We’re at EIC 2024. And we're continuing our discussion about the future of digital identity. And great to have with me today the CEO and founder of Meeco, Katryna Dow.
Thank you, Warwick. It's really lovely to be here with you and of course, to be back in Berlin at EIC.
It's great to have you as always. Now with your extensive background in digital identity and personal data rights in particular, what is the single innovation in digital identity you think that has shaped or will shape digital identity most significantly for businesses? The impact on businesses?
I think the clue was there in personal data. I think what we've seen, steadily over the last decade, but never so much as this year putting the citizen, the customer, the patient, the student at the forefront. So it's, now we're starting to see this collision between what may have been considered ten years ago, five years ago, as kind of this alternative idea of direct participation of the individual. And if I think of the great keynote that Martin opened the event with saying, you know, like it or not, we've got to find a way to bring individuals in the various roles in life into the tech stack and into the identity fabric. And so I think the evolution now, is this a really customer centric approach? Yeah.
And from a technological point of view, though, what's kind of supporting that in terms of... So the innovation is again the focus on the individual. But you know, what do you see as focusing on that from a technology or supporting that from a technological point?
So I think the language that we might have used over the last few years would have been a shift to SSI, self-sovereign identity. I think now we're starting to land more on a on a hybrid term, which is either decentralized identity or reusable identity. So I think the difference is, this end user having the tools and the mechanisms to actually participate as a first party in an interaction. And I think that's manifest now with what we're seeing is this interoperable, cross-border, interchangeable, decentralized reusable or that kind of identity. We're landing on a language now, which I think is more of a hybrid between sort of the way an enterprise or a government may have looked at things and some of the work that the Self-Sovereign identity community was trying to do in bringing this to the forefront. And we just have many more technology options now that are settling around that capability.
I think you mentioned a key word there, which was interoperability. I mean, that's going to be the thing that we're critical battle with. But just looking at a slightly wider scope then, what are the other innovations that you see as being sort of complementary that are happening alongside, that are kind of co-enabeling in the and, and sort of facilitating this collaboration that you were mentioning?
So, I think first of all, some positives, maybe some negatives, and then let's take it back to neutral. So in a positive sense, I think what we're starting to see is some consensus around tech stacks. So I'm not sure that there will be a single tech stack to rule them all. That really speaks to the interoperability, but I don't think, I've ever seen so much clarity around some of the standards and some of the building blocks. So I think that's really exciting because that clarity, I think Mike Jones did a fantastic presentation this week on, you know, making choices around standards and being clear what those choices are that are a real enabler. So I think, that's great. I'd also like to say from a positive point of view, AI, but I'd like to quickly pivot to, potentially some of the harms and concerns we have. The most extraordinary technology that is actually being pulled by society. If we look at something like ChatGPT and the growth of everyday people interacting with this new capability. And we don't know what we don't know yet. And it's and it's moving really quickly. And it could have some widespread, amazing transformational capabilities in society personalized health, personalized finance, better decision making. But it could also, depending on who's controlling the data, the verification of that data as a training set and therefore the way it's shaping society. You know, when you invent the ship, you invent a shipwreck. We really have some ethical and existential questions to answer society as to how we're going to deploy that technology.
AI is a whole topic in itself. I mean, we could fill of ten minutes just with that. But you also mentioned standards. We'll get onto that a little bit later. But the thing that I wanted to know from you, you mentioned the emergence of digital identity wallets in your keynote presentation. I just wondered how you see that as transforming digital identity and data sharing in the future.
One of the things I said in the keynote is I think we've we've really done ourselves a disservice with this word wallet. Because what happens is we think of the word and it automatically makes us think of a particular form factor. Or whether or not we think immediately of a mobile phone, or we think of the word wallet, and we're immediately thinking of payments, when in fact, what we need to be talking about or thinking about is, some software running somewhere against a security posture that enables this IoT device, or this person or this entity to be recognized, verified, trusted, and then to fulfill some outcome. So that might be, a wallet, a secure container embedded in my coffee machine with a payment authority to order, automatically order it's pods, coffee pods, right through to a human crossing a border. So I think the key thing there is, instead of us getting hung up on the form factor, because we may be wearing wallets, we we may be interacting with the idea of a wallet embedded in many things around us. We need to be really focusing on what are the secure and consent based mechanisms to interact with that technology. And, how quickly, can we settle on a number of tech stacks that are standards based, interoperable, and allow us to be able to have, a seamless digital life.
That's great. But I know you said that there will be no, there probably won't be one tech stack to rule them all, but do you think the likes of Google and Apple will perhaps, dominate the digital identity wallet space? Or is there a role for independent initiatives to play?
I want to believe there is a role for the independent. I think the work of the OpenWallet Foundation and some of their announcements this week in terms of closer alliance with the things that are happening here in the EU. I really want to know that that succeeds. But I think that was one of the keynotes that said, part of that success will be how the final regulation is shaped and the requirements. If I look at Apple and Google, I love Apple. You know, I'm, you know, wearing I have devices all around me. So I really enjoy and trust that ecosystem. We can't get away from the fact that Apple and Google just get this UX experience right time after time after time, or even if something is an evolution, they have a way of bringing us as users on that journey, so they move us towards a new patents. So I think that is always a challenge in terms of how do you compete? It may be one thing to regulate, but you still have to think of a great experience. Where I think at the moment that there is a significant advantage that maybe we're not talking about enough is what we really need is a rich ecosystem of issuers and verifiers that can be trusted, and that will really link back to the entity, whether that is really, an airline, really a government, really a hospital. And I think one of the advantages for both is they've invested heavily over the last decades on this business platform of knowing who you are when you submit an app. Your legal entity, your contact details, whether or not you have an identifier associated with your tax and, or your VAT or your GST. And I think we possibly underestimating how important that business infrastructure will be from a trust point of view for issuers and verifiers, so that if you're in whatever ecosystem and you see a logo, you can be fairly confident that logo is associated with a credential, that it can, that it actually traces back to who you believe that to be. Yeah. So I think we need to do a lot of I would like to see next year's sessions around sort of that business infrastructure.
Yeah. Okay. So that that's again a whole topic in its own. But in the context of the Council of Extended Intelligence and, your role on the IEEE, what are the most critical standards and initiatives currently shaping the future of digital identity and AI in your view?
So, again, a lot of the work that I did with IEEE was a few years ago now, and it was around, this collision of extended intelligence and human centricity, which now we're talking about a lot more from an AI point of view. And so I think, it comes back to some of the same themes. Source of data provenance, verification, how that informs identity, and then what intelligence or layer is being added to that, that is moving somebody either towards access, permission, authorization or a decision. and so I think when we were doing that, when I was involved in that work with the IEEE some years ago now, we were really trying to focus on some foundational principles, an ethical approach. How is it that you can continue to elevate human centricity? And I think one of the challenges that we have here, which Europe is trying to do, is over time, we've reached, a set of human rights, and then technology has been developing and we've had a divergence between what we've already secured, in a physical sense. From a digital sense, we have a lot of technical debt now as to have that. And so part of that is how do we bring those two paradigms back together again? How do we make sure that we have digital rights? But at the same time, privacy, security and and without stopping the pace of technology? So I think what we'll see out of the standards bodies will be a lot more work around ethics, human centricity, digital rights. I'm hoping, that will then inform the standards which are then the things that we're building on top of.
Quickly, what advice would you give to businesses and to policymakers looking to navigate those kind of rapidly evolving digital identity landscape?
I don't think we're going to slow down this pace of citizen human centricity. How do you bring your customer, your employee, your patient, your student into the value chain as a first party actor, how do you start designing solutions? And I think given all of the great content we've seen over the last couple of days, start prototyping, start somewhere, find a use case. Don't worry about the technology. Don't worry about, you know, having to make all of those technical decisions. What's the job to be done? What's the outcome? What's a great customer experience? Work backwards from that. And I think that you find an an amazing menu of choices that have been validated by others to get started.
Just get started. As ever, great to talk to you. Katryna Dow.
Thank you.
