COVID has Accelerated Public Demand for Digital ID

Wonderful. Thank you.

Well, I would agree. It's a, it's a difficult act to follow the talk before was fantastic. And we here in Canada are one of those countries that is very collaborative and engaged with a banking ID approach as well. So I think we'll stay in that similar topic, but we'll talk a little bit about the public perception and kind of how this is moving forward in Canada, particularly in the context of COVID I'm speaking to you for Vancouver, British Columbia. I wish I were with you for the lovely Bavarian food. So next year after COVID, I'm sure this will happen.

Of course, we know that digital identity is the foundation a foundation for digital transformation. This is at the point, the end of every use case that we need to address whether it's proof of vaccination, credentials, or economic recovery. And we've talked in the past at EIC as well about some studies that we've done. Some studies that have happened around the ecosystem, and we see at least 48 to 97 billion of potential in the Canadian economy around three to 6% of GDP by working together to solve these issues. So massive economic opportunity.

But let's talk a little bit about what digital identity looks like in Canada, and I'll just give you a basis. So we have some understanding to work from Canada is a federated governance model. We have a collaboration of different federal provincial territorial governments working together. If you're born in Canada, your root of identity, your birth certificate is issued in your province or your territory. If you're an immigrant, such as myself, your root of identity is with the federal government. This could be your permanent resident card.

For example, from a constitutional perspective, federal government has defined authority on national defense things like foreign affairs and banking where provinces and territories have defined authority on things like education, healthcare, some natural resources and road regulations. So the question that I raise is under which authority is digital identification. And in fact, digital identification is not defined under federal, under federal authority or provincial and territorial authority.

So this results in a kind of an ecosystem that has a mix of solutions and credentials, these credentials can be used with federal services pro provincial services from our governments, and then a, a different different kinds of approaches for the banking sector or for the payment sector, for example. So we do have a collage of solutions in our ecosystem. Some of our key benefits building on, I think the last presentation as well is that we have a small number of collaborative telecommunication providers and a small number of banking organizations who are highly collaborative.

We are a highly banked country. Many of our Canadians are doing banking online.

76%, mostly on the online or mobile and 23% are completely via mobile. So we're, we're very highly banked. And I think we're quite in line with the, with, with the gain topic and, and using our financial system. So let's bring in the human side and we've done research year over year, longitudinal studies. We've performed this study in 2019 in 2020 during the pandemic. And we're completing our 2021 study. So we're getting overtime results in terms of these questions that we're asking, then we're also able to ask some specific market research.

Each time we go through, we'll go through some of the responses. And the orange are the 2019 responses and the blue are the 2020 responses. And we can see that there was a significant increase from 2019 to 2020 in people's willingness to share information for convenience. There were a little bit less concerned about their information being compromised online. And I think we can look at this in the sense to say that people work quite inconvenience of course, and terrible situation with COVID, but the social distancing really drove the need for more online services, more online banking.

So the ability to move forward, to increase with significant here, in terms of people's desire to learn more about what digital identity is and the benefits can provide. Well, we also saw an increase from 2019 to 2020 in terms of people's desire and willingness to learn more about the topic. So I think all of us at the EIC events, I mean, you know, we've been in and around digital identity and we know that sometimes people don't know what we're talking about when we say digital identity. So growth year over year about these topics and learning more about what they can do to help people.

Now, I think it should be of no surprise here. 75% of Canadians believe that the COVID 19 pandemic made digital identity more important. And so really three and four Canadians here are saying, we need these services. We can see how digital would help our lives, and we need to move forward to take what we have today and make it more cohesive and usable across the whole of the economy.

Now, I think this is a particular interest when we speak with Canadians and this is coast to coast, to coast survey, different languages and cultures across our, across our country. And when we spoke with people about how digital identity could help to redistribute one to one support to people who may need it more. And so I think maybe we can remember in the early days of the pandemic, when even the, the zoom phone lines weren't working, the phone lines were completely overloaded.

So when you explain to Canadians the ability to move some to digital, and then really ensuring that those who need the office support or the telephone support would have it suddenly. Now we have nine out of 10 Canadians who are very supportive to moving to a digital idea approach for, for many of our transactions.

So, so really when you tell that emotional story, it makes a difference. Now, I think when we think about digital identity and our customers and our clients, and we also think about working with governments and who their constituents are, we've got a few key subgroups that we think are, are important here.

And, and, and they have responded individually. And particularly these are parents and caregivers. So those who are caring for a dependent child or those who are caring for a parent or family member or an aging person in their community, they felt very strongly. So we'll show you, this is the caregiver generation versus the overall respondents to the survey. And we can see that those who are the caregivers in particular are very, very, have strong desires for digital identity to move forward.

You know, we can, these are the people that are needing to care for data and records of parents, as well as for children, perhaps. And so they are in English, we would say the sandwich generation, but they feel the pressure in, in both sides of their life. So they are the most, the most enthusiastic about moving forward. We also saw a, a basic, a little bit more support in terms of these people who are caregivers wanting to see the federal government move forward in, in terms of solving, but really their local government, their province is 57% quite close as well.

So there is a desire, and this is a particular subgroup that really would benefit from digital identity and is more enthusiastic about learning more and about adopting. Similarly, a key subgroup that we worked with was people who assess themselves as being disabled. And in fact, this group actually felt a bit more concern about sharing information or their information being compromised online, and they were only slightly more willing to consider saving money and saving resources as a benefit for digital ID.

So a couple of key subgroups here for us to think about as we move forward in thinking about our constituents and our customers. Now, as we work, we move forward. We think about public private partnerships. We did ask Canadians if they were, if they wanted their federal provincial or territorial governments to move forward quickly to enable trusted digital identity credentials that could work for them. And overwhelmingly 80, 82% were very, to somewhat and highly interested to see governments move forward to solve the digital identity needs for them.

Again, the caregivers are, are in a higher percentage here. We call them the sandwich generation, the parents, and, and somewhat so, so four and five Canadians do want governments to move with speed. They have trust in governments and they want to see how governments can issue credentials to help them to help Canadians in their, in their daily transactions.

Now, we did ask Canadians about how they would feel about the approach to create a way forward for Canada regarding digital identity regarding credentials and the way forward. And we, we asked them, would they have more trust in the public sector? Would they have to lead the efforts such as the financial institutions or the telecommunications organizations, or perhaps they would like to see a combination of both of these types of organizations working together.

So when we ask Canadians 66% wanted to see a public private partnership, they wanted to know that digital identity would work for them, whether they were transacting with the federal government, the provincial government, the municipality, or whether they were transacting with their bank or their telephone company. So ubiquitous identity that works for them in all cases, Canadians also felt that by having the public sector and the private sector work together, there would be the right checks and balances in terms of ensuring that services were built with respect for them.

We actually saw an even split in terms of people who wanted to see government go forward and take the lead alone at 17%. And people who really felt only the private sector should be moving forward to solve these issues also at 17%. So overwhelming support for a collaborative and economic driven approach. So how will we ensure in the way forward is Canada, that we will have systems that work together are interoperable, that credentials can be portable, that privacy is protected and ultimately ensuring that people are respected.

Well, I think, you know, similar to what we've heard in the, in the networks around banking, I think we're looking at digital identity and a framework to unlock utility of networks. So whether we have trust with networks, with our financial systems, we can have trust with networks, with our telecommunications providers, with our academia and university and higher ed providers.

We're, we're looking at a framework to unlock ethical privacy and consent based use of identity based information as a subset of information. And this is where the Pan-Canadian trust framework comes into play. And the Pan-Canadian trust framework is technology neutral. It provides a basis by which for requesters can request data from you to be verified and data verifiers at different levels of assurance can actually verify that data.

Now what's important here is that you are in the center of these transactions, that you are in control of how information is shared about you, with whom and for what purpose the pan Canadian trust framework provides guidance in this ecosystem. And it works across different kinds of technologies.

So whether we're looking at a very self sovereign type open source ecosystem, or whether we're looking at a trusted operator ecosystem, the pan Canadian trust framework is an information assurance framework that provides the governance and verifiable criteria to ensure that that information is highly verified is assured. And that systems can have confidence. This framework is available for all types of organizations to download to adopt today. You'll see that we've got privacy is one of our all encompassing functionalities.

And so privacy is built into everything that we are doing with the pan Canadian trust framework. So we're excited for this release and we continue to evolve. So we expect more components or profiles of the pan Canadian for trust framework to come forward soon to define mappings with national standards, such as N or, or national and international frameworks around EU. And I DAS for example.

So, so mappings play an important role here. Now, we are excited to advise that the pan Canadian trust framework Trustmark program will be coming forward early in 2021. This program will organizations will be able to apply to become verified through the voila verified program. This will take assessments will take place by accredited auditors, both on the information assurance in terms of the processes defined by the pan Canadian trust framework, as well as the technology and infrastructure profiles set by a community.

Again can be used with different types of open source implementations, as well as different types of technical standards that exist for the vibrancy of our global digital identity ecosystem. And this does support networks to understand how, where, and how networks can have confidence in each other and the information that are in each network as we go forward to a, a more network-based connected world. So in case you're not familiar with us, we are the digital ID and authentication council of Canada.

We really work as a adoption accelerator initiative, so working to reduce the uncertainty and increase the opportunities for verified online transactions to take place. We are Canada's largest and most diverse voice on digital identity. And we bring perspective on what's important about how technology standards and public policy fit together to drive that and accelerate that adoption.

Of course, we are trust framework operators for the Pan-Canadian trust framework as well. This framework is open to be used and applied for Canadian entities, as well as non-Canadian entities. We are extremely collaborative. And so if you would like to work with us both regionally and in the context of the global digital economy, which is our focus, we would love to talk with you about how we can work together and how we can collaborate. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your EIC event. I wish I were there with you. I will be next year and enjoy your conference. Thank you.