eKey 2.0 — Bahrain's AI-Driven Digital Identity and eKYC Platform

Bahrain's Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA), in partnership with Beyon Connect, relaunched its national digital-identity app as eKey 2.0 on Sunday, 9 February 2025. The revamped platform uses AI-based facial-recognition verification and an enhanced eKYC (Know Your Customer) process to give every citizen and resident a single, password-less biometric login for government and participating private-sector services.
Adoption in the first phase was immediate and measurable: iGA's Chief Executive announced that registrations for the revamped app exceeded 13,000 within a single day of launch. The first phase connected roughly 14 government and private-sector entities, with the platform designed to expand toward the wider set of services later consolidated under Bahrain's unified MyGov app and national portal, bahrain.bh.
eKey 2.0 has since been recognised externally: it won the Digital Identity Innovation Award at the Bahrain Smart Cities Summit in July 2026, roughly a year and a half after launch, indicating the system remained in active use and was judged favourably by an independent industry panel rather than being a one-off pilot. Public reporting to date covers registration counts and service-integration figures rather than independent audits of the facial-recognition system's accuracy, false-match rates or data-protection safeguards, which remain unverified in open sources.

Read the full analysis: https://www.iga.gov.bh/en/article/iga-ce-more-than-13-000-registrations-for-the-revamped-ekey-2-0-within-one-day-of-its-launch