Good morning and thank you for that wonderful introduction and I see many faces that I recognize. So thank you to be here to support me in this conversation. I am a volunteer at the Women in Identity Organization.
I, I wanna give you a little bit of background about the organization, what it's trying to accomplish. You may have seen there were other sessions in breakouts. We had a meetup at lunch yesterday. So lemme just give you that background and then I, I want to talk to you about the research that we're undertaking. The organization is, is very global, but we have come together from multiple countries and sort of set these this as our vision for what we hope the organization can accomplish.
And that is that digital identity solutions that are built for everyone should also be built by everyone having that inclusion, not just in who uses digital identity services, but who is actually developing them.
Along with that, we have established a very big mission for ourselves and that is to drive the digital identity industry, to build solutions with diverse teams to promote universal access, which would enable civic, social and economic empowerment around the world. And this is a really big mission I'll have to say.
And as we really grappled with how do we take and make this real action where we really can affect change or hopefully improvement, add value to the digital identity industry, we started to look at what are some concrete and substantive things that we could do. So just to tell you a little bit more about who we are, we are a nonprofit organization. We have both a legal entity in the US and the uk, but we have membership all around the world.
As part of that, we are governed by a global executive board with representatives from multiple countries because we are finding, obviously there are differences in different places and we are trying to be inclusive ourselves in how we run the organization.
It's really run by volunteers. We do not have a full staff. We have one paid staff. And so most of the work that's getting done is being done by volunteers.
But when I talk a little bit more about our research, that is where we've really put our money to really try to work with institutions of higher learning so that our research is rigorous and we can have confidence that we're getting to the right information. It is a, as a nonprofit, there are memberships and those are completely free. And if anyone came to the meetup yesterday, you will have seen that in the group. There is a mix of members. So we appreciate not just women who work in the digital identity industry, but everyone.
And we have many men who are allies or members of the organization and frankly are volunteers that really help us to try to reach our mission.
So in order to work on what can be a very complicated issue, what we do in order to have funding to do any of this is we really rely on companies and corporate sponsorships to partner with us as we try to engage on these issues more substantively. As I mentioned, we are funded through our, our members, not our members, sorry, our corporate support.
And of course if you have any interest, I would love to talk to you later about the possibility of your com of company being a part of this. To give you an overall view of the organization, we have over 3000 members and supporters. There's only about 17 volunteers like myself. This is not my day job, but we do about 45 or more member events every year. And doing that with a small group of volunteers can be a lot of work, but we really find it incredibly rewarding and I think it's really making a difference in reaching all segments of the industry.
We also have membership in 45 countries currently and that seems to be continuing to grow. So now I wanna talk about the whole concept that we, we were introducing here about the importance of inclusion and that financial impact that it may have. And for that, as I mentioned, we looked at what does this organization wanna be? And we really wanted to be able to make change. So to do that you have to do real work. And so as part of that, we came together with our corporate sponsors, with our allies.
We talked about what, what do we need, what would be beneficial, what would help the digital identity industry sort of in the long run that might make a difference. And so what came up was the idea to create an identity code of conduct. And this is not a code of conduct where you have certain principles about hiring and firing and those kinds of things.
It's really about how do you do business? How do you conduct your business in a way that makes it profitable for the business and is still inclusive and embraces the different principles that I mentioned to you before.
So we, we established that this is what was our goal and we really split it up into what are six phases or stages. We've already done the first couple. So the first thing we did was partner with a, a company to do the problem statement, to look at the evidence to see what's out there. And with that we also did a literature review. And when we did the literature review, we were trying to make sure that we weren't reinventing the wheel and that if someone else had done some of this work, we took advantage of that and built on it.
And not that we tried to do something completely new and different that was not relevant.
All of those reports are on our website, which is just women in identity.org. But what we found is there was not a lot of research, there was not a lot of work that really gave us much information. One of the things that we did see in that literature review was a report in 2019 by Mackenzie and Company.
And they talked about, they actually were talking about digital identity in this report and which they suggested that inclusion, if we could really make those digital identities more inclusive, would likely raise the gross domestic product for several countries by like three to 15%, which was a considerable amount. And looking at that, it made us realize that there's a potential for financial reward, for return on investment if we really took a deeper look into inclusivity. And so the next phase was to look at the human impact of exclusion.
So what does it mean if people are not able to get digital identities? What's the result of that? What does that number look like? And we were really looking at how does that also impact individuals? And so what we did is rather than just try to look at the entire digital identity landscape, which would be multiple industry verticals and really very broadly dispersed, we narrowed our focus to the financial payments, the FinTech section of digital identity.
So we looked there and we also decided that, that it might be best to look at a developed nation and another nation that perhaps was less developed that was not as far along to see were there similarities and differences and with that impact, that inclusivity and the financial impact. So we looked at the UK and we also looked at Ghana. And in the course of that we were really able to gather a lot of good information about what people have experienced, who have not been able to get those digital identities, what the impact on their lives was.
So we were looking at as this says the human impact, how does that impact individuals? What was interesting is that I think, not that you're supposed to pre propose what your research is going to show you, but I think we expected that there wouldn't be that many people that weren't able to get a digital identity in the uk, A more developed nation. Turns out there were actually many who struggled with that.
And in, when I say many, I mean in the millions and in other countries like the US it's exponentially higher. We didn't expect to see that. We expected that for Ghana, to be perfectly honest. We didn't expect that in more developed nations. But as it turns out there's a pretty large sector that is getting left out for a variety of reasons. That report is also on the website.
And I would encourage you if you have an opportunity to take a look at that now we're at the next phase and this is the one that I wanna tell you the most about because now we're trying to focus on the economic value, the potential for growth, the potential for investment.
What will that look like that's being done right now we are partnering with a well-known university and I'm pretty sure that the contract is not officially signed.
So I don't think I'm allowed to tell you what university, but we're really working with a university that has a, a very high profile and well-respected economic department and that's, that's who we're really trying to work with so that we get a better sense about what this really means. And I'd like to kind of break this down for you a little bit. Let's see if I can, before I break this down, let me just add the last few stages here for you. We'll be a, the code of conduct design. So once we figure out what's the economic impact, is there a return on investment, what does that look like?
We'll be coming up with a code of conduct design.
What are the principles to develop products? What are the principles about how do you maintain diversity in your solutions? What does that you know, really do for the industry and for businesses in particular for the market.
With that, we'll be taking a look at developing an implementation framework. How do you put those principles into practice? And that last phase is activation. What will really hopefully give that to the market and we'll be able to use that in meaningful ways. So on the economic impact, this phase three, it's beginning now and it will do a couple of things in this instance in that, in that human impact I talked about, they talked to individuals, people had not been able to get digital identity.
What that had in this, in this phase, we are talking much more to decision makers, to people with positions in their businesses. Whether it's budgeting, whether it's marketing, whether it's those who are really look at looking at how they are maintaining their digital identity solutions and having more in depth conversations that are very focused financially on what the impact seems to be.
And some of this we're finding is often hidden costs or invisible costs that we're looking at. It's kind of been divided and I'm, I confess my background is as a lawyer, I am not a researcher.
So if I say anything that's confusing or the researchers in the audience, you know, be sure to let me know because I would love to talk with you 'cause I wanna make sure that I, I get all of this information correctly given to you. But they're essentially looking at, or sometimes called invisible costs because they're looking at, and I have to check my notes here, what they call connecting, compensating and cleaning processes. And those are things like connecting meaning the maintenance and repair things like password resets and those types of things.
Compensating for errors in onboarding and creating accounts and so forth. Cleaning where you, where you're modifying or you're purifying your data, those kinds of things.
And what they're trying to talk with these decision makers about is how do you decide, are you missing an opportunity or not? What are the factors that you're looking at to decide are we missing an opportunity by not reaching certain market segments, monitoring how significant that problem might be, looking at recovering. If you do find that you're excluding certain segments of the market, how do you recover from that?
And then really how do you respond in the future so that you're sort of not missing out. And a lot of this is really, like I said, trying to dig down deeper into is is there, you know, I mean I suppose it's possible the research could come back and say, well you're not really missing much. But so far what we've seen in the literature reviews, what we've seen other companies research suggests that maybe we are, but it's the kind of invisible costs that we don't always spend the time looking at but can add up quickly.
So we are looking to talk to a mix of identity providers and relying parties as well. Again, we are more focused on the financial and payments sector because that's really where we started our research. So we want to continue with that.
And so in this phase three, the our call to action, number one and I, and I mean this sincerely to everyone here, if you have an interest in being one of those who's interviewed, if you have someone in your company who is a decision maker who you think would have good insights into this in terms of your own organization, we would love to to talk with you.
We would love to work with whomever or if any of you would be interested to try to get insight into those costs. The other thing is this benefit cost for firms that who are delivering identity solutions, especially relying parties as well as identity providers. So we really would like to get a broad spectrum and not just a narrow focus in the industry because we know that there are multiple stakeholders, multiple parties involved in this. So if you're interested in this, that's my, my volunteer email address.
But I do check that and I would love to talk with any of you and I will put you in touch with the researchers since I'm not doing it myself. But absolutely we would really like to do, to really involve as many people as we can.
And, and if you noticed in our vision and our mission statement, it didn't say, you know, digital identity products for women, right? It's said for everyone. And we understand that diversity of thought and diversity of innovation is, is more than just a certain segment of the population. So we really want to address that very broad spectrum. And so that's why I wanna point that out because we really, we really feel that this is something that could be beneficial to everyone, not just a small part of the market.
And then this next phase we are doing virtual round tables and I say virtual because most we want to try to reach as many as we can since we're a global organization and as you saw, we're in many countries, we are finding that there are different experiences in different countries and cultures.
So we want to try to take that into account. And these round tables, these are some of the topics that we're looking at In my day job, I work at the Qatar initiative and so things like the standards and some of the digital wallets and the privacy are issues that we have interest in.
And I'm sure there are things that your company might look at and say that's really important to us for some of the identity providers that we work with. Things like a common taxonomy and language has been important because as we started to work on this, we're realizing sometimes we're using the same words but we mean something differently. So there's a lot of different places that we really need to try to do this research.
So these, these are some of the topics and again, we're open to more and I think once we actually began putting these together with our stakeholders and working with the university, we'll be fleshing this out even more.
It's another area where we would love your input. And you saw my email address again, it was k@womeninidentity.org.
Please, I would love to hear your ideas. And lastly, I did want to shout out to our sponsors, some of whom are here and I know I have seen some of your exhibits. So these are the companies currently who are providing us the financial resources to do this kind of work. We really have decided that this is something that we are hopeful will bring value to the market, bring value to the in to the industry. And we're very grateful for the folks that you see listed here who've really been willing to help us find those resources.
In part because we really appreciate the ability to offer free memberships to everyone.
The report on this financial inclusion we hope to have out by the end of this year. And there's lots of opportunities to volunteer or to be a part of this in a lot of different ways. So I hope that this is useful.
I don't know that we have time for questions, but we're, we're really trying to do something that is beneficial to the market all across the spectrum and I, I hope that that some of this sounds of interest to you and again, we appreciate all opinions and views and volunteers and if you'd like to participate in any of the research or in any of the other things that we do, I encourage you to reach out and I appreciate the time that you've given to talk to me today about this especially 'cause it's early morning on the last day. So thank you all and thank you for my supporters in the crowd.
Great, thank you very much. Kay. That was very interesting and I'm sure many people haven't paid much as much attention to this as they ought to have done. But based on your findings, sort of what are the key policy changes you can recommend to governments and international bodies to promote ID inclusion? Are you working at that level?
We, we are to some extent. In some ways what we're hoping is that this next level of research is going to provide more of that because I think there's a couple things.
One, we're, we're realizing that especially in some of the government bodies in some of the standards work that we're seeing, there is not always a diversity in representation and it is not a new idea to say that diversity of thought or innovation actually results in better products and better processes. And so we really, I think would encourage people to look for ways to bring more and more people to the table so that we don't all look alike because we just find that when you have that diversity of thought, you just end up with a better solution.
I mean there was research 20 years ago about this and it continues today, but I think that has been hard for people to really get that kind of engagement and that would really make a huge difference I think in the decisions and, and the kinds of of services standards, just processes that we come up with at that high level.
Great. Thank you very much. Good luck. Thank you everyone.
Thank you.
