Case study · United Arab Emirates

The national-ID authentication layer for the UAE's regulated economy.

Every regulated entity in the UAE — government, banking, telecom, law enforcement — needs a single trusted way to authenticate the national ID. Our team designed and built the cross-platform SDK and online Validation Gateway that does it.

2017In production since
40M+Identities managed
2M+Authentications per day · all implementations
1.3MAuthentications per day · UAE national alone
99.99%Availability observed across implementations
How it fits together

One integration layer, every relying party.

Rather than each regulated entity building its own path to the national ID register, they integrate once — against an SDK and gateway our team designed, built and still supports.

Relying parties

Regulated entities

Government · Banking · Telecom · Law enforcement

Designed & built by the team

National ID SDK + online Validation Gateway

Cross-platform · in production since 2017

Authoritative record

National ID register

Authoritative source of truth

What we built

A cross-platform SDK, and the gateway behind it.

Smartcard depth on the client side, a hardened validation service on the server side, and the operational discipline to keep both running for the better part of a decade.

The SDK

  • Cross-platform, so relying parties integrate once regardless of their stack
  • Native smartcard and PKI depth — card authentication, certificate handling, secure messaging
  • Built and certified to Common Criteria standards

The online Validation Gateway

  • The online path from a relying party to the authoritative national ID register
  • Carries the authentication traffic of the UAE's regulated economy
  • Availability observed at 99.99% across implementations
Scale in context. 1.3 million authentications a day on the UAE national system alone, and more than 2 million a day across all implementations — sustained, not peak.
Why it matters

This is the part that is hard to buy.

It is infrastructure, not a product

When every bank, telco and ministry in a country depends on one authentication path, the engineering standard is different. There is no maintenance window that nobody notices.

It has run for years

In production since 2017. Most identity vendors can show a pilot. Far fewer can show a decade-adjacent operational record on a national system.

The same people are still here

The engineers who designed the SDK and gateway lead delivery at Aptiway today. That is the whole reason the firm exists in this shape.

Planning a national identity programme?

We have built one that a regulated economy runs on, and we are still operating it.