In the province of British Columbia, Canada, please welcome Mr. Bailey. And he will talk about welcome. Thanks Martin. He will talk about the org book enabling the digital economy. So I handed this over to you and the stage is yours.
All right. Thanks very much, Martin. It's great to be here this morning. It's great pleasure to be here, to talk about, I think a pretty special initiative that, that we've undertaken in British Columbia. For those of you that don't know British Columbia, we're the Western most province on the Pacific ocean in Canada.
Our population is about 5 million and my role in the government British Columbia is assistant deputy minister for the ministry of attorney general and public safety sector, but relevant to this talk is my previous role, which was the assistant deputy minister responsible for our digital identity program. So in British Columbia, we are, I think the leaders in north America on providing digital identity services, we have for the last five years, been verifying the identity and enrolling all of our citizens into our digital identity program. And we have issued them contactless smart cards.
We have biometric authentication to ensure uniqueness. And as of this February, we have enrolled essentially the entire population and they're able to use their contactless cards as well as we have recently released a iOS and an Android app, so they can use their phone as an authenticator. And we're now onboarding services. A good example of a service that we're onboarding right now is for the approval of student loans.
So previously students that we're wanting to attend post-secondary education would have to go to a Canada post office in person show their identity, the identity proof that was expensive. It was inconvenient. And then they through the process of applying for a loan.
But now with this new solution, they can do this all online and they can do this all from their phone and that's a huge improvement, but we have a problem with our solution because we built unconventional technology and that's that with our solution, we kind of have this ability to do surveillance on the population as they use their identities, but of course, block the new blockchain approach that we're all talking about here this week has the promise that we can deliver these kinds of services without that challenge of carrying out surveillance on all of our citizens.
And so we're pretty, we're pretty excited about that. We're working with secure key technologies with their verified me service, and now we're also working with self-sovereign or the sovereign foundation, and it's really that the work we're doing with. So the sovereign foundation that I wanna talk about today.
So with our current service, we know who you are, but, but when we're providing services to businesses, we don't know anything about that relationship between you and your business, but businesses are required by law to interact with government in many different ways to start a business, you have to apply for different licenses, permits. You may need to be incorporated or become a society. And the way that we do that today with our conventional services creates a huge legacy of data quality issues. And it's not unusual for example, for a business to be known by a dozen or so incorrect names.
And so a, a good example that challenge that we may have for example, is if we're in dispute with a business and we decide to not pay them anymore, we can't really not pay them because we can't identify them. That, you know, that's a big challenge for in a large distributed organization.
In addition to that, the services that we provide for businesses to interact with government are not very convenient.
The first identity service that we provided in British Columbia was a password based system for business users, but the way we designed that meant really that if you're, for example, if you're a lo an accountant providing services for 10 companies, and you're doing 10 different transactions or against 10 different systems, then for that one business, you may have, you know, a hundred different user I and passwords that you know you, so they have books of username passwords, right, in order to do their job. And it's, it's, it's a, it's a pretty poor system. So we want to do better today.
We primarily issue business licenses, certificates, certificates of incorporation, other license, and permits in a paper form. And in some cases we have modernized and we now issue that in PDF form, but it's really the same. It's really the same kind of document. It can't really be acted on in to implement a digital service.
And so, you know, and so here's some examples, you know, if I wanna open a business account at a bank, I have to take my paper and corporation papers issued by the registry services to prove that that the, the business exists and that I'm, and that I'm in control of that business.
And there's a couple of other examples there. So here's an example that I wanna talk about, which is Mary wants to start a bakery and she has to get three things she has to incorporate. She needs to get a health operating permit and she needs a business license. And forgive me for this cheesy animation.
But what I'm saying of course is that it's a real hassle for Mary. She has to either go in person or respond through mail to, to get all of the permissions that she needs to run her bakery. And it's not very convenient. It's a waste of her time and it's slowing down the economy of British Columbia, but what if we could provide these certificates in a digital form?
So for example, if the BC registry could provide a digital certificate for the incorporation for Bob, then Bob could provide that online to a bank to open, to open an account, let's say, and then the bank could automatically create that account for Bob. And we've, we've heard other the previous speakers talk about these kind of capabilities. And interestingly, the BC corporations act actually enables this capability. So the legislators of some time in the past had the forethought to provide in the law that this was, we had the authority to do this.
Now I talked about the fact that we don't wanna surveil our, our residents. And so anything we want to do here with businesses, we wanna align to the approach that we're gonna be taking with individuals. And these are the, the, the organizations that we're working with as influencers and enablers. And many of you here are contributing to this work. And you'll notice Joni's organization down on the, on the lower left. And we're working with Johnny's organization to develop standards for the trust framework for organizations. So we have a small but mighty team in Victoria that work for me.
And they're working with procurement services in the federal government in Ottawa to develop a solution that would enable this capability. And very recently the government Ontario has joined. And so we're developing this claims based system where we'll be able to improve the experience for businesses. And we're doing that with the, the sovereign network. So we're building that on top of that, but we are network agnostic, I would say, but that's what we're currently using for that.
We actually got started with blockchain in the fall of 2016, where we implemented a, a network that would demonstrate how all of the registries across Canada could stay in sync, cuz that is a big challenge and a data quality issue. And that small proof of concept was very successful, but we did learn one thing and that's that you shouldn't put data on the chain. And so that's one thing that we learned about that. The other thing we learned is that most organizations, government organizations were not ready for this new kind of an approach.
So we, this is why we've pivoted to this new idea, which was to create a, a capability to issue these digital certificates for businesses that we could then use as we provide services. And we would in anchor this all on the incorporated businesses and provide digital certificates in that way. So the idea was that since businesses do not have wallets and we don't have networks that we would get started with actually a directory of claims, this is not personal information. This is public information.
So we could create what we called the org org book, which would be a repository of all these, of all these claims.
And so the idea being that government regulators, as they're issuing these cert certifications to businesses,
Could, could crypto print these certificates and put them in the org book. And then we could then use these to provide the data quality and convenience that businesses need. And it would all be based on the blockchain technology from a verification process.
So now, if we look at Mary's new experience, she can now go through this process of creating her bakery all online by using these digital certificates from the org book, to demonstrate that she has the authority to do what she wants to do. And of course in the future, we expect that Mary will have a wallet and we'll be able to provide those claims directly into the wallet. And me and Mary be able to do lots of other things. In addition, she'd be able to act on her own behalf with her own personal claims about herself from our identity program and all would be good.
So we have created some software. We are doing everything open source and you, you can go to this website and you can run this software. You can implement gen org, book yourself using the open source software from GitHub. And this is an example of Jay's pizza. And so this demonstration system, what we did was we gathered up all the open data from open data sources from government organizations. We cleaned the data and we loaded it into the org book. And so you can see here that Jay's pizza has a certificate of incorporation.
It has a letter from work safe, BC that indicates that they have the right insurance for all their workers. They have a certificate for collecting provincial sales tax and they have a business license from the city of Surry, which is a city in British Columbia.
So although we're not using this yet in a user centric online, transactional method, we immediately get benefit from this. So we have one of the areas that I'm responsible is the CIO for the justice sector is we do liquor gaming. And now in Canada coming up this summer at cannabis licensing. And so our business areas can get immediate.
Our regulators can get immediate benefit out of the org book because they can just look up through this software, the real, actual digital certificates of these businesses. And that's part of the part of what they have to do is run a criminal record, check on all of the people that are associated with that business. And they can immediately get access to the information about the businesses by using this utility.
So right away, we get some value, but in the future, we can see that when we do have the distributed identity networks and wallets, that then we can now give this benefit to the business owners themselves, and they'll be able to do that.
And actually we, one of the things that we're doing with the federal government, with procurement services, they have modified their registration process for a qualified supplier for the federal government.
So that if you're a business from BC, when you register you just point at the org book and they pull the data directly from the org book into their registry, and now they have data quality for BC businesses. So there is a benefit there today. There is another idea that we've been working on, which is what we call tify. And we realize that there would be common patterns for creating businesses. And so we have created this application, which can follow a recipe of how to create a, in this case, how to create a restaurant, how to create a bakery, how to create any kind of company.
And it can, and it can take you through this process of creating digital certificates in the org book or in your wallet. And it knows about the dependencies between these different certificates. And so you can go on and, and try this yourself on this website, this sit. And anyway, we think it's pretty cool. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of potential for this and how we can really improve services for businesses in BC.
So I'll stop there. I think we've got a few minutes now for questions and I hope you enjoyed the, the chat.
Thank you. I
Wonderful talk.
And I'd really love to see more digital services for me, both as a citizen and as an entrepreneur or someone running a company, you know, just recently I had to go through the process of getting a refund for buying an electric or semi electric vehicle hybrid plugin, the German government. And it always LEDs to things. I don't want to talk about the authentication approach at all, but, but it meant I had to scan or co photo some documents and I had to then always deliver them back as PDF. Right?
So I hadn't convert these things in some way to PDF, which I scanned and obviously not PDF format, usually a photo, the PDF format, all these things were really annoying. And I, I think, you know, look going through other processs. I think there's a lot of thing you can do better. Let's have a look at the questions. Maybe let's start with the first one, who's running the notes of the blockchain network you're doing and how are they incentivized?
That's a really good question. I had that question of the sovereign foundation yesterday.
And I think this is something that, you know, is that hasn't been figured out yet is to what is the business model for that kind of network with security? It's relatively straightforward that with a closed network, like verified me that there is there's a whole economic model behind that. And as a government we can sell our essentially enable the network can enable us to sell our data and for merchants or businesses to consume our data and the network just like payment networks can be paid a fee for that transfer of information. I'm not sure about sovereign, but I think it's a great question.
Okay. And maybe the other question, what is the bigger challenge? So is it educating government about digital ID and digital business? So the opportunities or is it then, is it more trust making it work with a lot of old idea, old legacy and so on? What is the bigger challenge for your experience?
Yeah. And I have quite a bit of experience at this. So when we say educating government, I'm not sure whether people mean educating the bureaucracy or educating the elected officials, which we would call the government.
I think it's the bureaucracy.
Yeah.
And, you know, we're, we're putting a lot of effort into that and it is a real challenge. And I think that people always default to what they know, and it's very difficult to get people to try new things. And there's no question that, that this is a challenge, I think, especially in government. Yeah.
Okay.
So Ian, thank you very much. The third one is not really a question. It's more a comment on a, something going on in Germany, current.
