will undoubtedly be a very big story in the UK in 2026.
Setting a new standard for liveness checks
Today’s news has been more than 10 years in the making.
Yoti is the first business to meet iBeta Quality Assurance Level 3 – their highest liveness standard under ISO/IEC 30107-3 for presentation attack detection.
And Yoti’s MyFace achieves this using just a single selfie image to detect liveness and attacks.
Passing Level 3 is super hard. Expert testers use the highest-quality masks and props over several weeks to attack Yoti’s MyFace model. If any single attack gets through undetected (and then succeeds again more than 5% of the time), the model fails Level 3. At the same time, the liveness model must not incorrectly classify more than 10% of genuine live faces presented to the camera as attacks.
To date:
- 108 vendors have passed iBeta Level 1.
- 66 vendors have gone on to pass iBeta Level 2.
- Before today, no vendor or liveness model – whether active or passive – had passed iBeta Level 3.
Many commentators have argued that it’s too easy for kids to beat liveness checks for age assurance, and for fraudsters to beat liveness checks to take over accounts, pass identity checks or enable bots to buy all the popular event tickets.
But most of the world’s roughly 6 billion mobile phone users know how to take a selfie. Businesses can now reliably detect simple, moderate and even sophisticated presentation attacks. This makes it far easier to trust that the face looking into a phone’s camera really is the live face of their customer.
NIST confirms Yoti’s marketing-leading facial age estimation performance
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published its latest evaluation of facial age estimation models. One of the performance tables now given prominence on the main NIST webpage reports on Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by Interocular Distance. This is the distance between the centres of the eye pupils, measured in pixels, using mugshot images (480 x 600 pixels).
Front-on mugshot images are the NIST images that most closely approximate selfie images captured on mobile phone cameras. NIST refers to these mugshot images as “standard photos”.
When Yoti captures selfies for facial age estimation, the average distance between the eye pupils is around 120 pixels. This ensures the full face is captured while minimising unnecessary background space.
NIST’s performance table shows that, for most facial age estimation vendors, higher image resolution (more pixels) and a larger face within the image area (more pixels between the eye pupils) lead to more accurate age estimation.
As shown, based on 917,582 mugshots of unique, white 18-30 year olds captured across the US, Yoti’s latest model (yoti-004) is the most accurate. It achieves the lowest mean absolute error across all interocular distances measured.
NIST reports that the mean absolute error for yoti-004 for white male 18-30 year olds, with an interocular distance of 120-199 pixels, is 1.71 years. Yoti’s own white paper reports a mean absolute error of 1.83 years for the yoti-004 model for skin tone 1 males who are aged between 18 and 30 years.
Despite Yoti’s measurement process being independently audited, some opponents of facial age estimation have argued for years that Yoti’s internal test results cannot be trusted. The evidence is increasingly clear that Yoti’s internal test results are corroborated when our facial age estimation model is independently tested using comparable images.
– Robin, CEO
