The state is getting ready to post a request for proposals for a ‘digital wallet’ for students in the North Carolina Community College system. The program aims to give students a way to keep control over their own digital credentials, including transcripts and certifications like Basic Law Enforcement Training.
This year’s state budget included $5 million for the program, designed to “evaluate the effectiveness of digital credential services for use by community college students.” The budget bill directs the North Carolina Community Colleges System (NCCCS) Office to contract with a single provider across all of its 58 colleges.
The program grew out of a pilot, which operated at Cape Fear Community College and Randolph Community College. Each college used a different vendor: CFCC used a platform from Florida-based DigiCred, a newer company, and Randolph used California-based Certree, which has a much more established user base.
Republican State Senator Michael Lee, currently the Senate Majority Leader, has been the main legislative force behind the program. He told WHQR that his concerns around student information access and security date back years, but were sharpened up more recently when his daughter experienced difficulty coordinating transcripts from multiple institutions. He also said he sees the digital wallet as part of a broader effort to reshape higher education.
“This is a piece of a much broader part of the transformation of the education system with competency-based education, somewhat decentralized education, kind of a la carte,” Lee said in an interview earlier this month.
Both DigiCred and Certree have engaged lobbyists and made campaign donations to Lee as the program has advanced from an idea, to a pilot, to a statewide rollout. The actual budget language does not name a specific vendor, leaving that to NCCCS. However, the specifications closely match the specifications of DigiCred’s platform. DigiCred didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article, but Certee noted some concerns about the requirements, as did some other stakeholders in the process, who questioned whether DigiCred would be compatible with a wide range of educational institutions and potential employers.
For his part, Lee said the requirements in the budget reflect his core concerns about student information, and dismissed the idea that lobbyists influenced his decision. He also said the goal of the program is to explore the feasibility of scaling last year’s pilot.
“This may never happen if the system says, ‘okay, we can't scale this pilot, and so this isn't going to work,’” Lee said.
DigiCred and Certree jockeyed for a role in the program
Lee said he first started considering the issue of student transcripts about five years ago, but the cost seemed too high and the technology was still evolving. He said that, as time went on, he started thinking more broadly than just transcripts, considering the wider category of credentials as part of efforts to decentralize education. According to Lee, that attracted both DigiCred and Certree to explore options in North Carolina.
Not long after Lee started talking about digital credentials, DigiCred Holdings, Inc. was founded in Florida in 2022. The following year, the company hired Franklin Freeman — a former top aide to Democratic Governor Mike Easley who now works for the McGuire Woods firm — as a lobbyist. Later in 2023, DigiCred CEO John Hartman donated $1,500 to Lee’s campaign; a month later, co-founder Mark Brogley donated $1,000.
Asked if that was a way to ‘get on his radar,’ Lee told WHQR, “No, not at all. I was talking to them. The first time I met them, they were really interested in what we were doing, what I would call the decentralization of education.”
In early 2024, DigiCred switched to Tom Fetzer as its lobbyist. Fetzer, the former mayor of Raleigh and past Chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, serves as lobbyist for a host of state and local government bodies, including New Hanover County, CFPUA, the Wilmington International Airport, and the Wilmington Regional Film Commission. Lee briefly worked with Fetzer after his loss in the 2018 state senate election in a strictly consulting role, due to his recent position in office. Later that year, Hartman donated another $5,000 to Lee’s campaign.
Over the same year, Certree contracted with Brubaker and Associates, spending $33,000 on lobbying.
In late 2024, the digital credential program language made it into SB 382, initially a Hurricane Helene relief bill that ended up with a lot of other provisions in it, leading to a veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and an override by Republicans.
In the first half of 2025, the digital wallet program ran, with $750,000 going to CFCC to work with DigiCred and $250,000 going to Randolph to work with Certree. (The bill doesn’t specify the reasons for the allotments, though Randolph is a significantly smaller college.)
In July, the State Board of Community Colleges discussed the results of the pilot program, but didn’t come to a final decision on which vendor — DigiCred, Certree, or possibly a third candidate — to go with for the statewide rollout. According to meeting minutes, Randolph Community College President Dr. Shah Ardalan spoke at the meeting, noting that while their pilot had less time and less money, they were able to implement Certree quickly because “of the maturity of the technology.” The board did acknowledge that Certree, founded in 2018, had a much wider user base — CFCC appeared to be DigiCred’s first public client; Certree is used by over 50,000 organizations. One board member, Geoffrey Lang, continued to argue that Certree’s promises “might be too good to be true.”
In October, Certree CEO Pavan Kochar gave the maximum $6,800 donation to Lee and, by the end of the year, Certree had spent another $71,500 on several lobbyists at Brubaker and Associates. DigiCred, meanwhile, spent $125,000 on Fetzer’s services for the year.
In April of this year, Brogley gave $6,800 to Lee. Two weeks later, Lee filed S991, legislation authorizing the digital wallet program that was later folded into the state budget. The language included specific details that aligned with DigiCred’s product, including its use of distributed operations, blockchain, and a specific and high-level digital security requirement.
Despite the similarities, Lee said the legislative language was not custom-written for DigiCred, telling WHQR, “the way we laid it out was so that anyone that can compete can compete. “
Differing approaches
Lee said lobbyists helped arrange meetings with both DigiCred and Certree, who he said knew about his interest in credentialing based on his discussions in committees (including the Senate Education and Higher Education Committee, where Lee is a co-chair) and elsewhere.
The two companies do take slightly different approaches. Certree acts as a host for student information, providing them with a highly secure “vault” for digital versions of their credentials; the company boasts a ‘zero trust’ architecture that makes those vaults very safe. DigiCred stores the credentials on a student’s smartphone using blockchain-based technology and a mobile app. DigiCred also requires what’s known as Identity Assurance Level 3 (IAL3), the highest level of identity proof according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The strict requirements mean students must appear in person and use biometric data to onboard before transferring their first credential.
Lee said he met with Kochar to discuss Certree, and had concerns about students owning their data.
“I met with the president of the company. She sat right where you're sitting,” Lee said in an interview. “I said, ‘your user agreement says that the student doesn't own the data,’ [...] and she said, ‘Well, we'll work on it. That's something we'll work on.’”
Kochar pushed back on that in an email to WHQR.
“Senator Lee and I did speak, and I said no such thing. Certree has stood for consumer data protection for more than seven years. Our public website has likewise described Certree for years as a private vault in which individuals control their own records,” she wrote. “These principles have been publicly documented for many years and have not changed. They are foundational to Certree’s architecture and business model. I would have had no reason to tell Senator Lee otherwise, and I certainly would not have intentionally misrepresented our own product or policies to a legislator.”
Lee also said he wanted students to digitally possess their own data. Speaking about a hypothetical situation in which DigiCred got the statewide bid, Lee said, “[in] this kind of system where you own your own data in the particular format, if DigiCred goes away tomorrow, the idea is that [students] still have their data and their certifications, and so that they can build their. We call it a wallet, but it's more of an internal resume of sorts.”
Certree was “persistent,” Lee said, “and so they ended up being part of the two-part pilot.”
The result of that pilot, in Lee’s opinion, was that Certree wasn’t successful.
“Nobody signed up,” he told WHQR.
Based on the full report on the pilot, there were far more students using DigiCred than Certree. Almost 1,500 CFCC and New Hanover County Schools students were onboarded to DigiCred, while Certree reported 108 successful information transactions at Randolph.
Kochar told WHQR that “the Randolph and Cape Fear pilots were not comparable student-adoption experiments, noting that CFCC received three times the funding, as well as an initial month to run the pilot, and “a highly structured student-recruitment and onboarding program” that Randolph didn’t have.
She argued that “the Randolph pilot instead focused on whether the technology could work in real-world use cases,” adding the college was still using their service.
To that end, Randolph President Shah Ardalan, who has a background in IT, told WHQR that Certree was “one of the best I have seen. It was very seamless, very easy to implement, and they delivered whatever promises that they have made [...] They did deliver pretty well, and our students used it and still are using it.”
Technical concerns
Several people familiar with the digital wallet project but not authorized to speak on behalf of their respective organizations told WHQR that two of the legislative requirements posed potential concerns.
The first is the IAL3 security measures used by DigiCred and included in the budget language for the project. Lee called the requirement a “big deal,” prompted by his concerns for student data security.
Kochar suggested the IAL3 standard, because it requires in-person onboarding, could cause issues.
“Imagine a former community-college student who has moved to another state and, years later, needs access to a verified transcript to apply to a university. If North Carolina requires that student to complete IAL3 proofing before using the credential system, the student could not simply complete the process remotely from home. The student would need to appear at an approved location, during available operating hours, where the required supervised identity-proofing and biometric procedures can be performed. That creates real questions about accessibility, convenience, cost, and whether IAL3 is the appropriate assurance level for ordinary education-credential use cases,” she wrote to WHQR in an email.
Another concern has to do with the digital architecture laid out in DigiCred’s presentation, which shows DigiCred’s Credential Management System (CrMS) installed in the cloud environment of both the host institution and the receiving institution.
In other words, according to DigiCred’s information provided to NCCC and the details of the pilot at CFCC, DigiCred software apparently needs to be installed on both ends of a transaction. So, for a student to get their credentials — a transcript, certification, etc. — from an institution, they need to have DigiCred; that wouldn't be an issue if all of NCCC’s 58 colleges use the product. The question is whether, in order to receive a credential from a student, an institution, organization, or agency also needs to use DigiCred.
During the pilot, CFCC installed DigiCred’s software and allowed students to send transcripts to UNCW. However, DigiCred hosted the ‘receiving’ end on UNCW’s behalf, allowing the university to access transcripts remotely without installing any software. UNCW never installed DigiCred software in their cloud environment.
It’s unclear if CFCC students sent their credentials anywhere else outside of the structured pilot. A spokesperson for the college told WHQR it “does not track or have visibility into where students may have sent their information after receiving it.” CFCC said “requirements for receiving institutions can vary depending on their setup” and deferred questions to DigiCred – which has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
DigiCred is slated to be part of a digital wallet program in Wyoming that’s rolling out this fall. According to a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Workforce Services, receiving institutions would not need the DigiCred system.
“It's an open-source system, designed to work with other open-source systems. I don't know all the technical details of this, but that was one of the requirements — that it would have to be able to share the credentials with any school or employer,” Senior Project Manager Ty Stockton told WHQR in September. At the time, the project had not yet started.
For his part, Lee reiterated that he was focused on the core concerns he felt were represented in the legislation. He said if a technical problem materialized, NCCC could pivot or decide not to move forward. He also noted that the requirement could change as technology evolved, and again said DigiCred might not end up being the right company.
“The idea is that, because these are the standards, it's not a company that owns [your data], and it's not your data in a cloud somewhere,” he said. “As other technologies evolve, or other companies evolve, they'll be able to kind of pick it up if DigiCred's not around or DigiCred becomes too expensive or can't do what they say they're going to do. The idea is you can kind of take your credentials and it can move to a different system. “
The future of education
The $5 million digital wallet project is more than a story about government contracting – it’s part of Lee’s much broader approach to higher education. He said his end goal is democratizing the system, making it more flexible, and shifting the focus from the traditional four-year university degree. Along those lines, Lee has supported new approaches to education, like the nontraditional SparkNC ‘labs’ offering STEM instruction for students, as well as emerging AI technology, like the $5 million in this year’s budget for AI lesson-planning and tutoring programs Khanmigo and MagicSchool (Lee had initially pushed for over $10 million).
The wallet fits into that plan by allowing people to store their own individual credentials based on competency rather than a “Carnagie unit” — the traditional ‘credit hour’ of higher ed — provides, for Lee, an alternative. Not just transcripts for two- and four-year degrees, but specific certifications and other credentials.
“This is a huge disruption. You know, the university system used to have a monopoly on information. They don't anymore. They still think they do, which is troublesome because of the value proposition,” Lee said.
Lee pointed to the evolution of the role of the university, which he said, at one point, was often considered a prerequisite for future employment. He said, “We now see a lot of college degrees you can't do anything with in the private sector.”
By comparison, Lee praised community colleges for embracing more directly applicable courses, “You got students that don’t want to have to go for two years to become a lineman.”
He recalled a meeting with legislative liaisons from the state’s universities that took place four years ago.
“They looked at me and said, ‘Senator Lee, we just want to know — all this is being done for the community college system — we just want to know when it's going to be our turn,’” Lee said. “And my response was, ‘well, when the system as a whole provides the value [...] so there are parts of the university system that are rewarded and are funded and are provided the policy and money to accelerate, but it's the ones that are providing that value proposition.”
Lee said his goal wasn’t to end the traditional university system, though he said he hoped that by changing market conditions universities might also change — and he acknowledged that might not be easy.
“When you've had an industry that operated in particular ways since the beginning of time — not quite the beginning of time, but you know — it's going to be messy. We will make mistakes. I mean, to say we won't is a little Pollyanna,” Lee said. “We have to start the process [...] it’s about thinking about it differently.”
