The Philippines has launched a 496.3 million peso (approximately $7.8 million) tender for infrastructure and security services supporting everyday use of its national digital identity program, according to Biometric Update’s report on the procurement.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology is seeking one-year subscriptions for five parts of its National ID eVerify Program: public cloud services, hardware security modules, monitoring of inter-agency verifications and relying-party integrations, sovereign hybrid- and multi-cloud orchestration, and digital identity verification and trust management. The contract specifies guaranteed 99.5 percent uptime.
The tender’s security requirements go beyond hosting. Its identity-verification platform must support facial biometric verification with cloud-based liveness detection, configurable confidence thresholds and cryptographic protection of personal data. Bidders also need ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certifications, while the verification component must meet requirements tied to ISO/IEC 18013-5, OpenID4VCI and OpenID4VP, QR codes and NFC.
The procurement calls for a proof of concept showing verification of a current eGovPH digital national ID through a QR-code flow. Readers must be able to check Trust, VICAL and status lists. A pre-bid information session is scheduled for October 26, with bids due November 9.
These requirements provide a concrete example of the adoption conditions facing national digital ID programs as governments pursue broader digital public infrastructure. Biometric Update’s report on an upcoming African Union ministerial meeting says ministers will review digital identity, data governance and connectivity in Libreville, Gabon, from October 26 to 29. The report also cites concerns from GSMA and ID4Africa Executive Director Joseph Atick that infrastructure coverage does not necessarily translate into meaningful service delivery.
The Philippine tender is separate from a 20-year public-private partnership involving Unisys and the Philippine Statistics Authority, which covers card issuance, citizen registration and technical integration. The new procurement is therefore focused on operational verification infrastructure rather than the entire national ID program.