User Centric Identities are certainly nice to have. But the question remains how to create a business cases around the exciting new technologies currently emerging. Bringing the very idea of good old fashioned customer loyalty cards to the web might be a promising way to create benefits for ID holders, issuers and acceptance partners alike. Technologies like Microsoft CardSpace (TM) or the OpenID framework can not only serve as a reliable means of authentication and authorisation, but can also be used for bonus programmes and coupon promotions. User Centric Identities may be used to serve as a customer IDs in their own right. More interesting are scenarios where a real world plastic card is being extended into the internet to have a User Centric ID as its virtual companion. The advantages for users is obvious. The promise for issuers and acceptance partners is to benefit from creating for the first time user profiles comprising the real and the virtual world at once.
