Incode Joins OpenAge with a Board Role to Shape the Future of Age Assurance

Incode, Persona and Veratad have joined the OpenAge Initiative, a standards body working to establish interoperable, privacy-preserving age assurance across platforms and services.

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Why Age Verification Needs an Open Standard

Age assurance is no longer a niche compliance requirement. It sits at the intersection of child safety legislation, digital services regulation, and fundamental questions about how platforms handle user data. The pressure to implement it is real and accelerating.

But the current landscape is fragmented in ways that create practical problems for everyone involved: developers building for multiple markets, platforms trying to stay compliant across jurisdictions, users being asked to re-verify across different services, and regulators struggling to establish consistent benchmarks.

These fragmentation problems won’t be solved by any single vendor. They require a shared framework built across the industry. That’s what OpenAge is designed to provide.

About OpenAge

The OpenAge Initiative is an open standards effort focused on developing shared specifications for age assurance that work across different platforms and providers. The goal is to enable interoperability without requiring every service to deploy its own verification infrastructure, and to do so in a way that respects user privacy as a first-order constraint rather than an afterthought.

Key principles behind the initiative:

• Interoperability — age claims should be portable across services and contexts, so a verified user doesn’t need to re-verify from scratch at every platform.
• Privacy-preservation — age assurance should confirm that a user meets an age threshold without transmitting unnecessary personal data to the requesting service.
• Technical openness — the specifications should be accessible to developers, not locked behind proprietary implementations.

Why Incode Joined

Incode joined OpenAge because the problems it addresses directly affect the customers and markets we operate in.

We build age verification technology used by platforms, financial institutions, and regulated services across multiple jurisdictions. The regulatory environment around age assurance is tightening globally, from the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code to state-level legislation in the United States to the EU’s Digital Services Act. Clients are asking how to implement systems that will work across these different requirements without needing to rebuild their verification infrastructure each time a new regulation passes.

Open standards are the answer to that question. If age assurance becomes interoperable by default, platforms can comply with new regulations more efficiently, users experience less friction, and the industry stops reinventing the same infrastructure at every company independently.

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Contribution Areas

Incode is contributing to OpenAge across several working areas:

• Technical specifications for biometric age estimation, including accuracy benchmarks and evaluation methodology.
• Privacy architecture for age claim transmission that minimizes data exposure.
• Interoperability protocols that allow age assurance to function across different provider implementations.

We’re also bringing our operational experience with regulatory requirements in multiple jurisdictions, which helps ground the standard development in the practical compliance realities platforms face.

The Bigger Picture

Age assurance is one of the first areas where the identity industry is being asked to deliver infrastructure that works across the open web rather than within a single platform or service ecosystem. That’s a more difficult technical and coordination problem than building a good single-vendor solution.

OpenAge represents the kind of industry-level coordination that’s needed to solve it correctly. We’re committed to that effort and to contributing the technical depth and production experience that makes the resulting standard actually implementable.

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Incode was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification. Download the report.