Digital wallets like Apple Wallet and Android Pay can store things like credit cards and reward cards, but there’s one important card that they still can’t hold: a driver’s license. However, that may soon change in the UK.
Oliver Morley, CEO of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in the UK, today showed off a digital driver’s license using Apple’s Wallet app. We can see that the license is stored in the Passes section of Wallet, where you’ll also find event tickets and reward cards.
Morley notes that the digital driver’s license is still a prototype and that there’s currently no timeline for a full release. He also says that the digital license isn’t a full replacement for a physical card. Instead, it would serve as an add-on, like how the paper counterpart to the driver license was abolished in the UK in June 2015.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard about a digital driver’s license for your smartphone, as the Iowa Department of Transportation revealed in 2014 that it was working on a digital license. A digital license would come in handy because it would enable users to slim down their wallet even further, and in some cases, stop carrying a wallet altogether, which has kind of been the dream of digital wallet apps all along.