Katryna Dow - How Consumer Identity is approached by Meeco

Thank you to Katrina. Who's going to leave us through to, through, to lunch. Do we have a clicker?

No, we don't fashion way. Yeah, hopefully so just, and so, so that was an interesting segue into identity. I'm trying, we're a small group today, so please feel like you can interrupt me. I'll aim to sort of whi this in about 20 minutes, 25 minutes and happy if you interrupt with questions along the way. Very briefly, I am the founder and CEO of a company called Mik. We often talk about Miko enabling the API of me.

So we see, I was gonna say in the, not distant the future, but actually it's now everything we touch, where do you see has some input and output from a data point of view and our identity, whether or not it's our real identity or it's something that identifies us is wrapped around that data and information. And we believe very strongly that there is an opportunity for, for individual citizens, customers, patients, students, to bring their data and identity into the enterprises and organizations that they trust in collaborative way.

And it speaks really to a lot of the great points that were made on the panel a few minutes ago is that the shift that we see happening and, and, you know, if there is a shift around the me, part of it, it's this idea that a convenience and, and removing friction is gonna Trump a whole host of things. And so what, what is unanimous across an emerging digital generation is ease and convenience.

And the idea that I have to download 50 different apps for the three banks that I have and my toaster and my car and the electricity grid and the solar handle and the, you know, like da da, you know, it goes on and on and on, but idea that, that, you know, if, if I had a hundred dollars for every bank that says they're working on the killer app, you know, it's just, it's crazy.

And so there is this shift and there's this dance at the moment, which is why a lot of the work we see being done by Canara and YX, and is so important at the moment is trying to find this middle ground where we can actually start to build into the value chain. I, I gave this talk a few weeks ago in Paris, which I called towers from around the global view from the bridge. And really it's sort of some of the war wounds of, of the last nine months of my life.

Really, I've been on this three continents on a monthly basis. And so it's, it's biased towards the things that are shifting in Europe, but together panel talked about sort of things we're starting to see bubbling up in a Australasia or Australia in particular. And also some of the challenges for US-centric companies that have a global operation and, and have can't launch around a lot of things like identity and data, but find that things that are every day in us context could actually end up having a chief executive, you know, facing a prison sentence in Europe.

And so with these very strange tensions, so what I'd like to do is just talk to you around some of those observations tomorrow, or, or the next day, whenever we're representing, I'll get into the nuts and bolts of some practical things we're doing from a technology point of view, and also some use cases. But today I just wanted to sort of look at some of those challenges is the hope that if that regulation is not bearing down in your organization right now, there's an opportunity to, to be innovation led rather than compliance led.

When we think about identity or the idea of, of cyan, we see that as obviously real identity or the ability I, me to federate the different roles in my life. Something that's privacy enhancing in that I can be known by either a persona or, or I can create something that is recognizable in an omnichannel situation without necessarily giving away who I am. We are looking towards what we call the new normal. And I'll talk about that very briefly.

And that is how do you market to somebody from a global point of view, if you are global organization and satisfy these competing requirements in a way that does create content that is personalized. And then how does that fit with your digital transformation? So I'm just gonna share with you some of the things that we've seen over the last 12 months, but I would say more challenging in the last three months. And I think the next six months ahead in particular. So the key things that we see is there are, there are obviously drivers right now to look at this change.

Although I would say commitment call has been at the forefront of talking about the whole C opportunity for maybe longer than necessarily the marketers had that conversation. So I, I would urge some of their early white papers are really great signpost to things that are really just becoming obvious to a lot of enterprises right now, the tensions and with all tensions come opportunities.

And so, as I, as I said, when we look at the individual and this is borrowed an influence by some of reporting, that call is doing in the science spaces, we look at, what does it look like to have the individual in the middle?

And how do we start to balance this identity and access management with the regulatory drivers, with the need for digital transformation, or at least trying to bring together those omnichannel entry points for customers and the desire or requirement for a digital generation to have marketing that is personalized or content relevant in a way that can differentiate a brand or, or elevate service and at the same time, be cool rather than creepy. And it's a very fine line between those two extremes, which is the importance of consent.

When we think of science from the perspective of the individual, we think of something that's, customer-centric centric, that's context driven and consent based, always because the interesting thing for organizations particularly under GDPR is if you get the context and consent matched, right, then what our studies have shown is individuals are actually willing to share more information rather than less, if they understand why the data's being collected, how it's gonna be used, the context of the be, and the benefit that is associated with that consent, what, obviously these regulatory drivers are accelerating some of the opportunities.

And as, as Colin talked about earlier on, and, and the panel now, it also creates challenges for organizations in terms of how they respond to these drivers. So these are predominantly European drivers at the moment, although Australia is to starting to make a bolt move towards open banking. So we're gonna see some big changes in our financial services environment. My background before founding Meco, I worked in financial services for a decade.

And in fact was part of what inspired me to, to found Meco, cuz I realized every day we were manufacturing financial products here and the customer was here and we were constantly going like this. And we had this idea that we would create this mortgage product or this insurance product, and we'd create it in January and we'd put it on the marketing calendar for September as if every single customer was gonna wake up in September with that need. And so what we weren't able to do consistently was what I used to say is be the first service provider on the scene of change.

You know, having a child promotion, changing jobs and inheritance, moving countries, proving your identity, all of these things that are every day, how do you stop to bring those two things together? And so I think there's gonna be a huge shape up in financial services. If banks only look towards PSD, two compliance, as in here's your data versus here's how we can help you make better decisions, real time through the access and sharing and collaboration with your data. Then we looked at the us and we know there are tensions at the moment around data privacy divide.

And so many of the things without making any comments about current administration, shall I say that some of the hard thought rights for American citizens in the previous administration, we're starting to see those rollback. And this is creating a lot of confusion for American who centered headquarter organizations.

And then in Australia, our, our productivity commissioner published two reports, one at the end of last year and then earlier, or I think it was may this year was the, the second draft that when the treasury, which I'm sure is influenced where we've got two with open banking as well, and has gone as far as to say that that Australian citizens, that they believe there's a comprehensive right to data control for consumers and the data actually a household level is an asset. So what does that start to look like?

Well, how do we start to solve this data paradox? And the data paradox we see right now is individuals actually want more personalization. They want to be understood in an omnichannel way, whether or not they're on the phone or they're coming from digital channel, or they're walking into a branch, they want the service tailored to their outcome.

But at the same time, we see enormous trust decline in, in the way that data and information is collected, managed, you know, whether or not we were to Uber recently or Equifax, or I can't even remember who I read about last week and the size of the date breach.

But the problem is we read about these weekly now, and we're talking about tens of millions of people's records that have put at stake, but it's, it's almost to the point of now as, oh, I wonder who it is this week, but, but in being in the us just recently and, and talking to some of the banks, they say that the Equifax issues for some Americans will mean either lack of, or hurdles to credit for the next decade of their life.

That's, that's an extraordinary impact also from a digital point of view because you, if you think that you have to physically ID people, you need branches over, or you need additional fraud checks in place to make sure someone is someone that you can trust. Then the ability for you to March ahead in terms of your digital transformation is significantly impacted. Then if you are Wells Fargo, that is that moved quickly into some digital channels. And then that digital channel enabled the kind of fraud that went on around customer's accounts.

This paradox is, is growing even more apart the tension. So we see a pattern emerging on all three continents driven, largely around the same ideas, which is silo thinking.

You know, we see this problem every day between either the privacy compliance side of where the spending is going, all the marketing personalization. And, and there is really is a really on two shores. And it's not that there isn't a lack of funds. The number of times that we speak to somebody on say marketing or innovation side, an enterprise who says GDPR over banking, we don't need to worry about the lawyers taking care of it.

And you think, okay, that's gonna be really interesting from a UX and a customer experience, point of view, come next year when a lawyer says, no problem, you can do anything you want. There's just this 50 checkbox list that a customer needs to work through when they open a new practical service. So we know that's not gonna work. And so whilst those funds are in circulation right now, what we don't see is people thinking, what does the new normal look like when these things come together?

And so there's a lot being invested in Europe in terms of the data mapping where the data, I mean, the cookie things that Collins spoke about this morning. I, again, I've been in the us quite a bit. The last couple of months, there are so many us headquartered companies that would, would dispute hands down. That that is going to be the case. Unquestionably.

I, I was with a very large digital advertiser last week and mentioned the cookie thing. And I was, I was laughed at just said, well, that's the most ridiculous thing. We've how they even know that we've taken their cookies. That's just crazy.

You know, you, you know, and you thinking, okay, I'm speaking to somebody now that it's a very senior executive in a fortune 100 company with a huge brand recognition. And this person is probably, you know, after bonus paid half a million dollars a year, and they're actually just laughing at me right now and saying, this doesn't apply. And so we are in for a really interesting time next year, particularly cause organizations are still trying to manage the whole digital transformation.

And so what we see that's really important, and I think this is the opportunity for other parts of the world that may not be under the same deadlines is this portfolio approach, this integrated approach we see at the moment, there are these three growing networks. And if, if an organization government can get this right for their citizens, for their customers, it's actually a way of unlocking those networks in a horizontal way.

So there, there are the enterprise networks where you may find an organization is a super brand and it has a portfolio of brands. And so what it's trying to do is solve the customer identity aspect from the point of view of portability from the bank to their insurance product or from their insurance product in the house cost of insurance product with the car, and then looking to see how they can within the regulatory environment, remove some of the friction.

Then we have the traditional world gardens like apple and Google or Google and Tesla that are creating maybe a fantastic experience if you're in the garden, but absolute hell if you move outside of the garden, because the portability isn't there, or the whole point of the fasting bargain, you know, know, particularly with apple, you know, everything I touch where, you know, it's hanging off my body or clicking every day is apple. And the idea of me moving into another environment would just be, you know, countless thousands of hours of pain.

And so, so, you know, I'm kind of stuck in that environment. And then the third, which is where I think the important work that's being done from standards point of view is this open networks, this idea of horizontally enabling a customer to move seamlessly across these different channels. And this is really critical because whilst we see governments being focused on solving some identity issues, it's within the context of your role as a citizen.

And if we start to think about things from the perspective of the individual, you know, we have roles as citizen, as employees, as parents, we have our reputation, our professional reputation to manage. We have our financial life, we have our health, we have our personal interests and at our persona, if you like changes dramatically across those different roles. And the problem is we don't see anywhere right now, whether or not it's a government or whether or not it's an enterprise to understand the nuance of that from an individual's point of view.

So I think, I think who's going to win this race will be organizations focused on unlocking that horizontal value for customers and allowing them to move around in a seamless way. I'm constantly asked what's the killer app. I don't think there will be a killer app. I think it's going to be the seamlessness of being able to bring your trusted identity and move that into a trusted space for a specific outcome in the most frictionless way as possible. So we also see value chains are rapidly involving to include people of things.

And so when we talk about identity right now, do you mean me or me and my car or the car with my partner in the car now, are we talking about my credit card attached to the car for payment, or we talking about, I got out of the car, my partner got in and that credit card. And so when we start to think about the idea that a car has an identity, our home has an identity. Our wearables have an identity and we are either attached to, or we want to detach from, from those things as we move in and out of that environment, the, the whole concept of, of identity is becoming significantly more complex.

And then not to mention friction forward, which I, which I talked about briefly, you know, one of the issues that we have is the honey pot just doesn't work. And so the ability for the individual to feel that their data is actually distributed is really critical. This was a quote from a book, which I think is called throwing rocks at the Google bus. I believe it came out at the end of last year or earlier this year, this speaks to Collins point as well, around the whole cookie issue.

And again, to the conversation I had in the us last week, you know, tens of millions, billions of dollars that are actually being spent on, you know, click farms and bots. And so, you know, this idea of business model and how do we monetize people's identity?

You know, there was so much fraud right now in the system, and there's so much value sitting on the table. If we can solve this, we can't imagine the number of new business models that are possible. I think this is a really important thing for the emerging generation as well. We've seen the rise of ad blocking. We talked a little bit earlier around the idea of whether or not young people care about privacy, but what they do care about are things on their own terms.

And so if we're seeing ad blocking now, and we, this paradigm moves out to either where we're being scanned from a biometric point of view or this scene from a minority report, it's, it's the idea that there isn't going to be, even if it's from a European context there, isn't going to continue to be this car launch to say, I wanna reach into an individual's life and bombard them in some way, because it's human nature for people to find a way to work around it, whether or not it's the spam email account or whatever the case may be.

So we have to find a solution that doesn't create resistance because there's cost in resistance. And ultimately if a brand wants to connect or a government wants to connect, or an airline wants to connect with a passenger or citizen for an outcome, then how do we try and make that handshake as, as trusted as possible? So what's required to unlock this value.

And this is, this is something that I'll talk about in the next couple of days, what we've been working on, what looks like for the individual to bring their API and plug it into a customer journey and actually help remove some of that friction and increase the trust. We also know that right now, we're on this cusp of the current business models, which are around collecting, storing, and monetizing the data.

And again, we've already, you know, in brief time we've been together today, this point's already come up two or three times is there are new models. You know, we're trying to graph 19th century, 20th century concepts.

We, we are taking old processes that became making them digital and thinking, oh, we will just bring the same value proposition or we'll bring the same business model along. And it just doesn't work in that way. A society is looking at new forms of, of equity and new forms of value and whether or not you think Bitcoin right now is a huge bubble that is going to burst or whether or not, you know, there is confidence at all in what's happening with distributed it's phenomenon.

That is significantly shaking society right now to say, you know, does a country, is it, does a country have the only right to issue a currency? Or will you have someone like Estonia right now to say, well, should we issue a digital currency alongside our, our physical currency? And then Venezuela, I saw last week I was reading about the information and I was thinking, I went to bed, I've read the, I was thinking, oh, why don't they just issue their own coin? That would be a way around sanctions. They woke up the next morning in they're in the newspaper.

But as well were saying, they're gonna issue a coin P to their rich resources as a means of working around the sanctions. And so whether or not we think these things are here to stay or not, we really need to be thinking of what this new normal looks like. And we know what's driving. That is the policy, the privacy issues, data and silos, onboarding friction, diminishing trust, KYC, AML regulation. These costs are growing in the financial services sector they're growing for government.

So if we don't find a way to bring this portfolio approach to solving these things, it's not like those costs are gonna go away. And so where we see things shifting this to the individual, as an enabler to unlock this, you know, this is a big part of our philosophy.

If what it looks like to put the citizen, the passenger, the patient in the middle of this ecosystem, and then wrap around that strong identity and consent with the control and the privacy management and what we've seen by testing this time and time again, is if that transparency is there, we start unlock a world of value of data and information, social accounts, wearables, bank accounts, health data, travel data that is either under the full or semi control or permission of the individual into this ecosystem of value, where that can actually flow into kind of integrated end to end services.

And I think this is really the huge opportunity that that lies ahead. Also from a design point of view, we look at the idea of minimal viable collection for maximum viable access. This is where verified attributes come in.

You know, do you need my date of birth, or do you need to know I'm over a certain age to consume alcohol to, you know, board this flight to whatever the case is. And so starting to think about the way we design digital experiences to ask a very simple binary question, that's almost a yes or no, as opposed to the data collection. What we are seeing is not only does that speed up the opportunity for digital transformation, but it also lowers some of the compliance and risks associated with storing that data and managing that data use cases.

Again, I'll speak about this, or I'm happy to talk to you over the next couple of days. Participation drive models. Every time we see a cohort of customers or students invited in to, you know, know, looking at what the student admin experience is like or a patient in terms of the relationship between the hospital and the insurance company and the physician, or the customer in some sort of digital channel where they have a fi experience, they might, they might start off in a shop or they might start off in a showroom. And then they end up completing that purchase.

And through some sort of digital channel, every time you bring the individual in there's transformation, in terms of, of how that value chain starts to develop. And, you know, our numbers are, you know, the small cohorts, but they're upwards of 80 something, 90 something percent, because where that trust and transparency is there, and person is actually empowered to be part of the value chain. People actually share more information. They're clear about how the information is being collected and how it's being used. People become much, much more collaborative around it.

And, you know, if there is anything that was seen from this emerging digital generation, it may be not so much that the focus is on privacy. It's, it's around an outcome it's around a, a value proposition exchange. And that's really what is going to have organizations in, in a competitive environment, win over each other is who can create the great user experience who can provide the outcome, but who can do that in a way that differentiates whether or not that's by empowering the individual or giving them something that is a value composition over and above the services being offered.

And we've been testing this, you know, there are three sectors that we focus on government, financial services and telecommunications, and those are, those are areas that are data rich, that are under a lot of threats from a regulatory point of view, whether it's huge opportunity to create new value. So the one thing that I would say in closing is that we've seen in trying to balance and harmonize these tensions is obviously anyone in Europe, they have to have started out towards GDPR banking. That's not even, that's not even a choice. Now.

I'm happy to say that some organizations that I, that I, I first talked to a year ago kind of went, oh, this male blow over at least to conceding. No, no. We are visiting data mapping now to find where our customer data is, this portfolio approach, getting different parts of the organization, speaking to each other and looking at the whole identity personalization omnichannel experience from, and the regulation, you know, as a, as a holistic component is really critical. And then I would say the most important thing plan for the new end states.

Cause we see a lot of organizations seeing some of these regulatory changes as point in time, but like Y2K for those of you that old enough even know what that is. The point of it is is this isn't gonna be that we reach these milestone dates.

It's like, oh, tick, we've been through that compliance regime and we've, and we've, we've done what we need to do. Now.

We can, you know, everything goes back to normal, you know, whether or not it's around the cookie policy or whether it's around open APIs from the banking point of view, or if it's around framing consent, when you're booking an airline ticket, these are these, this is the new end state and the ability to start taking some of the open standard work that's being done and thinking about what it will look like to bring the customer directly into that value chain in a more collaborative way, I, I think is going to be where we're gonna see significant value.

So last but not least leave you with this idea. We see increasing evidence for this doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the way that organizations embrace this opportunity, but we see more and more that the hallmark of Futureproof organization or government or airline is gonna be the willingness to share that collects about customers directly with its customers for mutual value.

And, you know, there is a commercial side to this to see that it does drive revenue. It does increase loyalty. If you can manage a risk and reduce your cost by building that actually into the customer experience, then there's the ability to tick, you know, all of those boxes.

But I would say that most important thing is to see that customers are really the platform opportunity right ahead, and to, to take this innovation approach by thinking, how do we bring, how do we bring that data consent mission into the organization, as opposed to putting up the probe blocks to do the minimum from the compliance? So I think may June, 2018 will be an interesting time. I can't wait to circle back to some organizations that have said, oh, everything's gonna be fine. And then it's like, oh, our lawyers have just said, we need to do this. We'll be like, really?

So I guess for those of us in the room that are working on building solutions, I think the farm only just begun. And there's some interesting times ahead. Thank you. What is the use case for that?

I mean, right now I citizen don't want my information shared bank. I don't want to share it with Anyone else.

No, but this is sharing it with you. So, so, so, so what we are seeing is is that, so I'll give you three scenarios with banks right now, a bank that said, you know what we want to be first. We want to, we want to have a sandbox of APIs. We wanna make it available for customers. We wanna understand the kinds of things they want to do, because we think we'll be able to build new products out of it.

You know, whether or not it's, you know, insight capability or, or customers don't really want the data people. It's not really about the data. It's about the insight. It's about making better decisions. It's about being more informed. So we have bank a saying, we think faster, we're there. The more we'll be able to grab a digital generation that wants to collaborate with the information bank C over here saying, it's all gonna Google over. We will do the minimum. We will grudgingly give a customer what they want, but we're gonna make this hard for them as possible within the lower.

And then, you know, in the middle saying, well, we're not really sure whether or not a customer is gonna want access to their data and information. So we'll make sure that we can do it, but it's not gonna be an innovation drive for us. Very different Strategic place. Absolutely. And what we are seeing is the organization saying, we think that right now we're a bank or we're a telco, or we're a, whatever we think this collaborative approach means that we can move into new markets or offer concierge services or integrate more horizontally with our B2B relationships.

It it's gonna be the consent from the customer to collaborate on that data. So it's not about a B2B giving the data away it's about whether or not they position themselves to have access to the information, to help customers make better decisions or, or just have a, a better sort of integrated channel experience.

And look, you know, we we'll, we'll see who wins out of those three strategies, but from a customer point of view, it's certainly evident that the ability to, to be part of that value chain and be rewarded for it is a lot more attractive than sort of beating the door down of, you know, banking approach C, which is, you know, can I have my transaction data? Very good. Thank you very much.