Your qualification should outlive the institution that issued it
A credential passport is a signed record of a qualification that the holder carries for life. Any employer can verify it in seconds, on any smartphone, without contacting the issuer and without taking anyone's word for it.
The problem
A qualification is one of the few documents a person needs to prove repeatedly across forty years of working life. The instruments we use to prove it were not designed for that.
Paper and PDFs are forgeable.
A certificate is a design, and a transcript is a layout. Both can be reproduced convincingly with ordinary software, and the forgery is often better presented than the original. A verifier looking at a document can assess whether it looks right, which is not the same as knowing whether it is right.
Verification by phone call does not scale.
The fallback is to contact the issuer — a registrar's office, an awarding body, a training provider. That takes days, costs staff time on both sides, and is skipped under hiring pressure far more often than anyone admits. A control that is routinely bypassed is not a control.
Careers outlast institutions.
Over decades, providers merge, close, change systems, migrate student records into formats nobody supports, or simply lose them. The holder still has the qualification. The organisation that could confirm it may no longer exist in any form that answers the phone.
The common thread: proof of a qualification currently depends on a third party remaining reachable, cooperative and intact, indefinitely.
The credential passport
The credential passport inverts the dependency. Instead of the qualification being a claim that points back at an issuer, it becomes a self-contained signed record the holder keeps.
At the point of award, the issuing institution signs the credential record — qualification, holder, date, awarding body, and whatever attributes matter for that award. The signature is ECDSA-P256 in DigSig form under ISO/IEC 20248:2022, conformant with the standard and independently reviewed; VeriV's implementation was built from co-research and testing with a co-author of the standard, ongoing since 2017.
The holder keeps that record. They can present it to an employer, a regulator, a licensing body or an overseas authority. The verifier checks it in seconds: any modern smartphone, no app to install, no account, no login. Verification is read-only and serverless — it does not call the issuer, and it does not require the issuer to still be operating.
Records live in an append-only ledger. Nothing is ever overwritten, so a credential's history — issue, amendment, revocation — remains legible rather than replaced.
Where a physical artefact still matters — a printed certificate, a licence card, a sealed award document — an NFC hardware anchor (NXP NTAG 424 DNA, producing a fresh one-time code on every tap) can bind the physical object to the signed record. This is optional. The digital record stands on its own.
Anti-forgery properties
Three sentences cover it:
- The signature cannot be forged without the issuer's private key.
- The record cannot be altered without breaking the signature, which makes the alteration detectable by whoever verifies.
- Revocation and dispute are visible — a withdrawn or contested credential is marked by a new signed record in the chain, so a verifier sees the current status rather than a stale copy.
Every record is signed by a named, authorised human signer at the issuing institution. AI plays an assistive role only, in analysis; it signs nothing.
A credential can also be formally disputed within a defined dispute window, with a defined arbitration path — so a holder who believes a record is wrong has a route that does not depend on goodwill.
For issuers
You issue each credential once, signed, and stop fielding verification requests about it forever. Registrar workload falls because employers verify directly rather than queueing at your inbox. Your awards become harder to counterfeit, which protects the value of every credential you have ever issued. And if your systems change — or your institution merges or closes — the credentials you signed remain verifiable regardless.
Issuance fits alongside your existing student or member records; the signed record is produced at the award gate rather than replacing your system of record.
For holders
You hold your own qualifications. You can prove them in seconds, to anyone, anywhere, without asking a former institution for a favour or waiting on a reference check. Nothing is lost if a provider closes. Nothing degrades if a decade passes. And verification is read-only — the person checking your credential can confirm it without gaining access to anything else about you.
Maturity
The record architecture runs end to end today on VeriV's live industrial platform at veriv.io, at TRL 6–7. Credential applications are at pilot stage, and we are open about that.
Start a pilot conversation
We are talking with awarding bodies, universities, training providers and professional registers about pilot deployments. A first conversation is short, technical, and carries no obligation.
Enquire about a pilot