Timebomb or Damp Squib? Building Trust by Addressing Errors, Frauds and Scams in DPI

Digital public infrastructure is scaling faster than the machinery meant to fix it when it fails. More than 36 countries have committed under the 50-in-5 campaign to design, implement and scale at least one DPI component by 2028, and in countries from Brazil to India, digital payments and digital ID already operate at population scale.

Volume brings problems: more transactions mean more errors, and society-scale systems create new attack surfaces. Instant interoperable payments mean the money is transferred within seconds, but once it leaves an account and reaches another, there is little that can be done. Transfer of funds could take place to the wrong person, through a mistake in the phone number that acts as the alias, or done under duress. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance found in 2025 that 57% of adults worldwide had experienced a scam and 23% lost money as a result. Yet redress has not kept pace. Of a number of DPI grievance mechanisms assessed recently, a minority met a minimum "liveness" threshold — a published policy with acknowledgment and resolution timeframes, an escalation path, at least two working complaint channels, and basic case-capture capacity.

That gap has consequences. Where liability for fraud is unassigned, harm falls between the cracks: the direct cause is an unknown malicious party, even though the system's speed and reach enabled the attack. And as DPIs start to link across borders, none of the existing mechanisms can follow a grievance from one jurisdiction to another.

This roundtable will explore the state of play for trust in DPI solutions, as well as emergent potential solutions being deployed around the world, and what trust frameworks for DPI will look like in the coming years, including the approaches for creating interoperable grievance redressal frameworks.