The Surprising eIDAS2 Opportunity: To Unleash a New €Bn Market For

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for staying on in this afternoon. I'm gonna spend about 15 minutes talking about an enormous hidden billion Euro opportunity that's right behind E IDAs two and digital wallets. And it's gonna be talk about perspective. My name's Jamie Smith and I'm the founder of customer futures.com, but also mission, a dedicated consultancy around digital wallets, personal ai, verifiable credentials. We've been working in this space for a long time. We've been at EIC talking about verifiable credentials before it was cool.

And so let's dig into this hidden opportunity. Let's dig into this hidden, hello, is this working? Shall I go behind the podium? It's okay. This hidden an opportunity. So this is a matter of perspective. Some of you may have seen this picture before. Hands up if you can see the rabbit, right? Hands up if you can see the duck. The point I'm making is that you can look at something the same way and see different things. And I believe that's true of E-I-D-A-S, but more generally. More generally digital. I'm gonna stand still.

So many people think that E-I-D-A-S two is about personal data and about identity, about who you are and how you show up in digital economy. Some people say, some people say it's about digital wallets and about the portability of data and others say, no, no, no. It's about personal data and many more types of credentials. Proof of employment, proof of insurance.

Hello, there we go, right? Proof of employment, proof of insurance. And others say, no, no, this is about signatures, right? We heard earlier today that in Estonia they added digital signatures to the economy and saved 2% on the GDP.

Well, they're all right, but there's still a missing hidden opportunity. Okay? Is it about digital government, about new digital public infrastructure for citizens?

Yes, but it's also about empowerment. It's about choice agency, digital sovereignty.

Ah, but it's also about the gaffa, you know, big tech surveillance being correlated so they can build advertising profiles. I still think there's a hidden opportunity and it's one about perspective. But let tell you a story about customer experience. I want you to imagine you're a customer of big corp, a large incorporated company that probably regulated maybe a bank insurance, healthcare, and they send you an email and they say, Hey, we've got a really important message for you. And you go, great, what's the message?

You go, oh, well we can't tell you an email because we don't trust email. Okay, well what's the message?

Oh, you gotta come to the website. You gotta come and log in.

Oh, well I've not been for six months. Or maybe the password's been automatically re reset. It's more than six months. Whatever.

Okay, well how do I get my new password? Oh, it's okay. We sent you a message to your email. What the one I, the one that you don't trust that you can send them at? Yeah. Okay.

Alright, well we'll send you a one time password to my, to my SMS and it's still a mess. And there's a link in there and I, you know, I'm on my device so it opens up my app. This is the customer experience, this is how it feels for customers. And so I finally get there, I open the message. Really important message. We've updated our privacy policy, right? It is just a nightmare.

You know, we, when when you go through these important life moments, getting married, buying a car, buying a house, we crawl over glass to go through all the identity gymnastics to prove things about ourselves, wet signatures, travel miles to get it done. And it's like this big health emergency.

Like we, we have this big spike in our lives, but this stuff, it's like a low grade headache that we just can't shift. And it gets worse than that because on average you have 150 relationships with organizations and if you run a household, you've got another 40. And so we talk about being customer centric, but really we're not being customer centric, right? We're still, we're squeezing the air in the balloon and pushing all the effort to the customer. So let's just take one little look one level further from a customer engagement point of view. Messaging and email are push, right?

They're interruptive. If you look at your SMS list, it's like one time password pizza offer plumber, one time password, one time password. It's a mess. And so what do we do? We start to move to other channels. That's where conversation happens. The people we care about, we're using other channels.

An email, we're putting up spam filters, et cetera. Well the other two are pool. You're pooling the customer to your website. So they can fill out another form, set a cookie, build a 360 review really, or get, download another app, right? I've got an app to get the taxi to get to the airport. An app for the airport, an app for my covid certificate, an app for the airline, an app for the loyalty scheme, an app for the taxi to get here, another app for this conference. It's crazy.

So I wanna propose that the EU digital identity initiative, EI does two digital wallets more generally, has the potential to be a fifth channel, One that is private, secure, trusted. And I can do lots of cool things with it. And we're gonna dig in a little minute, in a minute about what those things are. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the uses for EI desks 'cause we've had, you know, a day and a half of that already. This is a journey I could have used, the home mover journey, I could have used get a loan journey.

This happens to be travel, but it serves my purpose on here are all the things that customers do, all the different channels they use and all the different tools and channels that businesses use, right? Let's look at just the customer ones. I'm using TripAdvisor and Google and Uber and the hotel portal and a one-time password and maybe my bank and the payment and on and on. And the obvious thing to say is, well look, what about the business? They can see this whole journey, right?

No, those purple boxes are what the hotel sees and they're trying to build a 360 degree view of me, right? That's the real customer journey.

So look, E-I-D-A-S can show up at all parts of the journey. Some of the large scale pilots are already working on travel and payments and so on and saying, oh, what are the 11 steps? But I'm here to say that it's not just about identity and payments, it's about the way you engage the customer along that journey. So it's presenting a choice now, isn't it? This is a regulation. We gotta comply. So is this a story about compliance overhead? We've got to accept EI DDAs, we've gotta accept the digital wallet. Or is this an opportunity for digital growth for engagement?

So I'm gonna spend a few minutes talking about customer value and why I think this is genuinely a breakthrough. I think sometimes the best customer experience is no customer experience. We've digitized paper processes, we've put them online, we still fill out forms and go through steps with a digital wallet and tools on my side. It's now one tap, one swipe. Why can't I say to the airline, just check me in.

We know what data's required, we know the protocols, I can trigger it, they can send me the boarding pass when it's been, I can agree to the terms, I do it over and over again and yet I have to do all these gymnastics. Second is this idea of digital trust or radical trust. And I know we talk about levels of assurance and, and it's a very technical conversation, but from a customer perspective, it's like having a private telephone, a private, you know, hotline. And when the organization calls, it's gotta be them because they're the only people that have my number.

And when I call the organization, it can only be me calling and it doesn't matter if I'm in store or on the the in contact, the contact center, it's like having a private channel to the customer wallet. And third, I can now be remembered in that channel.

You know, have you stayed with us before, sir? I was here last week and you can't remember. 'cause your systems and your processes don't allow for it. So if we can start thinking about building reputation over time, you will meet new people today at this event and you'll stay in contact with them, you'll build a relationship with them and that relationship will improve over time. You build trust. Why can't we do that with our digital wallets? They get stronger over time because I've got this channel that can build reputation. But this talks about the hidden billion dollar euro opportunity.

So let's look at business opportunity. I think with a digital wallet, with a very high assurance identity, the customer can become the A PII bet you've all had experiences in organizations where there was a business project, you know, two systems that needed to be brought together. Maybe one company bought another company or there's a an old system and a new system that needs to be integrated so we can get the business value and it would generate new sales or improve efficiency.

But the business case doesn't stand up and the CFO says no, we can't spend that money to integrate those two systems. Why don't we just give the data to the customer and then it can show up in another part of the business? There are banks doing this today. They're building a new digital bank. They've got the old clumsy legacy backend, they're building a new digital business. They can't connect the two until they've got a conversion problem. Give the data to the customer member sense. Here's your profile. It's like one tap to onboard the customer.

And while I'm at it, we've got this new customer channel, we can start thinking about streaming customer reputation. And I don't mean overreach and asking for everything under the sun.

I mean, Why call three different APIs that are getting data from different parts of the business when you should just ask the customer themselves, what's your latest address? What's the best marketing preference for you? Ask the customer themselves and we can start streaming customer data in the way we can make things truly digital and not just digitized. And finally, and I think this is the most important point. We've been doing digital transformation with a handbrake on it's one sided. We've given businesses the tools of digital. We've given them process automation and predictive analytics.

Very expensive, elaborate CRM systems. But It's all one side. Guess what? I get sent an email and a one time password and download another wrap. Once we engage the customer in a new way, the customer can drive the transformation. The customer can automate things on their site, on their terms. We're framing EIAS as a one. Like here's a transactional thing, proof of age, proof of membership. But actually if we start thinking about automation on the customer side, that's when we can really do digital transformation at scale. Just check me in.

So the scary bit here is, well this is about citizen empowerment. That's terrifying for businesses. You're gonna take the data and go to a competitor if you have a conversation about the digital markets act, the very large platforms having to provide APIs for real time access to my copy of my customer data, right? This is all overhead as a compliance for them. But what if it's not about empowerment for its own sake? What if we use digital wallets, verifiable credentials, personal vaults, et cetera to build the new relationship?

And I think there's this new category around empowerment tech and it's for citizens and for businesses. So you can take the compliance route we heard earlier today and yesterday, privacy. And you know this customer citizen empowerment is a competitive advantage. We heard earlier, in fact I was speaking yesterday to the the brilliant team from the kingdom of Bhutan who've implemented national digital identity. And they were saying there are whole new parts of the digital economy or parts of the economy now are individuals in villages getting phones, getting bank accounts.

And overwhelmingly the bank they're choosing is the one that's enabled digital identity onboarding from a digital wallet. They're choosing the bank of Bhutan. This is competitive advantage. Your customers will walk if you don't enable this. So what's the billion dollar opportunity?

Well, I've got this customer hotline, I can stream data, I can remember who they are. We can personalize in a way that wasn't possible before, but from a cost perspective, I've got more compliant id. It's lower risk, lower fraud. It's lower cost to serve that customer. And my favorite bit is we can automate the customer experience, not all customer experiences, but we should just take away all the bad friction, all the repetition, all the clumsiness. And what about revenues? I've got better conversion, more personalization, maybe even new revenue streams. This starts to get quite disruptive.

Now I've got a new customer channel and my favorite of all personal ai. We've heard again about how portable digital identity, verifiable credentials might just be the gateway for trusted data that could power our personal ais. So I put this up again, are we looking at e IDAs digital wallets as a duck or a rabbit? Is it about empowerment? Is it about government? Is it about personal data? I think E-I-D-A-S too means citizens and business. It is of course about the gfa, about citizen empowerment, digital government identity.

But there's a billion dollar or billion euro opportunity lurking behind the scenes that if only we could grasp. I think we'll change adoption, we'll change digital economy and we'll empower citizens for the better. And I think it's something that citizens and businesses should be grasping together. Thank you very much, Jamie. Thank you for this excellent presentation. If I would have to explain to my board of directors, what I does is about, I would use your presentation.

I've never seen it so clear and soci and so really easy to understand also for people who are not versed in digital identity. Thank you for that. And the billion dollar question or the billion euro question, let's say Euro, how would we start if we wanted to have share of that the this big money, what would you recommend?

I think, I think this is the first steps about education. I think it's about reframing the opportunity from identity and data to one of customer engagement and then exploring how that that framing might change business engagement. It's what we do at mission all the time. It's engaging executives to understand the value of this and it's not just a compliance overhead. Yeah.

Well, we'll start stealing your presentation for that. Okay. Thank you so much. In That case. Thanks Jamie.