So thank you coming a call and it's wonderful to be back at EIC. Thank you Martin, for that introduction. So what I'm gonna cover is this idea of bridging right now, the work that's been done over the last few years in the Siam customer identity track with this new movement that is coming up around either self-managed or self-sovereign identity. And for those of you that were in workshops on Monday or yesterday, or, or saw some of the keynotes yesterday, this is, this is an idea that is really starting to gain some traction.
So one of the things we're gonna cover is personalizing products and services without putting people at risk. So how do we have the best of both worlds? And our mission at Miko is actually to enable everyone on the planet to get equity and value for the information they share for the data they share for how their identity is used.
And we actually can't do that alone. And before I founded Miko, I worked in financial services. And one of the things that we we did whenever we developed a product, we would say, is this something that we would want to be sold to our mother?
And I think the challenge for us now is this is not about the generation that is passed. This is about the generation that is coming. This is about our children. So everything we create now, I think one of the questions is, is this something that I would want my child to be using? And the importance of that is if we get this right, we can actually empower future generations. We can actually really change the way data, information and identity works. And if we don't, there are some real repercussions for our children going forward.
And I think if we look around the room right now, we have the collective expertise in this room to shape the democracy of identity.
Think of the power in this room, think of the experience, think of all the problems that have been solved over the past decades, around security access management identity, the solutions that are now starting to converge and come together into this omnichannel connected 24 7 data driven world. So what is it that we can do by working together? So one of the challenges for us right now is we have this rapid fusion of just physical, biological, digital identity.
So identity or the digital world has never been so more personal. You know, I have all my health data on one side of my body. I'm wearing my credit card on the other, you know, I'm being measured 24 7 and that data is going somewhere. And so we're increasingly becoming digital, this fusion of the physical and digital, you know, my phone is over there on the, on the table.
And I already have a little separation in anxiety because we are so used to having these connections to some form of digital input output beside us all of the time. And when does this start?
Well, this actually starts before we're born now, increasingly with social media, people have a digital birth before they have a physical birth. And around the six week mark, the average American child is born in the digital world, whether or not that's through a birth announcement or photographs that are shared online, but that birth is moving backwards before the physical whereby the time that a physical child is born, parents have already accepted terms and conditions that they may not understand in terms of the long term implication for their child.
So we understand that PII is a whole range of things that in a, a customized customer channel, we wanna know that we have access to those things in context at the right time.
But one of the things that we have the power to do now with PII is we have the power to do this. So we go from a whole list of attributes that may be a small collection that creates some kind of persona or a contextual to this idea that we are now joining everything in life. So we have some real responsibility now that we are able to do this and we have the power to do this.
And so this idea of us having this dual existence between this physical and digital world, where these things emerging is really this challenge for us to rethink the way that we manage identity. So at the same time, we've got record data breaches, hacking problems with centralized honey pots customers are more vulnerable than ever before.
So we, we have all of this amazing capability and we have a whole range of new challenges.
And so I'm a huge sci-fi fan.
You know, I think back to kind of that dystopian view, that that was exciting, you know, with blade runner in the eighties or minority report in early 2000. And the truth of it is we're already there.
You know, some of those things that seem like science fiction, these are things that we can do when we do do every day. A few quick examples, Kate Binley from the wall street journal did an experiment a few months ago, changed everything on her Facebook account, everything privacy dialed up, all the privacy settings, she wasn't pregnant, but she then downloaded a what to expect app by the next morning when she woke up, her whole feed was around pregnancy and motherhood. And that was with the highest privacy settings.
I think it was a month before last 23 of me just signed a 300 million deal with a drug company to give them access to the, to the 23 NME test results.
Now I'm sure a lot of people, when they decided to do that, DNA testing may not have thought about the implication of where that data may go. This is really interesting from Nike self-lacing shoes. I remember my dad taught me to lace my shoes and I felt like such a hero. The first time I could do it on my own. Kids don't even need to learn that anymore. There's an app that does it.
We're talking about autonomous cars, but I think before we see autonomous cars, we're gonna see the kinds of things that Audi have just released. I think here in Germany, which is this vehicle to infrastructure. So you don't even have to worry about what time the lights are going to change. You'll get a feed on the dashboard as to whether or not you should slow down or speed up. How long before the engine is gonna cut back in.
And there's this idea in retail, that if you order something online, why wait for you to think of the next best offer?
Why not ship, what we think you might want and then work out whether or not you can be bothered to return it. So now we're in this as a service world. And part of the problem is we are losing experiential privacy, whether or not that's reading a newspaper or sex or public transport or sleeping. So how we collect and process data in order to personalize services is gonna be the difference between gaining trust, getting fined, or maybe even getting fired. So this future of data is personalization. And this is one of the themes from the keynotes yesterday.
We've gotta find a way for this data to flow. We've gotta unlock this privacy paradox. We all know these statistics, and this should really be a counter on this, on this slide because the numbers change on a daily basis.
There was a comment around if Facebook algorithm was actually a person, this is from BBC, we'd be demanding. This person's head on sticks. This is enormous responsibility with how we're developing these systems.
And when it comes to things like even our monetary system IMF published a paper about six weeks ago on negative interest rates for cash to push people into the digital channel and China last month banned 23 million people from being able to travel. That's the population of Australia based on the social game of, of watching how people behave in society. So what do we do? It's not all bad news. There's some great new technology and possibilities ahead, self sovereign self-managed identity, zero knowledge proofs.
There are opportunities for us to start changing the way the identity stack looks so we could UN unlock this data with greater trust. A year ago, we published a white paper, quite a technical white paper on zero knowledge proofs, be very happy to share it.
We were focusing what we call the modern digital family. How do we enable people to get access control delegation and consent to their personal information?
And we've been working in R and D for the last 12 months on developing a test net around a, a private chain that will allow organizations and individual end customers to collaborate, never having the business logic or, or transactions at risk and only sharing data. That is, that is relevant. So there's just a little animation around the Testnet for background.
We looked at Hyperledger fabric Hyperledger in the a three quarter and Ethereum UHIN, I'm very happy to talk afterwards around some of our findings, but the reason we, we have landed on Hyperledger fabric is that there is some really great opportunities for, for sharing and private channels that actually at an architectural level build in the business value and the opportunity for a commercial return, but the privacy is there and that's really what we want to achieve.
So taking the best of Siam together with increasing rights and protections for customers, allow us to build these connected use cases, lower cost and in, and drive new business models. And at the end of the day, none of us are gonna make these changes unless we can see what this commercial path is. So we have existing regulated markets right now, whether or not that is financial services. That's heavily regulated telecommunications, the government sector. We already have some great services and we are seeing powerful transformation in the Siam sector.
And at the same time we have this self-manage identity or self-sovereign identity that's coming up and we've gotta find this bridge to bring these two things together, because that's where the magic is going to be. We have data portability, self-managed identity and consent management that we're acting like they're silos. And we've gotta find a way to get identity in the middle.
Who or what am I, what am I authenticated to do? And now what am I authorized to access?
And if we do that, we can build trust with customers to start bringing data from different parts of their life, into this connected data ecosystem, where we can enable B2B B2B to C, and more importantly, me to B where organizations can partner together to build a business logic that doesn't put the customer's data at risk. So this idea of Siam and S S I D means less data, more insight. How do we move to minimum collection for maximum value?
And one of the things we've been working on is progressive disclosure, and we call it drive by remember the old fashioned, walking down the street, seeing something in the window and being interested. You know, if you are shopping for a mortgage, if you are looking to buy a car, you don't really need to hand over everything.
If it's just about, Hey, maybe I'd like to test drive that. And you take that experience a little bit further, and yeah, there are some more attributes that you need, which is tell me more. It makes sense to find out if you can afford the car, if you can afford the house.
And now what we are doing is we are pushing some of that compliance burden and some of that data collection burden further into the value chain. So we've got a customer that's actually interested and motivated to engage, and finally it's transact and it transact. It makes sense that you're being asked for information to satisfy KYC or AML. We've reduced the cost and the burden for the enterprise. We've got the customer excited, but at the same time, we've created mutual value through that.
So coming to a conclusion around this and where this puts us in the room, this is one of my favorite quotes.
And I think we've probably all seen this in our career. When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.
You know, we invent cool stuff every day, but we also invent the consequences of that. And there's an argument. Sometimes that tech is neutral.
You know, it's benign, you create it. And you know, it doesn't have an opinion, but the truth of it is tech is becoming more and more political because whoever controls the way that tech works has the ability to influence the way that society is developing. So I think we're at this stage right now, in terms of the way that we are finding our fi lives, that we have these two parts we have to decide for our kids for the future generations. Do we want the cool personalization and privacy management?
And at the same time, not have to trade off what that means and without getting political, we've got this line that we're all playing around with at the moment, which is either the way we do this is gonna be either super creepy or super cool.
And without getting into judgements around who's doing this well or who isn't. I think there are some companies right now that are placing bets on being on the right side of history.
You know, MasterCard's doing some really interesting stuff in the identity space. You saw Kim Cameron yesterday talking about some of the things that Microsoft are doing a major enterprise with its market cap saying, we think customers need this capability. We need to give this to the end user. And yet we all know that apple is a world garden, and there are complaints about that, but you have a CEO coming out and saying, look, privacy is important. It's a human rights. It's a differentiator.
So I think at the end of the day, this is not just about privacy.
And, you know, we hear all the time, oh, people don't care about privacy when it comes to convenience. And that's probably true, but why should people have to trade these two things off? Cause at the end of the day, it's not really about privacy. It's about power. It's about enabling us to make better decisions to live better lives. It's about helping a customer find the right product or service. It's about meaningful value that can be unlocked. If we can find this balance between the way the data is available without penalizing participants for being part of that value chain.
So I think the challenge for us as professionals is to get back to first principles back into this room where we have the collective expertise and the power to shape the democracy of identity. And if I can quote from one of my favorite led Zeppelin songs, yeah, there are two paths we can go down, but there's still time to change the road we're on. And I think that time is now. Thank you.
Thank you, Karina, with, with what you said and I, you had this long run at a end. Do we have the time for the long run?
Look, I think, look, we're gonna make some mistakes, but I think there are enough things happening now where, and this is one of the things that Kim said yesterday. Enterprise are interested.
You know, we are working with financial services, organizations that say, we think it's a liability to collect all this data. Right. It doesn't make sense. And we actually wanna understand what customers want. We wanna personalize it. If we wanna get to this segment of one, we can't do it with collecting everyone's data and then trying to work out what the average of the average is.
So I, I personally feel there is a, a quickening. I mean, I've been coming to EIC now for, I think five years.
Yeah.
At least. And I think this is this last 12 months is where I think we've seen the most convergence from a technical point of view, a regulation point of view and the commercial models that are starting to
Evolve. And at the end, the commercial single decide because
Yeah, absolutely
At the end, it's about business. And when you earn, when you can do better business by respecting privacy, you will do it.
Absolutely.
I think if we can get to the place where we're not trading off privacy and convenience, but it's a case of privacy and not all, then, then I think there will be huge value to unlock in the market.
Thank you.
Thank you, Martin.
