Don’t Delay, Get Ready for a New Digital World Today

Hi there and welcome to today's webinar. I'm really pleased to have you with us today. We've got a really interesting topic focusing on digital identity and where the future is leading this, particularly in Germany. My name is Annie Bailey, I'm research strategy director with KuppingerCole Analysts and I'm joined today by Edwin Deron and John Eric Setas and they're both from Cigna cat. So before we really dive in, I have a few housekeeping information for you. First of all, you can relax.

We have the audio controlled centrally, so that means you're muted and there's no reason to or no need to adjust this throughout. You'll remain muted so you can just relax and listen. That doesn't mean that you can't ask your questions. We really encourage it. At any point throughout the webinar, please submit your question through the go-to webinar control panel. There'll be a field for questions. When you send that, that will come to me and I'll moderate that at the end of the webinar. So please send in your questions. We'll also be running a few polls throughout the session.

We'll take a pause, pose a question to you for you to answer, and we'll take a look at the results of that at the end to take the temperature on the topics here and to build a more dynamic discussion. And finally, you will have access to the recording and the slides from the session today. So these will be made available to you in the next day or two. So with that we can dive in.

I'll be setting the stage here with the context around digital identity, what the current status is with the market growth is and how we've estimated that, and then some recommendations for you to put in your pocket on how to respond to a future that contains digital identities in it. After that, I'll hand off to Edwin and John Eric and they will take it from there. So to begin, let's open with a poll.

And again, this is to take the temperature of the room, see how you are viewing the space here and how we can bring this into our discussion today as well. So the question is, which of these five identity management or identity security topics is most important to you today? Now you could take it from the angle of a new I am blueprint, modernizing the legacy IAM implementing MFA or passwordless, providing just in time access, going beyond authentication towards policy-based authorization or making zero trust a reality.

So please take a few moments, think about which of these is your highest priority and submit your answer. All right, so let's continue. So to open up, let's take a look at the current state of digital identities. Now the major takeaway that I'd like you to have is that this is a very dynamic space. There is a lot of different technology solutions which are out there, a lot of different influences which impact those and drive the development here with a lot of different variety. There is certainly strong influences from regional policy and government initiatives.

This does tend to be very regionally based. In some cases you have also the support of standards shaping digital identity. This is coming at it from an international level. You also have the private sector here as a very strong influence and they're typically carrying out and realizing these regional policies, government initiatives, and they're also driving the technology forward. The ones innovating and proposing new or different solutions not yet reflected in that regional policy.

There's grassroots initiatives that really bring together public, public sector organizations, private sector organizations across borders, working towards common goals. And then you have the decentralized identity family, which at some points of course participates in the grassroots efforts is part of the private sector, but is also very much its own family working towards its own technology development. So with this wide umbrella of influences here, it's no surprise that the different forms of digital identity that come about can be very different from each other.

That doesn't mean that they can't work in sync with each other. This is where the private sector is really innovating and bringing together great solutions for organizations. So if we break that down quickly, we have government issued. This is of course very familiar to you if you think of a physical government issued identity such as a passport or a driver's license. This is in the physical world, but this is bridging towards the digital world in a hybrid sense with an embedded chip in such a document and in some cases even a fully digital version here.

But then you also have federation options where you're able to connect with verified digital identities such as bank ID or in other cases bring your own ID from such government issued digital identities to be able to access this within your own organizational context. For onboarding, for authentication, for several other different use cases, you have some vendors that take an API hub approach with connectors bringing in these different federated or government issued options. And then in addition to that, you also have self issued.

And this doesn't necessarily mean decentralized, but it means that for those users who don't already have access to a verified digital identity perhaps issued by their government or if they're not in a region where bank ID is is widely accessible, it gives the organization a chance to help the user verify themselves perhaps with scanning their identity document, verifying that or matching that against their biometric facial scan or aliveness detection and being able to use that as a form of verified digital identity.

Some of these other aspects that we can break it down come to storage, not just between centralized to centralized. This brings in the questions of is this stored with the identity provided in a centralized manner or perhaps this is wallet based with the user? There are several different ways that this can be broken up as well as the trust base or the way that the verification is conducted. This could be done in a very traditional manner face to face in a personal physical interaction. This could be automated or going through aggregated verification of different attributes.

So again, this is perhaps a very dense introduction to the current state of the digital identity, but the main takeaway here is it's a very dynamic space. It's influenced heavily by regional policy but also is driven by the private sector. There are many different technological options which then becomes an advantage to be able to select the right technology mix to achieve your use cases for the requirements in your region. Now in this session we're gonna be focusing particularly on Germany. And Germany has a very interesting story with digital identity.

It had in some regards a very early start and commitment to developing a citizen digital identity. But it walks the line really balancing momentum towards achieving this very early goal with the agility to bring in different technology methods to adjust to changing behavior and changing requirements. So we see it sometimes very agile progress and early commitment demonstrated increased usage of the net two. Now the the CI citizen digital identity here, it's made commitments to other technology methods really researching possibilities behind citizen digital wallets for example.

And of course a commitment to the EIDS revision to 0.0 which does have a goal of bringing 80% of EU residents to use a digital identity by 2020 or 2030, excuse me, for the public sector sector as well as the private sector.

You also see some path dependent habits which indicate that the German government is very committed to its original goal of bringing the MPA to success despite slow and that sometimes low adoption rates with intermittent support of other technology options and still a preference to favor the known identity verification options even though there are proven in other methodologies here. But this comes at the same time as very clear indicators from the German consumer public and the change in their behaviors.

We've received from recent studies that digitization is viewed as a positive opportunity here and that's paired with clear behaviors such as online banking increasing 7% in 2021 and the shift in increase of referring online payments for online transactions, which hasn't always been the case in Germany. So the takeaway from here, Germany has had an early commitment shows promise and openness for other technology methods, but at times needs more encouragement to take those on, but the consumers are ready for a digital identity future.

So let's take a quick look at the market growth that we expect here and open with a poll. Do you already have an approach for an automated verification of customer and consumer identities implemented? And this is a simple yes or no question. Feel free to submit your answer and let's continue. So when we're thinking about the growth of this market, I'd like to quickly define first, what is this market we're talking about verified digital identity.

So not just a digital identity yet digital representation of an identifier, but something which is really bound to a real world identity through identity verification. This must be the foundation here. So we can of course group vendors together that provide this just the identity verification aspects. These are represented in the light blue tiles here.

So those vendors that only provide components of an identity verification process such as just the document verification or just biometric verification for example, there are other vendors that offer a complete vetting and proofing solution grouping often these different capabilities together, for example, among others. What's also quite interesting is to look at the full service providers.

So bringing the identity and verification into its real world application such as registration or onboarding of new consumers, of new employees of partners, and also being able to reuse that verification through authentication. For example, using a verified facial biometric as a means of authentication. This branches off into the reusable verified identity space, which really takes a look at the use of authentication among other means of reuse.

But this also branches in the other direction where you have additional services such as fraud reduction, digital signatures, attribute verification and orchestration, which also become part of full service providers here. So this is a quick overview of the market and we do expect that this market to grow dramatically over the next few years. And that's because there's such strong benefits of combining identity verification with onboarding and authentication here. And this information is connected from our recent 2022 research in this space.

So this is reflecting our latest view on the market. Also perhaps interesting for you to know who among your peers is interested in verified identity. And so this is a view of several different industries according to the number of customers that vendors have in those industries.

So this, this is not meant to show which vendor serves which industry, but to give an overall view and show that really in finance and government and healthcare and this all ambiguous other category really show the highest representation and interest in verified identity, but also quite interesting. And some of those industries that have the lowest representation from vendors are the ones where we as co your coal get some of the most often questions about how to get started with verified identity. What can it do for me?

So we see a lot of interest, demonstrated interest in a few industries and those where there's currently low representation, there is an increasing interest here. So let's continue on with another poll. What is the average onboarding time for your external partners? And please select an answer less than a day, less than a week, one to two weeks, two to three weeks or more than three weeks. And let's continue. And so to conclude, we'd like to, from our perspective at Cole, give you a few recommendations for how to prepare for a future with digital identity in it.

We really recommend if you're an organization and you're considering how verified digital identity can serve your organization, really think about those different use cases. Imagine the user journeys built with a digital identity in mind and see how that could ease the flow, improve the user experience, increase the security, reduce fraud from all of these different angles that you may be facing. Take a look on early adopter groups of your users and see how they could be leveraged and used to inform your early implementations.

It's also important to understand the compliance requirements for your business. Again, this comes back to regional policies that may impact particularly your industry, your region. You can also learn from success stories in other businesses in industries on countries and see how that can apply to your own unique use case. And of course get started, build a pilot, take an iterative approach to continually improve this.

And with that, I would conclude my session here and I'm looking forward to handing over to Edwin and John, Eric, once again, a reminder, please submit your questions at any time and we'll take care of those just after Edwin and John Eric present. Thank you. So thank you very much Annie for this, these good insights. And you will see at the end of our presentation that we also support that companies should start with piloting, with experimenting, with learning with digital identity.

But before we go there, generic and myself will share more insights about Germany digital identity and especially Eric with the few on what's happening internationally, if I'm not mistaken. Generic, you just came back from a banking conference in where was it In book arrest. So it's a lot of things happening in in that part of the world as well. So that's very interesting that you can share that too. And we going to talk about the future of digital identity. But before we start about what this identity is, what is the exact problem that we are addressing here? Can you elaborate on that?

We are trying to create a pure digital world and we have done a research over the last two years, which we call the battle board. You'll find a cure call later in the presentation on that where we asked consumers about their experiences with specifically financial services. But I mean this is is relevant for everybody. And one of the questions we asked, you know, how important is a 100% digital experience? And as you can see from, from this result, 85% said that you know, it has to be 100% digital.

And it was also interesting when, when I talked about this at the conference I was on on Tuesday s I talked about the convenience part of it where especially the millennials, they think, you know, it's way too complex And you know, some of them would rather go to the dentist and sign up for a, for a bank account. And of course we need trust in this. You need a trusted system, it needs to be convenient and it needs to be purely digital.

And I, I understand that, but to be honest, we are in almost in 2023. We are using the internet every moment of the day. Isn't that what we already are doing? What is really then what, what should we focus on? Is it really not, is it really not available yet? I think the challenge is we're seeing still too many manual processes. As one example, one of the Norwegian's banks had to take people through a re-validation because of aml. And guess what, they sent me an envelope in the post with six pages of form to fill in and I, I had to send an email. Which century are you guys in?

I mean, as you said, we are in 2022. Now this shouldn't be necessary.

We, we don't want any paper. I mean somebody then said you're a part of, of an onboarding process for example. And then say, well you need to print and sign this and send it back print. Who has a printer anymore? Right? And even if they had, well you print it, you put some ink on a piece of paper, what's the value of that? Except that well we've been using it for a long time and then you need to put it in an envelope. You need to remember to put that in the post and put stamps.

You know, people don't buy this. I think one of the problems is that a lot of organizations have taken the manual processes and just put, you know, you take the manual form and you just put it through Adobe to create the digital form and you put that online to fill in. And that's not, It's not a matter of copy paste. You really should focus on your process and optimize it to use it in an online version. In an online context. Exactly. Yeah. So that's why we're, what we're focusing on there where there's still a manual process replaced by online and then benefit from the online process.

So do we have any figures about how people then are using the online cause it is possible now for some cases to onboard online. Is that always successful?

No, it's, it's not. I mean, back to the research we did, we asked, you know, more than 7,000 people in these different countries, have you ever abandoned onboarding for financial services? And seven outta 10 people say, yes, we have. I mean that's 10 people you have attracted to your website, they've been so interested in your product that they hit the sign up button and then they say, you know what, no, I'm not going through this. Several reasons. Part of it is the, what I just mentioned, the manual processes.

Part of it is having to provide so much personal information, which is again, a challenge being a bank because you have to collect this information, but maybe you shouldn't collect everything up front and this is a challenge you, you lose. I mean, because the process isn't streamlined enough. As one of the audience said in a comment to my presentation I did on Tuesday on this same topic was, and he was a millennial who said, well if the signup is more than entering my email and password, I'm out. I'm not doing it. And and that's the expectation from the younger generation. Yeah.

So that's, that's important to, to take into account what kind of customer do you expect to use your services online. Exactly. And now this, this is 68%, is that for all countries or is that Yeah, so country specific information. So this is the, the average across all the countries and it's a high number. So if you break it down to the different countries, this is what you see. And I've highlighted Germanys, you wanna comment on this?

Yeah, well I think I, of course I've seen this craft before and sometimes when I work in Germany I hear that the digitalization in Germany is still growing and there's still room for improvement. But if you then look at this, it doesn't very, very different very much from, for instance, the Netherlands where I'm from. So I think this is an a development for all countries in the whole of Europe. And every country will do it on their own way. Like everybody looks like kind of jealous to the Nordics.

But if I hear that your story about an Norwegian bank that's sending you document by mail and I see that Norway also has these high abandon rates, then I think we are all in the same boat, but only we do it maybe different. Do you have an idea why Norway? They still have kind of a high percentage. I mean see, see all the Nordic countries, you have Finland on the top. Denmark in Sweden is also pretty high up there. And I think part of it, we've been spoiled. We've been using our bank ID now for 10 years or more. We're so used to it.

We're used to this being simple and then we meet this paper process still from the bank. In a way we are spoiled because in a lot of cases it is very simple and we have higher expectations. And I think it's important what you're saying, different countries have different approaches and also different cultures and different expectations. And that's really important to be aware of. You can't take what you've done in one country and do it directly in another country. Now I think that's, that's indeed for wise and each country also develops in their own speed.

And then if you look at a country like Germany, which is an amazingly big country, what we see now is the change in the number of bank branches. There is a decline in number of bank branches over the past decades. Currently we are in Germany, around 23,000 bank branches we're coming from over 50,000, like 20 years ago. That meant that a lot of people were used to go to a bank branch at the corner of the street. But now online banking of course already and will become more important in the coming years.

And that means for me that banking will lead the way people will get used to online banking and that will together with all kind of other use cases, show that the customers, the users will get used to digital to using credentials to log in. And they want to have it easy and they want to have it mobile. So where the bank branches are going down, online is going up. And I guess that's a very important development to see in for, for Germany. And just like in other countries, we've seen the same development in other countries, banks are moving from brick and mortar to online.

Yeah, and of course, I mean the, the pandemic we, we had just recently of course was boost for this as well because then you didn't have the option even, I mean there were periods of time where you were locked in and you couldn't go to a branch. You had to do this digitally.

Yes, ID, yeah. So how does that then work identity proving in an online way while we are still human beings in an offline world, like combination of the real world with the online world, how does that work? So we're back to the core challenge of identity proofing and identity proofing consists of two components.

One, we need some evidence that this user really exists, right? And we need some confidence that this user is present right now. And you typically would do that by a combination of an identity document, whatever is relevant in the country, it's passport is global of course, but then you have identity cars or driver's licenses that you will scan probably the NFC chip, et cetera, and then do a picture of the user with a liveness test. And if the picture from those two match, well then you have a pretty good idea. The both of these are true.

It is a real world identity and the user is present and this doesn't require any manual processes, no, nothing sent in the mail. I mean no extra manpower is needed for this, for automating this. And you will speed up the process by simplifying it in, in this specific way and you will get a faster and better onboarding. And of course in the cases where you do have a digital identity, as you do have in Germany, have the NPA that can be used. So that leads off to, to you Edwin, what, what does the landscape look like in, in Germany? How would you do this thing?

How would you do the identity proofing in Germany? Yeah, so that's also what any shared before in Germany, we started already over 10 years ago with an electronic identity function of the identity card. So the loyal personnel-wise, the NPA short is an electronic identity that has been here already for a long time. It has its special characteristics why it's not being used very much, but it's AE does notified, it's user friendly. I like the process, it's really very easy to use.

But as said before, Germany has made their, has gone through their own development and that has been in favor for video event. So an interview with live agent, a little bit similar to what we are doing now or post event, go to the post office, prove your identity there with your identity document. But then when we are, if we are going now more online and we have higher expectations of online because we know what is possible, we also want to identify ourselves online much more.

And that's why we see that something like accountant or sometimes it's called CON 24 7 available is also growing in interest and people can use it easy on their own. But even in Germany we have other electronic identities like the yes scheme from the banks we have fair me, that's one of the first wallets in in Germany. And as and also said, it's also about attribute at the station, extra information about a user. And we use for instance Experian for that. Now I am the country product manager for Germany. So I have a lot of colleagues that work for the other regions.

So altogether we built a portfolio not just for electronic identities like here on the, on the map, but also for more global solutions because well in some countries you also need another solution to prove the identity of of an end users online. Exactly. And I think that's important. I mean a lot of our customers are in multiple countries and then we provide, you know, access to not only the German but also the other methods that you will need in the different countries. Yep.

And I would like to show one of the cases that we are currently working on, and that is a little bit also based on what any said before, start your pilot, select your customer segment, be aware of the, of your regulatory requirements. So my advice would be think big, start small. So what you see here is a use case from one of our customers that is the current status, but of course that also started a small start with one country and then expand to others.

And what you see here is that the financial institution based in Germany is using for German needs specific, our partner rep ID for both ENT and in the near future accountant, another way to prove the identity, but for their customers from the Netherlands for instance, they use the electronic identity issued by the banks iden, they even use the electronic identity, that's the name of our subsidiary in Spain to do an identity check using an identity document over the internet. And and the same goes if they go to other countries like Italy.

Italy have has an amazing, well adopted high coverage electronic identity called spit. And we're currently working on the integration of it.

It's, it's good to see how they, how they have developed it in, in Italy and in Denmark of course the, the country was already used to using mid id, sorry, an ID and now changing to mid id. So they're even evolving towards the next electronic identity. And you see that one customer can use through one the various electronic identities or identity verification methods from one platform in different countries because not every country is the same. I guess that's the most important message here.

And you don't have to start with one global solution because of the differences in each country, but start and see what works best in, in a specific country for maybe even for a specific customer segment. And of course what we see is, I mean you you you sort of need to paint the big picture where you want to go, right? But you could start of course just in Germany, but if you know you're gonna acquire customers in in other countries as well, well this is, this is the way to go forward. Exactly.

And I think it's important to also realize that this is possible now you can open up the online channel and trust to us on the other side of the, of the screen by using these kind of methods. And there is even a future because there is a development going on.

And, and John would like you to take us with you in there. What is the future of all this? Where are we going in?

Well, what do you see happening already? Yeah, so Annie mentioned this briefly with the I to the digital identity wallet. And I think the community in general think this, this is really gonna change the way we work digital, it's gonna make it so much simpler and I mean everybody's talking about it. I was so happy to see that Capco released the report just a few days ago actually on decentralized identity. There are different terms being used for this. The wallet, decentralized identity, self-sovereign identity. We're using different terms.

We'll be talking about the same thing, giving the user a wallet. It's a European union initiative, it's happening all over the world, but it's a really interesting European uni initiative saying that each member state is responsible for issuing a wallet free or charge to all people that have some relation to the country, meaning citizens, residents, short term state students, et cetera.

And I, I like just to use this illustration showing out the past we had all these passwords. Currently we have these federated eids that you talked about as well, Annie, you know, and, and, and Edwin with a very NPA et cetera. And the future we're gonna have the wallet and of course the picture is probably gonna look more like this. We're gonna drag everything we have already with us in this. So the world will be more complex with for the users or the wallet, it's going to be better. And for the service product accepting the wallet, it's gonna be so much simpler.

So just on a high level, looking at this in the past, every time you're connected to a new service product, while you have to go through the whole process of verifying who you were with the current situation, well you can do that once too in Germany, the NPA or the yes in the, then you have the established identity and then you can reuse that in many cases. The challenge with this, with a lot of people are concerned with is that you know, too much information is shared.

This e i D provider knows every time you log in somewhere and the user, we don't really know what kind of information is being exchanged behind the scenes there. So in the future I will connect to the issuer, to the e d provider, I will put the data in my wallet and I will share selected Porwal of the wallets with the service provider, which means I'm in control of what I'm sharing. And also the issue has no idea what's going on on this. So this was a, you know, a very high level and brief intro to this is a really interesting topic. You should read that report by by on that.

So how can, how can we help in this complex world with all these components? Yeah. So I think it's good that you also show that how this is going to develop, that this, this is not something for near future only. This is something it, it will develop further and it will develop I if, if you ask me in such a way that everything can be online. And the question is what is, what is everything?

So we, we like to think in the digital identity life cycle of our customers. That means that the customers of our customers, they have three phases in their identity life cycle. That means first they sign up to a surface, they want to be customer, they want to be onboarded. And that's the moment that you want that. You want to get to know them, know who they are, verify their identity, check also if these are the customers that you want to service. And then if you have onboarded this, this customer, then your real relationship starts.

That means that tomorrow they can come in online and you want to recognize them again. They are the returning customer and they have to sign in, they have to log in, they have to authenticate themselves. You want to do that in a secure way that fits the current technology. And then when they start using your services, you sooner or later will also see, depending on your use case of course, but you will see that they want to into an agreement with you or maybe add something to it and that's what we call sign it. And then you start in the electronic signature phase and that this might evolve.

So it might also mean that you have a customer and they have to upgrade their identification because they're starting to use a service for which an extra identification or additional information is required. So that it is really a life cycle of development of your, of your customer and building the profile together. And this, this is also our advice focus either on one of them that would be a good start. Like onboarding is already a good start and then go to the other phases or maybe focus on electronic signing, which is already a huge benefit.

If you can skip the manual process, if you can skip sending letters, your process will speed up because the, the mail with the invitation link to sign is directly there. The anteriors can sign directly, they don't have to scan and send it to you. You don't have to download, it's all automated. So this is the digital identity life cycle and I would like to suggest to, well think about it and work that way. I think it's good that we give a summary Eric, because we have as always a lot of information to share. Time is always limited. We also want to answer the questions that are there.

So any is already waiting with the list of of questions we want to answer. So a summary from our side, people are expecting an online customer journey. It's the default. So they will bring higher conversion but your data quality will also increase. It is something that is developing, you have seen the graph from any of this picking up, it is growing and it will be a hockey stick in the coming years. There will, there will be a future. Our advice is don't wait for the future, start now, prepare, use what's available now.

And the last advice is choose a partner that is in the middle of the development, especially in the international sphere where there's a lot going on and then you have a future proof solution. Exactly and and also just to comment on number two there, I mean Germany had the most advanced, the most secure electronic ID with with NPA and it's already there. You can start using it now.

Yeah, yeah. It's a kind of chicken and discussion there. So let's see if we can solve it by having use cases available. So people will start looking in using the npa, they will apply for the pin code, they will install the app to start using it. I think that's a good start. I think we have to go back to any to see.

Yes, the First of all, a big thank you to the both of you. It was a really interesting presentation and generated a lot of questions from the audience. They're really, really grappling with the the future which is on the way also mixed with the reality and particularly in Germany. We had a few questions come in around the technology preferences in Germany. For example. One question looking at Germany being the big exception in a lot of European countries that do recognize a signature creation with the preference for then a video based verification.

Can you bring some insight here into that and how the usability or the implementation of this or perhaps the future of this is changing? I'm not quite sure if I understand the question but so what I know about in, in Germany, the qualified electronic signature is kind of the default. And to create, to get a qualified electronic signature from a Q tsp, a qualified trust service provider, you'll need to be identified and that is currently being done either over video iden with like an interview like, like this. Or you can do it with a what's called selfie iden.

There are multiple ways, I'm not quite sure if that was the background of the question, John, Eric, any do you have anymore? I think as you said, and I mean in Germany the loss on electronic signatures are, are pretty advanced and so on. But remember that the core of this is knowing who signed, if you don't have very good proof of who added the signature, the signatures not worth a lot, which is why you have the qualified signatures and then you need to have this process of onboarding.

Great, thank you for that. We have some other questions which are then centered around the MPA and how to, to handle and, and address some of the, the positives and also some of the negatives behind it from, from a self-described disillusioned German, but that there are some, some barriers here such as really strict data protection laws and, and progress feels slow and feels difficult. How would you, how would you respond to, to somebody in this situation who's feeling a little less optimistic about the, the position of the MPA in Germany?

Yeah, I I I, I can imagine it and maybe it's easy for me being Dutch, living in the Netherlands, having my D day, the Dutch equivalent of mpa and I use it for everything that is governmental for my tax, for my pension fund, for my health insurance. And it's on my mobile phone so I can, I can just use it only I had to install the app once. I had to choose a pin code once I had to put my passport to the MSC of my smartphone once and now I have to benefit. And I think that is for Germany exactly the same.

As soon as you have onboarded yourself, as soon as you have your pin code, you have installed the outsource. If you have maybe done a demo a few times, you get used to how it works. And then that's the important part of the chicken and egg discussion. If there are these use cases where you can really benefit from using it so you don't have to wait in line anymore, maybe your process will even be faster because the other side will receive your information faster.

You have proven your identity in one of the best ways that, that is the benefit that should be brought by organizations government and I can imagine that if you don't experience that yet. So please understand that I FD experience and my colleagues from Norway also have the experience there is really a benefit of using such an electronic identity But also realized it does take time for take up.

I mean, as you said, I'm using my everyday and I can use it both for private and public services. Yeah. But it took a few years before we got to where we are today and I think Germany is just behind on the curve and, and you show the very interesting curve in the beginning Annie, we showing the take up and I think we are in that situation now in Germany where it's, it's taking up, it's becoming more and more and that's the time, you know, to be there as a service provider to, to be available to, to start using it.

That creates another use case which creates more usage, which creates more use cases, et cetera. Great, thanks for answering those questions. Switching topics slightly to video Ient and your view on its future IT video iden is, is at times under criticism for it's, it's security weaknesses at times. Why do you still see this with the future? Well it is currently one of the commonly used methods in Germany. It is still allowed by Bing for, for AML compliant use cases, for instance. And for many people it will be a very pleasant way to use because somebody is guiding you.

You don't have to listen to a computer, somebody is guiding you. But at the same time we see that a lot of people want to do it themselves. So we see an uptake of the, what's called ent, the combination of a qualified electronic signature plus a micropayment, which is also an a r compliant onboarding mechanism in Germany. And then you can do as an end user, you can do the whole flow yourself without human interaction in the process.

So, and we will see that those two will live next to each other and they will be maybe less interest in video if people can use Contant on their own, that is development. We will see, even if John, Eric, and myself are right, the MPA will take off that is even different procedure and might even win an interest and that might eat away some of the transactions on video with, And it's also about realizing that people are different.

I mean people are different in different countries and different what they will expect, but I I would assume even within Germany, different demographics, some of them will be, you know, more comfortable by having a video interview and doing that. But others saying, you know, no, no, no, especially the young kids, they don't want to talk to anybody. They want to do everything, you know, online and as fast as possible. So I think it's important to recognize that, to have different solutions to try to address different demographics with different kinds of methods. So you cover the whole specter.

Yeah, thank you for, for that perspective there. And your answer particularly Edwin, partially answered the next question which I'm gonna ask. So that might be a, a nice summary there. But considering that identity verification is one aspect of onboarding in Germany, what about e-signatures? You mentioned reference payments as well.

What are, what are you considering best approaches here? But I can also imagine coming back to this answer from John Eric on allowing for differences, allowing for differing needs among different demographics. But perhaps you have something to add here as well.

Yeah, so in in general, I I think it's important to, so I think online the onboarding is one of the use case you should look at or electronic signing is one of the, simply because authentication on its own will not work. You have to get to know your customer first. So electronic signing is can be seen standalone there. Your customers of course need an electronic signature. And the electronic signature is not a graphical representation of what we call a signature on a digital piece of paper.

It is, it is so much more, it's a calculation, it's mathematic, it's encryption to prove really that the person who signed this and, and signed should be between brackets because it's not, not making a signature, but that you really have to prove that the person who signed a contract is really that person. The identification in electronic signing is very important. That is something that you, that you really have to consider when you start electronic signing.

What are the methods that people have available to make this to, to make a signature you need to, to prove the identity and you need to be able to put it in one document and that differs per country. For instance, me here in the Netherlands, I don't have a qualified electronic signature given out at birth. I do have a Swisscom QEs, so mine comes even from Switzerland and I've been identified before and now I can sign qualified all over Europe.

So there, there are opportunities there. Anything to add John?

No, I was just thinking, I mean, one important aspect, remember the slide I had with the identity validation two parts, right? That this individual exists and, and all you talked about now really proves, you know, the qualified signature and everything proves that you really exist. But I think we, we need for, we must forget this second part, knowing having confidence that you are actually present right now, not somebody else that had been able to get access.

We've seen the increase of fraud in, in my country in Norway now, a lot of them in close relations where, you know, somebody will take up a loan or somebody in in partner's name or something. So that's why these presence part and, and the only way to do that, that we know right now is either a video event or you take a self-portrait with some liveness test. So that's also an important part of it. The the the whole processor to have some confidence that hey, this is really admin doing this and not somebody spoofing in.

And I've, I've proven that I am admin in front of such a qualified trust service provider and they then confirm that when I place a signature under a contract. But I think you can fill a whole webinar about electronic signing.

Oh yeah, Think so. And speaking of that, we've filled the time very well today. Thank you to all of our attendings for your great questions. Thank you John, Eric, and Edwin for your answers here. And with that I would quickly show the results of the polls that you all participated in. Yes. Perhaps you also find it interesting. So from the first question on figuring out what are your priorities for the next year around identity management, we do see majority of people looking at moving beyond authentication perhaps where it's policy based access management. Very interesting here.

So thank you for your contributions Also. Zero trust is is number two. There is also Interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. Moving quickly to our next poll, a simple yes or no, do you already have an approach for identity verification in place? Majority say yes, but there's still a large portion Still 40% does not have that.

Yeah, and I mean that, that's the time to get started now. I mean the, the tools are available. There is no technical reasons not to get started.

It's, it's all available. Yes. And our last full question, what is the average onboarding time for your external partners? I've got a tie at either less than a week or between one to two weeks. That's still quite a while in working days. If that's delaying you from making progress, Asking Millennium, you're gonna, okay, you're gonna sign up for this account, it's gonna, you're gonna get the account in two weeks. It's gonna say, yeah, right, I'll go somewhere else. Right? They're used to this immediate sign up process and nobody said less than a day on this.

So there's still room for improvement here. We, but thank you, there's for yes, thank you to all of you for your participation here. And with that I'd like to conclude today just with a few thank yous, to our speakers, to our audience. If you're interested in more content like this, you can always attend our KC live events, their virtual events on various topics. The next one is gonna be on access management. So feel free to tune in there. We also have our hybrid event, if you'd prefer to join in person in May in Berlin.

This will be our European identity and Cloud conference covering some really interesting topics there. So we hope to see you there. And of course there's plenty for you to read. There's a white paper here really digging a little deeper into this topic, new era for digital identity in Germany, how it can move forward from where it's been in the past.

Of course, plenty of other research for you to read as well. And with that, thank you so much for your participation and I wish you a very nice rest of your day.