Timo Hotti: Automated Trust and Findy

So what's the starting point here. And really we are really not too far in. If we think about what we can do digitally today, we are not too far from the starting point yet, because what, one of the things that we can't do today is that we can't communicate with using trusted facts to each other digitally in a peer-to-peer fashion. So for instance, I can't in a digital way, prove for instance, any of, any of you there that I'm, let's say over 18 years old, of course, if you see my picture, it's pretty obvious, but still digitally.

It's difficult to prove that fact about myself and not only am I unable to do such communicate such things, but it's also of course, impossible to automate processes based on those kind of things. So there's quite a lot to do and quite, quite a big improvement available if we can solve this problem of communicating facts to each other. So before going to automated trust, let's, let's remind what is trust, how it is defined. And to do that, I went to the Webster dictionary, which says that trust is assured reliance on the character ability, strength, or of something or someone.

And so now, and verb trust means that rely on the truthfulness or accuracy of something. So this is the trust defined. It's actually very difficult to define trust without using the word trust what's digital trust.

Then, then we start to talk about kind of transactions. So digital trust is something that enables users to carry out business transactions. And in order to carry out the business transaction, the trust needs to be established between the parties of the transaction. That's a really, really important thing. So once you can establish trust with the parties and exchange facts with, with, among the parties, then you can actually execute a digital transaction. And the next thing is then definition about automated trust that I crafted here.

So I take, I took this definition of that. I found from the Webster dictionary. So automated trust is about capability to digitally rely on truthfulness or accuracy of care of the character ability or strength or someone, or, and then to use these facts in the digital transactions. And we split into the split. This trust into piece is what kind of things are are needed to establish trust. First of all, I need to be able to tell who I am, then what's my authorization to participate in a, in a transaction. And then what are the other qualifications and facts to participate?

So I need to be able to communicate this kind of things to the other parties of the transaction in order to qualify there. And this is what the self server in ID networks actually are designed to do. We also call them networks of verifiable data. That's sort of, I think it's more accurate and a kind of more better describing way.

Although describe these networks, this, these networks are able to convey this between the participants of the transaction, the facts that are required to establish trust in the transaction and FIDI is one such network and other similar networks will be built in other EU member states. And why is that basically in EU, this June early, this June EU publish this initiative about digital ID for Europeans and Sebastian from Germany already had a present very good presentation today about this topic.

So I'm not spending much more time about this, but basically just a remind EU wants that every EU citizen and resident in the union will be able to use a personal digital wallet to participate in digital transactions. And that's a good thing.

I, I took three kind of important things to remember about, about this E U ID in this, this presentation, and let's go through those. So first of all, what is this digital identity?

How, how do they define it? So it's basically, it is self-determined personal digital wallet that allows you to access different services, transactions, both public and private, and that wallet that everybody has. It can actually have all kinds of data in it, all kinds of facts in it like typical stuff, address, age, name, nationality, all kinds of qualifications, but also kind of those things that are in every single wallet like receipts and even invoices and payment data. So that wallet that will be implemented. It actually, it really there's no limit what you can put in there.

As long as that data you put into the wallet somehow describes you as somehow sociable with you. And the other thing to know about this EU ID island initiative is that it is, it is planned to be executed as, as a process with where there's a lots of cooperation between the commission, the member states and the private sector. So this is one of those things, a few things that actually bring together all these parties that actually need to be brought together to solve the problem.

And that's, that's the idea here that no, none, this is not going to be solved in Brussels or in individual member states or by the private sector by, but all these together. And that's a really, really important point. And then the third aspect of this is that there will be a toolbox that kind of brings this technical architecture reference framework for implementing these networks. And as Sebastian mentioned, there's already a kind of declaration of cooperation between Germany and Veland.

We got this, these two ministers signed this declaration of cooperation that we will work together with Germany to solve these problems and develop these networks together so that we can get national networks that actually work together, which is of course of, of course, a very useful thing that not only do we have national digital IDs, but also ideas that are opera interoperable across Europe, Hey, the use case that this EU initiative actually has, it's actually about banks and of course I'm, I'm from a bank. So this is fits, fits nicely to my, to my story.

So today, if you think about how to, what does it take to get a loan from a bank? It actually takes quite a lot. You need to have lots of papers with you. You need to arrange meetings, you need to have a negotiation in the bank, then you get the proposal and you may need to go to bank again to actually sign the papers. And then you have the load and lots of times time and effort has spent here. So there's quite a lot of space for improvement in this one use case, which is actually a very typical use case. This light.

I think this is a little bit of repetition from the previous previous presentations, but this basically shows the idea of the, of the self sovereign identities. And really when you think about these identities, you really need to think about put the individual into the center of the, or the picture. So you have an identity holder, which can be a person or organization, or actually also a thing which was pretty well illustrated in the Bo presentation today.

And this identity holder in this network, it can request this facts about him or himself from various sources, which can be organizations, individuals, or things. And then I can take those facts somewhere else, for instance, for a bank to ask for, for a loan, for instance, and this is really the big thing that we are now able to think about these services from the viewpoint of the user of the services. And it simplifies things quite a bit. This is also something that has been covered in the previous presentations.

So, so that's just to remind how this network actually works. So in, in this self network, you can have each, each person or organization or member of the network has a agent or wallet which can request and present facts to, or from another wallet, which can belong to another person or organization or thing.

And when, when I receive a fact or issue effect to somebody that on the, that fact can be verified from the shared infrastructure of the network and this shared infrastructure is of course, something that in Finland of for instance, is, will be provided by the FIDI Cooper. And this is all based on standards, open specifications.

And in, in the case of, in also the software implementation will be open sourced. So no vendor locks there or, or anything. So nobody nobody's making big money out of, out of the software that runs this thing. But earnings possibilities are on the services that are enabled by this network. And how do we get organized in the, in the pin network?

So our scope is Finland and our scope is really three things, individuals, organization, things, any, any of those can have identity, identity, internet, and it will be relatively covered by this, not for profit cooperative that has been actually registered this June. And it has actually both private and public sector organizations as its members. So it's a public private organization. And our goal really is to make this network suitable for any, any, any facts that the, in the members of the network want to share between each other.

So there's no no limit about what about the use case is what you can do here. And we also seek to participate in this digital identity initiative. And for instance, to part, we seek to participate in the toolbox development work and so on. So now that we have this network in place someday, now this use case for applying a bank loan actually gets much simpler. So this person who now wants to apply for the loan, he has his all, all the credentials needed for the loan in his own wallet, in this digital wallet.

And from that wallet, when he establishes, when he starts to the application process, which may be for instance, chat bot run by the bank, he presents from the wallet, only those documents, that and parts of those documents that are needed by the application process. And of course, then the bank, when it receives all the documents electronically and in a very far performance, the banks chat bot can make the loan grant position pretty much automatically. So this time to get a loan in this process is like maybe maybe a minute or two.

And the quality of the decision is very good because it's based on all the it's all based on verifiable facts. The status of the FIDI network today right now is that we have this cooperative founded. So we had the organization in place, and this actually ended three years of incubation.

We, we, we're working as a loose consortium before this founding of this cooperative already for three years. So we have been done quite a lot of stuff on a kind of voluntary basis. We are seeking funding for this cooperative today.

And, and actually the name of the cooperative is called fin because there was a naming conflict. There's a B Algerian company doing dock tracking devices, which was called fin. So we had to change our name to fin net and our schedule for all this creation of this network is that we want to have this cooperative funded and operational. By end of this year, the network, we would like to have a pilot network in place for pilot projects by the end of next year, and then production network re operational by end of 2023.

And this is pretty well aligned with what the EU initiative wants to have in place. And we have also developed a open source wallet software for prototyping purposes.

And it is, it is publicly available. If you go to this, this address, indi-network.gi hub of IO, it has the package, which is a easy to install to a local workstation, and you can have a look at it, what it, what it does. And there are also some very interesting block post about how we're thinking about how, how this wallet has been designed. What's the, what, why do architecture design decisions that we have made are what they are? Cause there are quite a few decisions that where we have kind of deviated from the mainstream, but anybody. Yeah.

Anybody who wants to have a look at some source code and some design thinking, please go to that website and to conclude couple of, couple of slides, why should I bother? Why should any industry bother, bother about this automated trust and self-sovereign identity management and digital transactions that are enabled by this identities? And really the big thing that is now changing is that the way how you communicate with other persons is changing. So it's really now you are able to communicate with anybody else in the network using facts, which hasn't been possible before.

And it does change the way how business is done, how it is, how it changes. Of course, depends on the business and some following innovations, but the business business processes and how, the way, how you run them, they change.

So it's, it's right now, time to trying to pay attention to this because although the networks are still couple of years away in real life, it takes couple of years to make this change and to understand what it is about in the big scheme of things. Finally, I'll show one, one slide about how, how we financial services are kind of thinking about this changed. So we would like to be in the future in this business of digital decentralized financing.

And what does that means that financing service, they are based on contracts between trusting parties and or on the verifiable effects presented by those parties. And to do that and to get to these financing services, we need to have digital contracting abilities in place and to have the digital contracting abilities in place we need to have, we need to be able to digitalize the parties of the contracts and make sure that the parties exchange facts with it in each other, that can be trusted by the other parties.

So we need to have this self sovereign identity capabilities and on the bottom layer, we need to have the protocol which enables this digital trust. So now when we look at this stack that is formed, it starts from a protocol just like internet started with TCP IP and HTTP. This protocol stack here starts for, with what we think will be trust over IP stack. Porwal allows us to exchange verifiable data and this forms, the identity networks and this verifiable data allows, this is what transactions, agreements, contracts.

And once we have have enabled this transactions, then we can have these digital financing services offerings in place. So we need to rethink the whole stack. But once we have done this, I think the outcome is pretty interesting.

And to conclude here, we really need to, if you want to transform the financing services from closed systems to open networks, we really need really need to embrace the new standard protocols that enable the trust and fact based communication so that we can get this decent trust contracting processes, which are then the kind of enabler of the next generation financing services. That was my presentation.