Are Buyers Ready for Digital ID? Or are they Confused?

Hi, I'm, I'm Nick Moho from the Open Identity Exchange. And I'm Gar Rogers, the SME for Identity Fraud and financial Crime for Amir. For dayon. Fantastic. So we're gonna talk to you today, today about relying parties and some work we did, or rather ed around surveying, relying parties, talking to them and finding out are they ready, are they ready to buy digital id or are they confused? And we'll take you through the story, but they're confused. They're confused, aren't they? They're very confused. So that's us.

So we're gonna tell you a little bit on the work research background and what we did talk about from their perspective, what is a digital id you will all have your perspectives on what a digital identity is, look at the outcomes and the value that we got from it. Some up with the research summary. And then I'm gonna talk about what's, what's our X going to do next. So what are the learnings we've taken from the excellent work that Gar did in talking to all the relying party?

So, but who, who, who are we and why did we do this? So the OX is, it's a member's community. We're a not-for-profit. And we work in kind of three main areas. We do a lot of thought leadership. We're looking at frameworks for wallets and global interoperability at the moment. We do a lot of influencing of governments in terms of consultation, response and feedback. So next week we're, once we, we've got this outta the way, we're looking at our version 1.4 and what do we think of that? So we're sending responses on that, for instance.

But we also do a lot of promotion and understanding the market. What does the market need? What are the fears and misconceptions in the market? And how can we get people buying our members products? And that's where this area, this fits.

So, and we know that bias seem to be struggling to understand the benefits of digital id. They're not buying it, it's not shooting off the shelves at the moment. And we and our members don't understand that because we believe in it. We've all invested in it. So we wanted to know why. Why is this not, you know, the top of someone's mind when they come in? Why are they not buying digital ID to improve their success rates to reduce fraud? So Garin very kindly with Diane, helped us explore this question with some excellent research.

So at that, I'm gonna hand over to you to thanks Very much indeed The research that we, we went through. Thanks very much indeed.

So look, just before we start, I almost wanna take us outta the room where we're identity people, we understand what we believe the term means, even though we may in the room have different definitions. I want to take you into the world where you will, you are looking at the general Joe in an organization that's buying these type of things. They may or may not know anything about it and ask the question, okay, let's baseline, let's understand, let's health check. What do you absolutely understand about the term digital identity and what do you understand about its value and meaning?

Okay, so what the research did was it was over about a two, three month period how long interviews with a series of kind of 12 benchmarking questions split into three areas. What do you believe digital ideas, what's the value of it and what problems do you see for adoption?

Okay, now we were asking people from all sorts of industries, small medium enterprises, all the way up to big corporates. And we were not necessarily talking to what I would describe as procurement experts. We were talking to people in operational areas and also in sort of strategic roles alongside technology. Okay? So treating it really is a temperature check. The sectors that we chose were, as you can see behind me, okay?

But there were a couple of use cases within healthcare breaking out what was employment and what was transformation and change to make services more consumable for the end user, the patient. And as you can see there, there's a great diversity of different types of organization that we check through. And there are a couple of kind of like key takeouts there.

One, how can I make this a quicker service? So in the term of gambling, how, what's the time to gamble in the term of credit? What's the time to credit, get credit written down? How can I actually engage somebody and get them to buy the service that I want? The second kind of like key theme that came out is I want to know more about the individual. I wanna create an individualistic experience. So in retail loyalty in particular, you'll see that people really wanted to understand more about the individual to serve a, a unique experience and get them to transact more effectively.

So getting down to it, as we started to explore with these guys, the first thing they said to us is, I'm concentrating on one-off identity. I'm, I'm less concerned or interested or even incomplete understanding about what a reusable identity could mean to my business.

Okay, next. Linked to that, they were talking very much about the selfie scan biometric capability, which is really digitization of identity proofs into a operational online experience. What they weren't really truly thinking about is digital identity as it could mean. And they also weren't necessarily talking about just id, they were talking about how their process gets enacted and completed with efficiency.

So what else do I need to gather at the same time that could be pseudo identity or absolutely linked identity items such as home property information, insurance information, or anything else that helps the end-to-end process be completed in one click. So within that framework, what we found, we had 11 different definitions of identity coming through. That definition of identity ranged from the access tokens that they had to get into a service to the collection of attributes that you might be online.

You know, things like your username and password, your ip, your, you know, your pseudonyms or your persona in a gaming environment, whatever that might be. But it wasn't necessarily about who you were, it was in that moment online.

Also, as I mentioned before, the biometric association with your document was another definition. And then with the more technical guys, they were spreading out in terms of a reusable identity and wallet, did they use the terminology that I'd expect consistently? No. Even within one conversation with one person, there were five or six terms that were being chucked around interchangeably. Very much kinda like confused at times and having to be kind of like cross-checked about what their meaning was when they actually gave the information and told their stories.

Did they commonly understand the terminology underneath the kind of like digital ID framework? No, no. They were using things like validation, verification, authentication.

I mean, I can see people in the room reacting to this, but it, you know, they were just confused about what it was and what they called it. And in one breath they'd be using it in three different contexts And They were really confused about technobabble. Now I'm gonna just sideline a little bit and tell us about a story from our September OIX conference where I had people up on stage. We were getting to kinda like talk about some of these things and tell us about the use cases.

And we had a question from a technician within the audience that not one single one of the individuals on the stage from relying party buyers understood. In fact, it had to be explained several times from other experts in the room before some of the panelists, me included, actually understood it. And if we're conveying that sort of message out to people, general Joes who are trying to consume this, there's a, there's a challenge there. The research also, they've talked very much around, okay, I've got a job to do here. I want to get the job done.

Whether it's kind of like selling mortgage products, kind of like giving a credit card to somebody, getting them to gain quicker or getting them employed to release kind of like opportunity into the healthcare sector and to get car economics flowing. My goal is always there. Now I'm happy to know that I'm gonna be protected or there's gonna be a functional capability that might help me in my decision making process. But if you tell me the story at that level, I'm disconnected because I can't see the value for itself.

And at the same time, if you overlay that with techno babel and any confusing language, you end up with somebody who starts to switch off not realizing what the value of this could be for them solving real life problems. We also found that different stakeholders in the organizations have different drivers. So they really want to know what the value of digital ID means to them. So what is it about digital ID that helps me to move from my incumbent solutions?

And if you talk to an operational team, you talk to a strategic team, a technical team, a product team, a customer experience team, they all wanted different outcomes. Being clearly understood, whether that's how quickly can I make a decision from an inclusion point of view, can I actually get every single person who's attempting this journey to go through it from a compliance point of view, will my regulator approve, right? Can I use this all the way through to how engaging is it? How quick is it? Will it bring back loyalty and utilization? Will it be secure? Will it be private?

So in our storytelling, this is quite key. The research also said, right, hold on a second, not everybody in this kind conversation is gonna get what you are talking about here. And neither can we actually work out what it really truly means for me as an individual, right? Imagining the art of the possible. So we need to kind like convey the story of that moonshot, but make it consumable, make it understandable, which then immediately enables us to talk more widely about opportunity. Imagine back in the sixties the kinda like, how can we get to the moon, right?

We got to the moon, now we're talking about space tourism as though it's kind of like gonna happen, right? It's that type of trajectory where people need to be taken on that story in very, very simple language and very compellingly overall though business was saying, Hey look, there are benefits here. Both the cost controls, compliance outcomes, and from a user point of view we expect, you know, better time to approval, better experience, better utilization of the service, better loyalty coming from it.

And actually we can go on to hyper-personalized their user experience and make it more engaging and deploy the right data at the right time for that experience. All really strong value adds.

But, and using my agile framework here, people know that there's a problem, they know how they solve it today. They don't know how they completely solve it in the future. They don't know what the metric uplifts from what they have today is. They don't understand how it works, they don't know how they would deliver it. They don't understand kind of like who would accept it. They don't understand whether their regulator would kinda like approve it. And actually the big questions over benefits in terms of ROI and cost are still a little bit vague for them.

So they're seeing things as a little bit, how can I put it politely. We're on a journey. We haven't quite got there in terms of answering all the questions and there's uncertainty, certainty creeping in. So even the most innovative experts on the panels we're talking very much about that uncertainty and thinking, right, okay, I can't leap into this, I've gotta help people through this. And in places I'm still uncertain whether it's because standards aren't there yet or it's because I've got five different factors, five different competing ways of doing something.

And they also observed there's no regulatory or other push to actually say you have to do this, which is influencing their decision making processes on investment. Okay. That's a quick summary of some of the research findings and I'll pass it back over to Nick. He'll talk about the O'S response.

Gar, thank you. And okay, brilliant piece of research and I know you really enjoyed doing it. And then the, the panel we had at the, the conference last year. Yep. I thought that was really insightful that that question that you had from the, the technical audience, can you remember what it was? So it was about the wallet standards and the way in which you could translate kind of credentials into those wallets, right? Yeah. So at that particular time we had a healthcare professional who was concentrating on trying to get people into, into roles, right? To help the National Health Service.

Yeah. You had another one that was trying to think about care home working and you had somebody working from the Walgreens Boots Alliance who was thinking about loyalty. Yeah. Right? The loyalty guy is an architect and is very much what he would describe as an expert. He did not get it.

The other, the girls on the, the panel didn't get it. Yeah. And two or three people in the kind of like audience afterwards were saying, I have no idea what's just been said. No.

Which, which, which is scary, isn't it? And what I'm interested in is how, how many people in the audience would describe themselves as a, as being from a relying party. Could I get a show of hands rather than a supplier of identity services. So we've got 1, 2, 3, so three outta around what? 50 in the audience? Yep.

That, that tells us we've got a problem. We're here talking about identity, we're creating solutions. Are we doing this in a vacuum?

Where are, where are the buyers for this? Where are the customers? And as we move to this world of wallets and we have this presumption that this is what is required both for the user and for the relying party. And the EU goes as far as writing legislation to say that it shall be accepted in all of these different places. The people who are gonna use this aren't ready at all. Well Look, I'm, I'm just gonna take it back to that scenario and some of the people in the room, right? You had one lady who was looking at care home workers who were on zero hour contracts.

That means that those people on zero hour contracts, they could be called in to work at any particular time, but they're not guaranteed work, right? They go through something like a 16 week onboarding process to get a job and the jobs are generally boarded for two weeks, right?

There's, there's a gap there. So what happens? They go all the way through the process and the job's gone, right? What else happens? The economy doesn't get the money that comes off the back of the tax dollar that's kind of coming from the employment. And all of it means that utilization within the National Health Service is problematic because you get people leaking into other industries sometimes in completely different industries like fast food and retail where their skills aren't being deployed. Yeah. Right? They will not understand the technical jargon that we are using in the room.

They simply will not. No, we, we, we have to simplify this. We have to find a way to explain this. We're talking about relying parties today, but to end users as well. So OEX is doing a number of different initiatives to try and help solve this problem. So we've created a number of new videos. We've produced 12 of them. There's two versions of each video. One's in business language that is aimed at relying parties. The other with the help of chap GPT is in language that's aimed as an end user, a 12-year-old reader, end user.

And these videos can either be played end to end, in which case they last just over 10 minutes, or they can be played as soundbites in their own right. We very carefully crafted them so that it could be used individually. And they address topics like, how does this enable you to access services? Is this secure? What about biometrics? What about fraud? Is that a risk? Is this gonna be mandatory?

Well, a password's gonna go away. So we've, these are really great assets. They're on our website just off the main page. And please do use these to help explain both to end users and relying parties, what digital ideas and to dispel some of the myths that, that are out there. What we're moving on to in our next phase is some problem analysis. So we've been talking to relying parties against, under the survey, we want to now focus in problem areas and bring relying parties together to talk about, well what about fraud? What do we need to do to dispel the myths around the honeypots of fraud?

Where actually we believe that fraud is going to be reduced by digital identity. How are we going to look at costs, look at success rates. So we're going to do this in a, in with groups of relying parties from different sectors, looking at different problems. And we will report back to you what we find and how we progress and create more assets to help educate. And we already have a whole, Sorry Nick to interrupt you just on that fraud thing. We're talking to a environment that comes from the research that are receptive to digitization being better than what they described as paper controls.

'cause paper controls actually mean human intervention and a number of them are worried about that. Yeah. Attaining in the system. Sorry to interrupt you.

Yeah, yeah. So, so, so we begin to get all of these advantages over on our website already. There's assets around benefits for digital identity. There's relying, there's checklists to help rely parties select the right kind of supplier, which is telling them to look for, for trusted suppliers. From a trust framework. There's a ID service directory, jargon busting. And we continue to develop these assets to help. Just to wrap up then. So there's kind of takeaways from a aligned party's perspective. They want to know more about how digital ID will work for them.

Our website and the resources we're creating are helping them with that understanding. They're worried about particular aspects of digital id. There's a lot of rumors out there, there's a lot of disinformation. How do we get them through that? Our problem analysis program will look in more detail at some of those problem areas and how we get these myths dispelled.

And then if you have more questions about digital ID or they have more questions, then get in touch with us, come along and help as, as we've established a few of you're relying parties, if you want to know more about digital, ID come and talk to us and we can help explain what it is. For the rest of you who aren't relying parties, come and join us and help dispel these rumors and get digital ID to be a reality so that we know the benefits, we believe in the benefits for end users. We believe in the benefits for relying parties. Help us on that journey to make our vision a reality. Thank you.

Thanks Karen. Thank you very much. Thank You. Great. Thank you very much gentlemen. Very interesting piece of research. W what would you say is, would you say was a good idea perhaps to maybe with, from this audience to get people in their organizations to be like digital idea ambassadors. 'cause you're providing all the resources, but if no one's interacting with that and, and interacting with their user group, then you know, kinda you need to connect the dots.

So I mean, what do you think of that idea of just kind digital ID ambassadors within organizations? Do you wanna take it to start off with or?

Well, look, I totally agree with it. Right?

So what, what it was very clear within the research is that the people that we were coming into contact with, some of them in lower levels of the organization, knew nothing, right? And made up their own kind of like interpretation of what the terms mean. If you'd had that ambassador cascading it out and being that advocate and explaining you'd be halfway through that sort of process. And if you could lean on some of the standardized responses and the kind of like the work that the OIX is doing, that'll help the conversation massively.