Why Digital Identity Will Define the Future of Finance: Interview with Xin Yan, Co-Founder & CEO of Sign

By Puja Sharma

Digital payments, CBDCs, and stablecoins are reshaping how value moves across economies, but true financial inclusion still hinges on one foundational challenge: trusted digital identity. As governments and financial institutions explore programmable money, blockchain-based infrastructure is emerging as a critical layer for enabling secure cross-border transactions, automating public finance, and creating new pathways to financial access. Yet questions remain around interoperability, regulation, and how digital assets can coexist within existing financial systems.

In conversation with Xin Yan, Co-Founder & CEO of Sign, IBS Intelligence explored the future of digital identity, programmable money, and blockchain-powered financial infrastructure. Having facilitated over $4 billion in token distributions and supported government blockchain initiatives across multiple countries, Sign is building on-chain verification and identity standards designed to bridge traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. Through its Digital ID framework and blockchain infrastructure, the company aims to enable trusted financial participation, seamless cross-border value transfer, and more inclusive digital economies.

Digital payments are often the first step into formal finance. From your work at Sign, what are the key challenges in converting payment adoption into deeper financial inclusion?

The true financial inclusion of digital payments is primarily obstructed by the lack of verifiable identity and credit history.

While blockchain has initiated a new era of convenience, efficiency, and instantaneous value transfer, the existing system can’t really transition into sophisticated financial services unless there’s a way to prove one’s identity. And that is the gap Sign is addressing through its Digital ID system.

We are connecting physical credentials to on-chain wallets. And once a citizen has their globally verifiable digital identity, they can build transaction histories and capture credit or yield-bearing assets. More importantly, we aren’t waiting around for organic payment adoption; instead, we are collaborating with government departments and local commercial partners and incentivising them to use these tools.

As the recent unrest across regions has shown, the legacy of finance is fragile, becoming inaccessible when faced with security threats or cash shortages. In such high-stakes environments, our Digital ID becomes a critical infrastructure capable of ensuring continuity of essential services.

With growing momentum around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), how do you see their role evolving alongside stablecoins, will they coexist, compete, or converge?

It’s not one or the other situation; CBDC and stablecoins are meant to coexist and eventually converge.

Stablecoins are the result of private innovation, which provides seamless access to global liquidity and facilitates frictionless cross-border trade. With CBDCs, central banks have provided an alternative with public authority that caters to the needs of sovereign nations to manage privacy-sensitive domestic operations like welfare distributions while maintaining monetary sovereignty.

The future isn’t a winner-take-all battle, as both serve different systemic requirements while sharing the same programmable DNA. Instead, forward-thinking governments will harmonise these tools, and Sign has built the infrastructure that enables this dual-currency approach, allowing nations to interact with global markets and decentralised finance without compromising their internal ledger.

“Programmable money” is frequently discussed as a transformative concept. What are the most practical, real-world use cases you’ve seen delivering measurable economic impact?

Programmable money embeds rules and conditions directly into the code that governs the movement of funds. This makes the total automation of public finance the most practical impact of this money and marks a shift from the inefficiencies of traditional governance to the proficiency of smart contracts, which enable immediate, self-executing transactions without human intervention.

The use of smart contracts to program stablecoins and CBDCs allows nation-states to distribute UBI, pensions, or targeted subsidies instantly and directly to verified citizens. This removes administrative bottlenecks and high fees plaguing public disbursements and reduces the opportunity for fraud. We are currently in discussions with partners in Barbados to automate zero-fee government grants and community aid directly to digital wallets. The impact of Sign’s Asset Distribution System goes far beyond just welfare, though; it also allows local merchants to engage with global partners at high-finance speed. With programmable money, every digital unit circulates and reaches its intended destination with essentially no friction, turning the entire economy into a high-frequency engine where wealth generation isn’t restricted by manual settlements or traditional intermediaries.

Cross-border payments remain inefficient despite innovation. How can blockchain-based infrastructure address limitations in traditional networks like SWIFT?

While foundational to global finance, networks like SWIFT can experience latency, higher costs, limited transparency, operational complexity, and geopolitical sensitivities

Blockchain addresses these limitations through peer-to-peer value transfer. By removing centralised intermediaries, it enables instantaneous settlement and streamlines cross-border payments. With the use of programmable money, i.e., stablecoins and CBDCs, cross-border payments can move directly between wallets or banks globally at a fraction of the cost.

As digital asset infrastructure scales, how should regulators balance innovation with risk management, particularly around interoperability, compliance, and financial stability?

Focusing on one component while sacrificing the other is a grave error. Regulators can only achieve true stability by balancing innovation and risk management, and that can only be accomplished through clear legal frameworks like the EU’s MiCA or the US CLARITY Act. These mandates provide the institutional certainty required for the safe adoption of digital assets.

As for compliance and interoperability, cryptography mechanisms like Zero-Knowledge Proofs provide promising solutions to controllable privacy by verifying digital identities and automating KYC or AML checks. Dual-layer blockchain architectures then allow nations to bridge their private CBDCs with public stablecoin networks to facilitate seamless global trade without compromising the security of the domestic ledger.

Issuing their own national stablecoins and CBDC, meanwhile, will allow nations to maintain financial stability by retaining complete oversight over monetary supply and preventing capital flight to foreign-controlled digital currencies.