The Invisible Man Paradox

So thank you for attending a little bit after the session. So I'm the field CTO in emea. So it's nothing to do with helping the agricultural sector in the uk, it's to do with CTO from an outreach person. I've been an identity for 20 years for those who remember the initiative of open authentication or some of the efforts to make MFA available for all in terms of Hot P and tot p. If you have a look, it's a couple of specs where you find my name, but today we're talking about the Invisible man paradox. So who is this invisible man?

And actually it's you and me, but not in the case right now because obviously you see me. But if you think about every time you interact with a service or something that you sign up for in a digital form, you initially are invisible to that service. And there's a paradox there because the invisible man, what do we want from the service? We want to be able to access it in a consistent and seamless way. We heard a lot of discussion this week around friction, but at the same time, we want it to be personal.

We want to the service to know us, to not ask silly questions and ask them again not to ask for data when it's not needed. We want it to be tailored to what we expect. And there's that conundrum, right? Because we heard all the stories of, you know, Facebook, snow and et cetera, and we want to, we don't want to give all this data specifically here in Europe. We see a bit later that we are a bit more protective with our privacy then we don't want to give that. On the other hand, if we don't give the information, it's gonna be hard to tailor the service to us and we still want it to be safe.

So on one hand we don't want to be bothered, but we would be the first ones to leave, especially if we are talking about services that relate to money or to something that is precious to us. We want it to be safe. And we know safety is a bit of an issue. So I think we heard a lot about new technologies, identities, et cetera. And what I lacked a little bit in these past few days is a little bit of data. And I'm gonna try to give you that here. Three data points. And by the way, this, this might be interesting for you, so I'm gonna refer to it later.

We commissioned a doctor a survey about, you know, we talk about the customers helping the customers and, and the end users, but we rarely ask the end users, what do you really want? So we, we commissioned a survey of 20,000 people in 14 countries to say, Hey, what do you think about these things in reality? And we're gonna find some interesting things.

And yes, obviously maybe it's obvious, but you see 56% want are happier to spend money when there's a frictionless user experience that is consistent. And a lot of people, as we all are frustrated to when we get rejected the fifth time about the password rules, and I know if you know the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Festival, the joke that won a few years ago was the one about Kenya, you please input a password of eight characters and the guy typed in Snow White and the seven doors, right? So that's an interesting one.

And some people really think, okay, you know, even once a month, you know that it's really frustrating that the less you use the service, the more difficult it is. And another data point that isn't on here, this initial friction of signing up is real money. And we're gonna go a little bit into detail of that. And the trusted customer experience, the identity is at the center of it, right?

It's, it's a first thing that needs to be established. It's a thing that ties it all together, right?

And, and no lets the service know what you want. And here the, the differences can be stalking and they can be for legacy reasons, they can be because of different technical stack. But I'll give you an example. In UK where I live at the moment, there's a famous supermarket chain called Waitrose. They have a wonderful online Porwal where you can shop. And on the top of the Porwal you have sections. So you do your groceries, your food, and maybe it's a special day, you wanna buy some flowers, you click on waitress flowers and guess what? You have to re-register again. And the reason is legacy.

It's a lots of reasons, but it's obviously not really what we want. It's it, it's silly, right? And that really drives people away. But what do people want? If we come back to this and we talk about these technologies, et cetera. So I give you a sneak preview of the report and there's a couple of really interesting data points here. So we ask the people what authentication technologies, and these are those 20,000 people. This is by the way, a subset for emea.

So I'm, I'm zooming into the answers from emea. And yes, people like the Passwordless login, but it decreases with age. The older the people, the less they will adopt passwordless. So we as technologies can, technologies can always say, Hey, it's gonna be great, but look, these guys are not adopted. Not only because of that, but look at this, they don't trust the biometrics. So on one hand we have this beautiful new technology on the other, it's not. And we can as providers say, okay, adopt our technology.

But look, the trust in the giants is there, so be careful. This by the way, comes out at the end of the month. So being really interesting to zoom into some of these things, and I invite you, it's gonna be available on our website at the end of the month. And when we talk to the people about Siam and the customers, like we heard before in the panel, it's what are we really fi we are fighting against an attitude or this engineering ingenuity that says it's just authentication, it's easy. And that's how they start, right? They start with a username and password.

I'm not gonna go through all of this obviously, but this is the journey that people do. So hey, just get the people to do a little bit of username and password and then the business asks, Hey, but can they maybe sign up with Google or Facebook?

And oh, by the way, for security, we got an audit. Can we just add a little bit of MFA here? What do we do? We have sms. And then three or four years later, suddenly you have five people working in engineering just dealing with this systems or this set of spaghetti. And obviously it's all evolving. So if you build it yourself, you have to, you're storing your P i i you, you have to have the regulations, you have to update it, you have to pen test it, et cetera, et cetera.

So this is really what we see that people think it's easy, but then realize it gets harder and harder and harder to maintain it. Because remember, this is a journey, right? And there's this subtleties of first impression.

So what, what we suggest always make sure you don't overburden the new person who signs up with too many questions. And there was an interesting statistics here. There was a company that added a single additional field on the signup form and they tracked the impact of people leaving and they calculated a loss of around 12 million for adding a single signup field. So be careful of how you guide those users and make it less burdensome on them to fill it out. So I capture them and then we call it progressive profiling.

Ask the additional identity attributes only in the context of the transaction that you want to perform. And it's really important that you give them the options. And we see this more and more, right? That maybe you don't use an email as an identifier, use a mobile phone number, et cetera. Depending on the channel that you come from, you need to maybe utilize different mechanisms and authentication technologies or, or approaches. So by getting this right, though you have a competitive advantage, you will be able to launch these things fast, launch new applications.

We have a lot of, we saw this during covid, right? Every company became a digital company. They needed to launch services extremely fast. You want to be able to accelerate this ability to personalize the journey without adding too many friction points. And at the same time, the risk exposure is still increasing. So you have, we see it ourselves, incredible amounts of attacks. One of our customers, if you think about the potential of gaining identity data, we have a customer that does payslip services. And if you think about payslip is a gold mine for identity theft, right?

You have what you've been paid, maybe a social security number often and address, et cetera, et cetera. All the things that, by the way, when you sometimes sign up or do identity proofing, people ask for, and this company alone had, and the the attackers were really interesting. They knew when the payday was on the day of the payday, they had 400 million attacks against that service.

So it's, it's definitely not an easy world out there and you need as much help that you can get. But think about this also in the context of giving, again what we said, that consistency across your state, across your services, across your different channels. And one customer I wanted to talk to you about is, anybody knows this company in the room? Jim Shock. So this is, if you want to read about an interesting success story, it's, it's a 20, it's one of the youngest UK billionaires. He started in a garage to do fancy spandex gym clothes for everyone. And it went really well.

It started mainly online. They now opened the first store and they really said, okay, we are not gonna deal with all this stuff with that entity. You deal with it. And this is more than multi-channel, having app, et cetera. Then with the opening of the store became omnichannel, meaning the ability to even transport that identity or that you had from a customer perspective, from from the end user perspective, what he did in the journey with Jim, Jim Shark online, and then transport that into the shop.

So they have an app and when you now walk into the shop, it says, Hey Phil, those lovely gray shorts that you were browsing on online is actually an aisle three. And by the way, we have a new model of that out.

So it's, it's a really interesting experience. They, they've done it incredibly well.

Well, so if you have in London and Region Street have a look at, at the Gym Shark Shop, it's a, it's a new generation of retail with the ability to start from scratch. So what we are saying is if you using these techniques and you help, let's say choose one of these wonderful platforms, we can really help you who, if you remember the old movie, right, of the Invisible man at a certain point, this was the, the old one, there's a guy with a bucket of paint and he threw it over the guy and suddenly the invisible man became invisible.

And here with all these new technologies that we have, we can really help you a little bit to have that digital spray paint to make that invisible end user visible in a nice, in frictionless way. And hence be able to serve what they want without burdening that too much. So I'm gonna open up a quick question. If you scan the QR code, you have the slides and some of the things that are referenced. So anybody wants to have a question While you're thinking about your questions, I want to ask you, we see an evolution in the CM market.

Is the identity market evolving in step and are the latest offerings gearing more for siams use cases? I think the, what we are seeing is, is a, is an evolution in maturity and it's accompanied by this, we said this, you know, the storm, we heard it earlier on the panel. We have some great new technologies. We have the giants entering the space.

So yes, there, there is a a maturity and I think we are learning more from each other in terms of more from the workforce and the identity. Although I think the, the reasons for buying the value that it provides is very different. And one of the biggest difference that I see is that the decision makers are not the same. The personas of who decides, like we heard earlier in the session is not your it your Cecil, your cio, it's your head of digital products, it's your, it's a person that actually is TA tasked with creating that digital product and put it into the market.

And hence the question is that really is there space for SIM category? I believe yes, but we need, because we need to help these people to get it right and it's getting more complex with these different authentication mechanism that we have and it will become even more complex with all the different channels that we will, you know, AR will come along and you will, you will be able to shop and interact with digital services in a whole different manner.

Okay, we have a few more minutes in hand. Are there no other questions in the room? While we are, we've got the opportunity to ask Philip, what is the key thing that to look for in an identity solutions in terms of Siam and what is your advice to organizations that may realize their existing solution is just not ideal? So you need to think about too, you need to have a, a trust that you need to choose a trusted partner.

It's, you need to be aware that it's a journey. Especially if I, if you have existing products, it's very different from creating a new product or or a new company to have a lot of different existing systems. So if you have already a lot of different existing systems, you need to think about can this technology actually pull them together because the consistency is as important as being able to have the different authentication mechanism.

The other thing I think we are going towards a, a world where the data that you gather from the insights actually that you get from the same solutions is very valuable and not yet fully understood by the, the practitioners or the builders of the systems. So you need something that is easy to implement that is, that can satisfy integrate with your existing infrastructure, but also depending how adventurous you are or how trustfully in your business model, you need something that scales.

And I mean to that testimony, in our case you probably heard about chat G P T, so our platform protects the chat G P T. So in that sense, talking about incredible scale as the business goes right, there's nothing, you know, that had compared in the last few years.

Okay, Great. Thanks.