Over the past decade significant advancements have been made towards decentralised, self-sovereign and tokenised identity. Now that we can tokenise a unique value what is the new value we can enable?
Katryna Dow, CEO & Founder, Meeco
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Over the past decade significant advancements have been made towards decentralised, self-sovereign and tokenised identity. Now that we can tokenise a unique value what is the new value we can enable?
Over the past decade significant advancements have been made towards decentralised, self-sovereign and tokenised identity. Now that we can tokenise a unique value what is the new value we can enable?
Hi to everyone that's watching from everywhere else around the globe and how fantastic that it's a hybrid experience as well. I am the founder and CEO of Meko. And quite simply, our mission has been from the very beginning to enable everyone to get equity and value for the information they share. And that includes their identity information. It could be anything that creates value in that digital exchange. I'd like to talk today about the next frontier and the work ahead of us as we move more and more to the decentralized world.
So would you like the good news or the bad news to start out with the good news? So the good news is we've made a lot of progress.
I, I can't remember exactly how many years I've been coming to EIC, but I remember some of the ideas around a decentralized world, greater control for end users, the ability for us to have greater control over our den, our identity consent to how our information is used, that some of those early ideas when first coming to EIC were seen as kind of novel and unlikely, and we fast forward to where we are now.
And I think it's fair to say that what we've seen is significant increase in the uptake of either self sovereign identity or decentralized identity, and particularly in the enterprise space as well. Okay. So this has gone from concept to movement to now really becoming mainstream. So that's the good news. The other good news is that we are getting to a place now where we can start to tokenize everything. So whether or not that is tokenizing an identity or wearable or a device or a piece of financial information.
What that also allows us to do is to wrap a unique layer of value around that exchange. Now, why is that so exciting?
Well, I hope that that will be this next layer of what will start to drive adoption even further and start to create a new layer of value because the moment we can tokenize, or we can give something a unique identity or a unique way to identify it, that it is uniquely valuable. And we can start to think of the value that we put around it.
So now into sort of what lies ahead and some of the challenges and some of the decisions that we have as practitioners and in some of the decisions that we are making every day, whether or not we're working on standards or protocols or products or services, we actually have an opportunity.
And I know we, we say this so often you hear this at conferences that, you know, know that, you know, we can architect new solutions and, and that there is a way for us to improve the way that we interact in the digital world, but what has happened as a result of the pandemic, the impact to many service organizations, not being ready to provide really great digital experiences and end services is that there is an opportunity now while we are rearchitecting for a better value exchange, so we could get this right. And it's really a decision.
However, and this is kind of part of the bad news is that if we don't get the incentives rights, it's unlikely, we'll get the sort of behavioral outcomes we want. And we know that part of the success of a lot of the large tech platforms and social platforms is that every day behavior is incentivized or manipulated for a particular outcome. And technology is neutral. The decisions that we make about how we architect or incentivize will be things that will drive that uptake in behavior.
And so when we talk about value or incentives, it's very easy to think that's always financial, but it's not it's customer experience. And over the last 24 hours, we've already seen some fantastic presentations, either around new service propositions, increased security, convenience, risk mitigation, all of these things are important aspects of value proposition, but actors won't work together unless there are incentives in place. We have to work out what this incentive layer is. If we want to drive adoption. And as I just mentioned, what we're starting to see is this emerging world.
And, and, you know, we've kind of had a stop start. It was a few months ago where it looked like, you know, as we were approaching summer, certainly in Europe, you know, things were gonna be normal. I don't think things will ever be normal again in the way that they were 18 months, two years ago. When I think of the travel disruption since September and 11, and we're still checking how much water we have and taking off our shoes and, and x-raying our, our laptops.
I think we are going to see a very similar change to the social norms and sure, some things may come back and it, and being able to be together is a great example of that, but we are together with different kind of rituals, and I think that's going to continue. And one of the things that we're already seeing, that's really speeding things up is the decline of use of cash and the need to be able to use additional digital instruments. And this is a, a report that McKinsey's put together last year, sort of right in the middle of the pandemic.
And they they're assertion was that we're seeing a speed up of digitization in the economy of seven years. So you think of seven years, you think seven years back at EIC, the things that we were talking about that may have been concept the beginning of a standards, working group, the idea of a protocol interoperability imagine packing all of that seven years into 12 months. And that's kind of where we are now in terms of the challenges ahead.
So we are really at this new design and architectural phase, it's how we decide to connect the current world and the semantic aspects of that current world, what we're doing, what device we're using, what we're trying to achieve with the world that we've been working on around decentralized identity and the ability for the end user to have greater control and greater participation. The other thing is just because technology can doesn't mean it should.
And, and I can see that there is a lot happening right now because of COVID. That is a little bit the same as nine 11. Okay.
Look, we just need to put things in place because we have this massive security risk and we need to, we need to close that out and then we'll go back later and look at the regulation, the implementation, the technology chosen, except we don't really ever go back and revise those things. And so what we know is really critical about some of the decisions we're making now is that many service providers, we not ready for remote. We're not ready to offer a great digital experience to customers. We have this quickening, we have this need for people to be able to work in a hybrid way.
And we also have the rise of people wanting to have greater control over who they are. So we have these three competing issues in the data and identity world, how we balance regulation, how we start to mitigate, mitigate against fraud abuse and how more importantly, we start nudging those things and incentivizing those things towards data value. So regulation, abuse, and value. We need to translate those things into data, access, data control, and data exchange. And it's the data exchange area that I'm really interested in seeing how we can build the right incentives.
My colleague, Jason Smith will present later this afternoon on a privacy report that has been tracked over the last 18 months. And I think one of the huge challenges that we see is that more and more end users, consumers are becoming aware of their rights and their preference for privacy and service providers are not responding accordingly. So we have this chasm, we have this gap between the expectation and, and we're constantly serving up this bargain of convenience versus security or convenience versus privacy.
And I think that is also one of the challenges is we know that we are moving really quickly to being able to identify who someone is, what they're doing, wrap some AI around that, and identity and data is gonna be at the heart of everything. And so how we enable citizens, patients, customers, students, to actually more equitably join these value chains will be determined. One by the kind of architecture and design and two, the kind of incentives that we build in the reward mechanisms to make actors work together.
And if we're not thinking about our end users as part of that value equation, then it's really unlikely that we're gonna get this right, however, optimistically. And I'm a pessimistic optimist. I don't know if such a thing is possible, but it's the way I feel. I worry constantly about what is happening, but at the same time, I kind of feel that there is a possibility for us to get some of this right for this emerging generation.
And if we do get it right, it could result in much better decision making because at the end of the day, the most powerful thing about a data identity handshake value exchange is it enables you to achieve something. And if it can help you make better decisions, better health decisions, better financial decisions, better travel decisions, better education decisions. Then that is a great goal for us to work towards. But it's only going to work.
If we can take this evolutionary stack that we've seen over the last four or five decades from CRM, where we were focused on managing customers to E R P, where we wanted to measure customers and measure the value to the rise of social media platforms, where we wanted to connect and have conversations with customers to where I believe we are right now, which is this integration of the customer, their personal data, their identity in a meaningful way. And we've seen this over the last decade. We've seen the rise of this.
I'll I'll put my hand up that this is something I dedicate my working life too. And if you go back to there's a white paper, a CocaCola white paper that was published, I think in 2012 on life management platforms that paints a picture of this as a possibility in terms of being able to bring customers, patient students into the value chain in a way where they're not making this convenience, privacy, security trade off. And yesterday, if you caught joy chick's presentation for Microsoft, it was an excellent presentation.
The idea that we would have decentralized everything and has moved towards zero trust, this is the work that we need to do around decentralized identity, because it's not enough that I can prove who I am. And I have some autonomy. You need to be able to trust what I'm doing. You need to be able to trust where I'm doing it. You need to be able to trust whether on not, it is actually me. So we've made great strides in being able to move some of that agency towards the individual.
But we now have to find ways to bring that capability and connect it into the services that we have the whole way through society, whether or not that's border control or admission in a hospital, or enrolling a child in school. If we can't find a way to leverage that capability.
And, and I think of doc's talk yesterday that fulcrum, if we can't find a way of bringing decentralized identity self-sovereign identity into the value chain in a way that is effective, then a lot of the work that we've been doing will will not succeed. I'm borrowing this slide or this graphic from data sovereignty now, and this represents some of the, the, the EU data strategy and the data spaces that are proposed for the EU and this idea of the crown of data sovereignty for the individual or the organization or the data creator.
And so what we are starting to see is organizations or groups like data sovereignty now advocating for soft infrastructure for standards, for the ability to build the connectors. And when I was first putting this presentation together, there were moments where I thought, wow, we're not moving fast enough.
We're, you know, we're building these islands. And then I, I spent yesterday or morning in the open ID connect stream. And I have to say, I left really inspired. There are amazing things going on. There are lots of abilities for us to connect, particularly some of the work that was focused that was showcased in financial services to start linking the world that we trust to the, to the world that we want to be trusted in that will have more personal agency. And of course, a nod to the work of, of D and w three C in terms of some of the work that's going on, obviously around identity credentials.
So now we need to find a way to bridge these two worlds. And that's really the next frontier. That's the work. And that's not to say everything regarding decentralized identity is done and dusted. We know that that there's still a lot of work to do, but we have to be working outwards from the enterprise outwards, from the service provider. We need to be finding these incentivized handshakes. We need to be helping individuals understand the power and autonomy they have through decentralized systems, and we need to find a way to balance that risk and reward.
So what I would like to do in closing is just take you through four case studies, very, very quickly of things that either we've been involved with around the world, or are leveraging some of the standards and connectors or handshakes into the existing world. I'd like to look at work, education, family, financial services. And those are, if you think about it, some of the most important building blocks that we have in life from the moment we're born, we have a health record very quickly in education record. We start our learning experience.
We are interacting with family and community, and then at some point we'll have a financial relationship. So one of the key things is the work that we need to do around lifelong, lifelong learning, which, which starts long before we even start school now and is, and it is observable either in the way that a child is developing and how we start to connect that over the course of our life and how that becomes relevant in the workforce.
So I would like to just give a nod to Vela who are startup actually in Australia, although they're not focused only on Australia that is tackling this around workforce credentials and in particular connectors into enterprise HR and learning and development platforms, COVID obviously made it very, very difficult to onboard. And at sometimes even prove who prospective employees were, how do we, how do you trust someone is who they, who they say they are their education, their experience, their right to work for our own organization.
We doubled the size of, of Meco over the last 18 months and hired 50% of the company remotely. I mean, there are people that work in our organizations in part of the world that I've never met and we're a small company. And it's a very strange thing to say. So the ability to make sure that you can access verified credentials around right, to work around identity prior learning, this is really critical.
And, and I see the work that Vela is doing leveraging a combination of the W3C standards, as well as open ID connect to build these connectors out from HR systems, from learning and development platforms, being able to enable an engineer to turn up on site, prove who they are, prove their qualified, manage their learning and development, and be trusted without having to give up some of their rights around decentralized identity or their right to be able to share that information ongoing. So I really applaud the work that that Vela is doing. The next is also a shout out to Australia.
I, I, I don't mean to bias Australia, but we see some really great things that have been happening there over the last 12, 18 months. And this is, this is one of the areas where we deviate a little around how we imagine a decentralized identity.
We, we, we feel that one of the important things around uptake is that people will be trying to do something when they're using their identity. We know that, that we often talk about the classic use case of proving how old you are to be able to purchase alcohol or check out retail experience. So we we've been thinking for some time that there's a really important fusion between identity and payment. So whether or not that's being able to wrap a payment around an identity or an identity around a payment.
So we've been doing some interesting work in Australia and this big shoutout here to Hadera hash graph and FPOS Australia. So FPOS is the debit card scheme operator in Australia. And over the last 18 months, they've been working on launching a new service into Australia called connect ID. So asking themselves strategically having those debit payment PA rails in place, how could those be purposed or repurposed or expanded in terms of additional customer value? And one of the use cases FPO also chose to become a council member joined Hadera governing council.
And one of the things they've been working on is micropayments. So how do you enable a customer that has a normal debit card experience to be using a stable coin against the a U D currency that's converted into H bars without having to understand anything about cryptocurrency world, to be able to do these fractional transactions, to do things like read one article from a newspaper or access, a small piece of media, a song or small pieces of content. Why is this so important? And why is the partnership with Hadera so important?
Or one of the big problems around incentivizing is the cost of these small transactions. So what's really interesting about this use case is that being able to make these transactions fractions of fractions of cents mean that merchants can be incentivized to offer these kinds of services. Content providers can start to build tiny fractional following around individual pieces of tokenized content. And so what we start to have now is the ability to bring all the convenience from tap or swipe into a new part of, of the world.
So there are lots of articles online if you, if you want to read up on, on the work that F OS connect ID and Hadera have been doing in Australia, it's, it's really exciting. One more shout out to Australia, or although this product is also being released here in Europe as well. And this is focusing on a really big pain point, really big pain point, digital family, multi-generational family. And it's been interesting listening to some of the, the talks over the last couple of days. We all assume that we're all wandering around with the latest smartphone. Yeah.
And so much of what we are designing is great if we all have the latest smartphone, but increasingly we have a family member that is taking care of aging parents. And at the same time, possibly concerned around what is happening with their children and kind of their digital immersion add to that keeping track of health records, power of attorney, financial information, travel information. And this is a use case that, that, again, I go back to what I think is a really important paper.
I, I would encourage you to go back, download it, read it, the Coka Cole 2012 life management platform paper, and Martin mentioned life management platforms yesterday. So here I am nearly a decade later, I'm going continue to bang the drum. But what's great is that my life capsule is actually taking this issue on and looking at secure storage, secure data management, secure exchange, family information across what they call emergency capsules, family capsules, and junior capsules.
So it's everything from something important, like capturing a memory, maybe your child's first art project, right through to something that is life saving in terms of medication, right through to how you may be managing an aging parent's power of attorney. And what's important about this is that they're focusing on a series of life events, happy life events, challenging life events, life events that we don't like to talk about.
Divorce, death illness, and starting to work with families to help them to be digitally ready. So this is a really important part of sort of moving that towards service providers. But what we need now is service providers moving towards that digital integration to make that seamless last but not least. This is probably one of my favorite use cases. I want to jump to Belgium and focus on an emerging area of technology, where we have the possibility to get this right, which is kid tech. So one of our hypothesis is to start looking at children's first digital experience.
So this is a product that's been created for children focusing on, on a pre-K of zero to seven. So basically their very, very first experience. And one of my personal missions is actually to help this age group learn to manage their digital keys. Yeah. I can't remember how old I was when I was given my first physical key to the house.
I mean, I, I felt like I was a, you know, completely empowered, grown up and I, and I was, I was a school kid, but part of what I hear every day, particularly within enterprise where there's resistance around increased autonomy for customers is that the issue is around key management. Yeah, well, you know, we've gotta be able to make things convenient and easy. And heater in Belgium provide a range of really important care network services to families with children that may have either a, a disability or learning challenges.
And one of the things that they noticed is that children respond really positively to any kind of sensory media that connects them with their family environment. And when we started to do some research, this was not just children with special needs. This was all children in that early development age. So whether or not it's the sound of their grandparent reading a book or a picture of their dog or a family celebration, this actually responded in very positive experiences, but what do you do for children zero to seven? Do you put them on YouTube? Do you put them on Facebook?
Do you start posting that stuff on Instagram? And so one of the things that heater wanted to do was to create a safe digital platform where parents do all the digital orchestration, where we can help young parents start to learn about digital parenting. It has a separate companion media platform for kids. So you can leave the child with all the content, no algorithms, no up next to worry about.
But the thing that excites me most about this is starting to help parents understand the importance of keys, how to protect family content and how to set things up in a way where there can be a key ceremony together with a teacher or another family member or someone that's looking after the child. Now it's a very early days to be focusing on that kind of digital capability.
And the, and the, the challenge is always, always, always, always, always on experience and convenience. But I think the really important thing is that if we can start to build these things into the early education process, then we've got a much better chance of a digitally literate generation. So the good news is we've made a lot of progress, but I think the work that is ahead of us right now is connecting this semantic world. It's trusting all the things that I am trying to do. It's enabling my service provider to be incentivized around what it is that I actually want to achieve.
It's finding ways to leverage the legal, the commercial and the digital incentives that drive the change that we want to see. And it's recognizing that self-sovereign me as an important step forward, but it's really just base camp on the mountain climb that we have ahead. Thank you.