CIAM, Wallets, Decentralized - Where is "Traditional" CIAM Heading?

Thank you, Phil. That was a fantastic lead in to what we're going to talk about now.

And yes, George, this is the best photograph you're gonna get at eic. Look at this. Okay. Where will I sit? I dunno. The thorn between the roses. Yes. Okay.

Okay, so we're nearly there. I'm gonna have an interesting discussion on, I'm gonna suggest Yes, what do you want? Why don't you take control?

Oh, we all have one ear. I, I already have one. Yes. So you're mic. Yeah. Great. Okay. So we're going to look at, we Don't need one more Whether where traditional Siam is he heading, but we're also at the end of this, going to give you a gift that you can use for the entire year and bring back next year.

So, clicker. Clicker.

Oh, here. So I'm just gonna give a little bit of context, which is really a bit of a wrap up of everything we've seen over the last few days. Maybe we should, do you know Phil Katrina from Miko? Mr.

Foster, quiet And assuming Alan Yes. George from Accenture. Okay. That's us. Interesting. Who said this to me this week?

You, did you say this to me? The glacial speed at which identity is changing?

Yeah, we Were discussing me coming back into the identity and attending the Gardener Summit and, and Alan continuing to talk about that this is the year that passwords will be killed. And, you know, the, all the, besides the branding on the slides, the message hadn't changed in the last 15 years.

So I, I, you know, applaud his consistency, but he was a bit surprised that not as much had changed. But I think we can all agree that we've seen a lot of change since last year even.

Yeah, there, there's a really some extraordinary moves forward, clarity around standards, new form factors, new ways of doing things. We'll, we'll look at that very quickly, but if I think of myself or ourselves now in our roles as customer, employee, patient, student, partner, you know, we've got logins and passwords and accounts for all of these things that we're doing across our lives every day in, in the physical world, and or trying to get something that's digital. And all of these are probably in somebody's Siam account, but what's not in someone's Siam account are all of these things.

So where are we heading in terms of the way these things may converge in some way? We've, I was in the e I track for part of the, this morning, a lot of progress there. So we've heard over the course of the, this week the strides ahead and the aims of the new i EU wallet. Is it going to work? Maybe that's something for us to discuss. We've seen this evolution around the multipurpose wallet.

Again, that's part of the e i that you can sign, pay, prove. So we have this combination of capabilities and then when we start to think of these super apps or these abilities, and then we start to bring in things like credentialing or digital assets, you know, we have everything there from being able to prove who I am as an avatar, maybe in a, in another dimension, right through to how I might track my carbon footprint, right through to being able to pay for things.

And of course, we've talked a lot this week around verified credentials and credentialing and the ecosystem that is now starting to develop for issuers and verifiers and people looking at what's the business model for those things going to be. And then we've talked a little bit about the game of wallets At the moment, if things stay in the current form factor, we might explore that as well.

You know, if everything is only on a mobile phone, then, you know, we have to make sure that this is something that whoever controls the operating system is going to agree with. And then as a counterpoint to that, we have the work that is happening in the Open Wallet Foundation. And then I think there's been some great updates this week around gains initiatives as well and, and trying to build that trust globally from an interoperable point of view. So what's the future of traditional Siam discuss? You're looking at Me. I am looking at you. I thought we'd get the controversy out first.

Do I? Oh, yes. I can just speak into this.

I, I find the term traditional Siam to be an interesting oxymoron, right? In it, in its same statement, right? So Has left the room and he came up with the title so we can blame him. Okay. It's all York's fault. So I mean the, the, so the, I think that we are doing identity a disservice, continuing to think that identity management and consumer identity management are separate things.

Siam started 10 years ago, and at the time it started because the traditional identity systems were, were ill suited for the kinds of jobs we wanted to do as consumers were becoming first class citizens, maybe as, as consumers were really entering and becoming more complex on the internet. And so things like, as you pointed out in your presentation, things like scale, things like 24 7 access things, the, the ability to handle multiple devices, multiple ease of views, things like that. That was not the model 10 years ago.

And so Siam came out as a way, I hate to say it was a marketing thing, but it was, it was a way for us to be able to say, oh, we don't do that, we do that. And, and we focus in on a market segment. In the last 10 years in, in sort of my view, consumers have gotten a lot more sophisticated. So much so that if you close your eyes, you cannot really tell the difference in behavior between what consumers are doing and what employees are doing.

And thanks to a little bug that we had for a couple of years, employees are looking a whole lot more like consumers, they're working from home on Salesforce, in their pajamas, et cetera. And so the challenges that we have are actually becoming the same thing. And so going back to your question in my thought about it, we are probably going to stop talking about Siam as a thing. Although what we are doing is gonna continue, it's just going to become together.

The, the coalescing you're talking about is probably where we're going. So I hear convergence and we might convergence, we might pick that up because we may explore what that means in the physical and where we might be heading.

George, what do you think? Is it all over? I think if, if we replace traditional with maybe like a legacy siams, which I have seen, I think it's depends on the strategy of your enterprise, right? So if you're a big company, you have a lot of operating entities all around the world, you know, you have to probably change your game to, to be a leader on the market, to show that you know, you care about the customers, you cover all the, you know, regulations and you don't force anyone to make a separate account if you're in New Zealand to log into, to German service, something like that.

So I think in that way, in my mind, whatever's existing now, it's sort of dying. But if we can convince to get up people that whatever is coming is gonna be better and not gonna make their life more complicated, that's a challenge.

Phil, you talked about this a bit Yes. In the, the complexity and the scale. Yeah. So just before we go into that, just a historical note on, on your, on your position actually, I thinks in a sense was born a little bit earlier, but in a specific vertical. So this was with the explosion of interaction channels in financial services, right? And this was early two thousands, you started to have interactive tv, you started to have the tele, you know, the online banking, mobile banking wap for those who are really gray.

And remember what w is, it was this funky mobile standard to have, you know, internet mobile optimized internet in the late nineties. And there, you know, people came up with, and they, we called it multi-channel authentication server. And then obviously, you know, this was the non-marketing people took calling that.

And then, you know, if Gartner doesn't say what it is called, adaptive authentication server. Now like you're saying, Sam, I think like you said, I agree traditional may maybe it's, it's even the wrong word. Because what we seeing is globalization, like you're saying, is people are struggling with the fact that either through acquisitions or through different products, the processes are different, the ways to manage are different and they can't keep up with the pace. Like you're saying. There's this whole new things of coming and there seems to be not one thing come along.

It's like, you know, in the, in the evening when you are after night out in London, not one bus, but suddenly, you know, after an hour all three. So we have PAs keys, we have the fact that biometrics are now on the devices, more devices, right? And different platforms. But we have now this perfect storm that finally the device manufacturers have agreed of implementing some of these things, right? The great work that people have been doing on the fighter.

So I think in that sense, the aspect of what is important that the Siam logical component in, if you think about it, does, will become something that allows you to manage all that heterogeneous technology in a way that it's not too burdensome and you can keep up the speed. So in that sense it might change. Yeah.

So, So that's a perfect segue into, you know, I'm waiting for a bus and three of them are coming, but there may be something I'm wearing that's indicating, you know, and that phone's home to say, you know, these buses all arrived at once and then there's nothing for 30 minutes. It's that we are going to find that customers are going to be able to, if there's vision that's been presented this week around the EU wallet and credentials, bring some of these attributes from other places. And that's one of the questions I have.

If customers are able to show up with things that you may want, you may want to know that help that journey, that remove that friction, there are a couple of challenges. First of all, they bring that from somewhere else who owns controls, you know, the minute it goes into your Siam system, your SIAM system, like what happens in this world where it's made better because the customer is able to be part of the value chain. But by the same token, you want to be able to have all of the normal controls from a security point of view. Everything.

Again, she looks at me, I I I have a problem with that because maybe the word ultimately ends up being trust. And you pointed out trust on your presentation that we were just talking about. I don't think people don't trust biometrics. I think people don't trust how biometrics get used. And I don't want to be tracked on everything I do. And if I have this identity, making it more convenient, turns out it's not actually convenient for me. It's convenient for them, right? It's convenient for the, for the, the entities and, and there's any number of things that we can have a look at.

You know, I I don't necessarily want Delta Airlines knowing when I'm flying on American Airlines now, is that something's gonna be a problem Probably. What if, what if they knew that and could bid real time to give you a discount?

No, I Won't make that decision. It's fine. I don't want them to know that I can walk into the corner store and I can buy, I dunno, a magazine about farming implements. Cause I like farming and I can go and buy this magazine and I can take a dollar bill outta my pocket. It's a cheap farming magazine and I can buy this farming magazine and no one knows that I'm interested in farming and that's a choice I made. And I can subscribe to the magazine and they can send me magazines about tractors. I don't know. But that's a, that's a choice I made. And we are not giving that choice.

We're sort of taking it away in the guise of making it more convenient. And I, I'm scared by that. Okay.

I'm, I'm worried. But, But I, I think that what, what is they, they're big trends here that go counteract. I mean you, you, you obviously work in, in this sector, but I mean, you heard about the launch of the saving account from Cupertino, right? People trust certain brands and private companies more than governments, more than other.

And, and this shift of trust and who we trust and is, is completely contract to a lot of things that we've been discussing here. So in that sense, we might be discussing all the things and suddenly, you know, you, you will have that idea and people from Apple and people will believe in it. And most people that it's, it's a big percentage of, of the population will have those devices and will trust if they trust it with their money in their savings, they will trust it with providing identity to other services.

George, what if I'm waiting for that bus and I'm happy to do a connector to that transport's identity system be identified. Maybe they have a value add. It's 1130 at night in London, you know, there's some safety feature. I'm prepared to hand that over real time. But they make the promise that at the end of that bus journey they forget those attributes that goes away. Can you see maybe some kind of real time almost participation. I'll bring something that helps you give me a better experience, but I'm not handing it over to you to track me forever.

I think that's the ideal way is more of like, which people don't see realized in their everyday lives. For example, during Covid we had this passes and the waitress decided after scanning your QR code if you're allowed to eat food there or not. And everyone sort of went with it, you know, like we all had this QR codes and we were like, okay, this helps me eat food.

But no, people didn't really see what, what after that, right? So it was over and people were like, okay, I give you this and you give me food, but no one even thought, okay, can I use it for something else? Can I use it to as my ID if I fly whatever, right? Because it was a bit scary and probably people at least here maybe trust governmental institutions a bit more than a private companies Or really want food. Or really want food, right?

So it's a mix of both, like society here and a couple, like also in the beginning of Covid in 2020 there was a, a big headline in Build, which is the magazine with pictures and less news. So it said cons paid with card and it was top news.

So it, I don't know, it it it's society wants this and that they want convenience, but they're, are they ready to pay by card? It was it a debit or credit?

You know, it's, it's a societal question, right? But to your point, Phil, if the UX is beautiful, if the trust is there and it's easy and it's just another little add-on to the ecosystem I'm already in becomes very seductive, it's hard to fight against that.

And, and you know, if you ask the young population, they've grown up with these devices, that's a natural form factor to use. So although I think there's an increasing awareness of certain, of, of their data a little bit, I think usability trumps they at the end, they always give it up. If you have, you know, the free burrito or 10% off or you already have the, you know, if, if I go and, you know, I get my on Amazon, my thing next day, I mean, sometimes I try to help out the boutique shops, but then, you know, if I need something quick, sadly nothing beats it so far.

So it's very, very difficult. But if I could have that convenience and not have to have the trade off, you think that would be a differentiator? I think you always have the trade off, right? I mean trust, I'm gonna come back to trust because sort of we we're, we're heading way off the topic on, on, on this when, but, but coming back to the trust, right? Trust is really just an acceptance of risk over which you've got no control.

And there was an, the, the, we do things regularly every, every day you see examples of where the enterprise abusers trust and, and there used to be, I can't remember who used to say it in the space, but the enterprise is an alligator. They eat things and you don't become friends with an alligator, right?

And, and so are willing, are people willing to give it up? Yeah, we can bribe stuff away from them.

But, and and I, I do, I gave up the, the privacy in order to get global entry in the US because that extra hour going through the airport was worth it to me and it lowered my friction. So I was willing to make that choice. What did I give up? I really don't know. I dunno what it's being used for, but It's a good segue into, and this is probably something you're all familiar with, it's something produced by Cantara in terms of the control vectors and where things are going. And a lead into our next question.

So we all knew where we started with, you know, IM employees, physical space could control things that perimeter started to move with federation, adding employees and partners, some collaboration. Then we add customers, we start to bring in cloud SaaS solutions, then we start to bring in things, wearables, other devices, then we get to relationships attributes, which is kind of, I think where we are now, we're kind of talking a lot more about all of these different aspects. So the question, the lead in for the next question is gonna go from the physical to this immersive to the metaverse.

So we wanna be able to prove something, be recognized physically or something that we are wearing or doing that you will want in one of your channels to be recognized and trusted quickly in order to give that seamless experience. Yeah, I I think it can go both, you know, both ways.

I mean, what, what disturbed me is a friend of mine in living in a beautiful country in the south called Italy, said one of his best friends got tired of interaction. This is in Italy of all places and just inhabits the, the, the house of his grandma that his grandma left him, puts on a, a VR headset and, and orders food. And he's been doing this since the last 18 months.

So I, I mean maybe covid accelerated some of that behavior, but I think it can go both ways, right? That it, it you you become almost immersed, too much immersed in that. But a lot of people will still have physical interactions. And the physical interaction means that you will identify yourself more and more frictionlessly in your physical interactions and if you want it or not, I think Right?

That's, that's the problem. It's we, and that's where I think the trust against the private or the, the government is, you know, it becomes tricky, George, if kids are playing Roblox and Minecraft and they're living up there already and then they grow up and we want them to onboard into a Siam, what does that mean? That would probably mean we still should not store children's information to use it later for other, other things.

But I think on a metaverse, like I think we should try to avoid creating same kind of hurdles in those spaces for I identification that we have in real life because people want to escape to something better. So we definitely can have some creative ways to help people to use those, those areas easily be at the enterprise level or customer level. So I think it's maybe more create room for more creativity there than, than in the, you know, old industries and old branches.

But, but that brings back my point is that you have more and more channels, more and more ways, and hence you need some help to make sense of it in your overall security posture because you still have people that will not adopt it, that will want to go to the store that will phone up, et cetera. So you need to, in, in, like in the earlier panel, it's the acceleration and the uptake of these technologies is definitely not distributed equally across the globe. So you will have regional differences, people that you need to serve that don't have the latest iPhone 16 or what's coming out, right.

And more complexity. Sure, Yeah. So maybe it's just because we're early in that cycle, right?

In, in, in terms of interacting. But early in, just in, in, in, in this next, in the next cycle, early in the technology, but post covid, everybody seemed to want to go online to do stuff. And maybe it's just me and maybe I'm a crutched old man and I'm chasing kids off my yard, but boy, it sucks doing business right now.

You know, I can't reach anybody on the phone at the airlines. I can't find somebody who will answer a phone, answer a question. If I try to go into the bank. There's one person in a line of like 500 people outside of the door if it's open. And so the reality is that, is it more convenient, not from this side of the, But is that forcing this and, and I to your court? It's making me use that. It's not as convenient as it was. It was really good for me. I flew a lot on Delta. I was diamond. I could pick up the phone and they guaranteed that I wouldn't wait more than 90 seconds on hold.

Now they don't love me anymore. I can't talk to them. There's nothing there, right? So that experience of going online has made it worse for me.

And, and that's part of that, maybe it's just where early on maybe they've got, we've got a lot more work to do to make that experience worthwhile. But we've definitely moved down that path. And I'm not sure it's a net value add, But is that possibly just this freaky period that we find ourself in, which is driving some of these Yeah, We're still using w Exactly. But I think like, just quickly, I think in the banking sector, you, you can see okay, you know, branches are getting, number of branches is getting smaller, it's more digital banks.

So I think there might be people who don't remember what it was going to a bank. I know such people because when I say, okay, I have to go to a bank here to to, to, you know, change something about my identity, something like that. People where I come from in Georgia, which is like developing market, they don't understand why do I have to go to, to talk to a person because they all do everything online that saves money for companies. So I think in this climate, people try to save money if it's more convenience. It depends on the customer for you, it's less for others.

They, you know, for someone they don't like to, you know, they, they just wanna stay home and because they have calls and they don't want to go anywhere, they, you know, and it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's a changing time. It's Definitely more convenient for the company. Yes.

But, but if it's early, if it is the beginning and it is as a result of this, how quickly do I think we've decided not to use the word traditional legacy? How quickly do we need to be adapting for this next paradigm?

Are we, are we ready for this? I I think it's not us in this room or the vendors being ready for it or even, you know, you as, as knowing about it and, and consulting about it or, or implementing the project. I think it's, it's what we discussed before. It's the customers are not ready for this and you know, they're struggling with, you know, dwindling sales, you know, the hard times, et cetera. Sometimes this is really the last thing on their mind.

And it's, it's like, Even if it would, even if it helps, there's not the bandwidth to do it. Yes, sadly. Yes. Yep. And then you, you will see them being overtaken by, by the new generation and the, I think it's just a fact of life and here it's just accelerating that cycle. Yeah.

Just, just to add on that, I think some, some people with guts, you know, can stand up and say, and prove to their higher management that they, they will, it'll improve their business because people have, as we said, their legacy stuff and it's okay. So mostly in it, unfortunately, people tend to react on problems rather than proactively be revolutionary. So whoever will be will probably succeed. Maybe if it's such a big company, they don't have to be super fast and they will catch up slowly, but they still will have to Do it. I think it comes back to your comment about convergence.

It's the way those things come together. Yeah.

I, I think, sorry, my voice is so soft. I think that the, the good part about it is that in the identity technology space, we're catching up on both aspects of, of the business that we have technology that can actually handle it, right? The consumer space now. Yeah.

We, we sort of look at tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users and don't really blink. And many of those use cases can actually be legitimately and easily moved into workforce use cases and vice versa. I think we'll probably see a growth in IGA in consumer space, right? And we say, what on earth are we looking at? IGA and consumer space? But Twitter's got that problem right now with their little blue dots or, or check marks or whatever they call 'em, right? Check for sale.

That's, that's all about, it's, it's, it's identity management. It's iga. Well you just said technology. So let's think about form factor because in the omnichannel we've seen devices, all of this at the moment, the phone is still a really big part of our life. Yeah. But I don't know, five years, 10 years, where is this next kind of form factor coming and where, you know, how does that need to be integrated? So here's a very cool, you know, vision of the future that would make you look pretty stupid if you were wearing it every day.

But, you know, we adapt to weird things. So if we look at kind of what we've tried to do with Siam over the years, you know, we started with C R M because we really wanted to, we wanted to know who the customer was. Then we moved to Eerp cuz we wanted to measure what that relationship was. Then we started to look at how customer platforms and the evolution that then led sort of to personal data management now into the wallets.

What, what is this? You know, we're right thick in the wallet thing right now, but we've been talking about the rise of that for a decade and now it's here. So now is it time to start talking about the next thing that will, that we want to connect the customer? What What we do privately over a beer is up to us. Right? I mean the reality is that for any software company, we are always playing catch up. Yeah. And until the market shows us that there's money to be made in it, we are not going to build something for something that doesn't exist. So is it going to be wearables?

Is is it going to be wallets? You know, until somebody comes up and says to the ceo, there's a big pile of money behind doing this, we're not gonna do it. That's just how business works. Wallets. You think there's enough of a case? Apple thought so.

Yeah, but Apple no controls the whole thing. A good way to do it.

Let, let's face it, if you were gonna run a business, that's a good way to do it. No, absolutely, absolutely.

No, I mean, I, I made that comment the other day in the thing. It's that, you know, we've seen the wallet wars, I don't know if you remember this, with wallet wars of the mobile network operators. Yeah.

You know, a few, well, more than a decade ago now, and, you know, joint ventures in Finland being created with mobile money, hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, literally evaporated in, in nothing. So I think here we're certainly with the same, if you, I think, like we said earlier, the customer doesn't really care that much if, if, if it works for him. But if it becomes cumbersome and he has to go into a setting on Android, because now it's that wallet that I need to activate because I want to tap in the physical world, it, it's just not gonna work.

He's not, he's gonna choose something else. Or if I use Android at work because it's a device that's given to me, but my home life is Apple. Correct? Yeah. I think yes. And yeah, and, and, and you will not care, like you said, I, I don't even know what they're doing with the data in, in your, when you, when, but that hour of your life is important for you.

And, and if that frustration, if we take the fact that the digital interactions are gonna become more than that part of identifying who you are during that digital transformation, you know, is a part of your life. And when it becomes very long and cumbersome, you're gonna choose the shortest path.

George, are we, are we at wallets? If people have to work out where to put time, effort, money, and integration with their Siam infrastructure? Is this where we're at? I think we are at where the money is, right?

So that, that's the general approach. Specifically. I think it's a good example with Android and Apple. I think we want to unify, for example, we want to watch all the movies at the same place. That was many, many years ago. Now I need to have Netflix, I need to have Disney, I need to have Hulu, I need to have HBO plus, I need to have Paramount plus I need to have Sky. So that's not the initial idea, right? So if we are gonna move to this one has wallet, this has wallet, government doesn't recognize in Germany, that kind of, that's bad. So I think collaboration and, you know Yeah.

Un unified approach is the, is the way to go. And there the money will flow together with that.

So, but it's difficult, right? I'm gonna get it wrong.

Yeah, no, no. Let's not repeat. Do you remember that cut phrase from Apple? There's an app for that now its gonna be, there's a for right?

So, you know, what do you Want? We, we by definition we are gonna get things wrong. Yeah. There was a time when everybody had a USB stick that would go into anything and you could copy stuff onto it. Yeah. You can't do that anymore, right? Because there's like 15 different u SB standards and you can't get a stick that works anywhere.

So we, we made a mistake there, boy, was that a mistake? We'll make mistakes with wallets, we'll make mistakes with all of this technology and the market will sort it out and where the money is, that's where we'll go. Yeah. Okay. So we've got a few minutes then we might be able to take a, a question or two rather than closing remarks. What's your closing question that you would pose to the audience to think about for the year ahead?

What, what is, what is the, the burning question that might drive some of the strategic decisions for the year ahead? We've got all this friction after covid things aren't working.

There are, there are suboptimal experiences online. What's the question to focus on? I'm not sure that it's a question. The the point from, from, or the thing for me that to keep in mind is that the only thing that's constant is change and everything that we assume that we know how it works. Everything that we assume right now will change and will be wrong and there will be something else coming in. And that's just to be aware that it is going to change. What do you think we're gonna talk about next year? Same Glacier.

I, I, I don't know because there's an awful lot of stuff that can happen in the next year. Okay. Yeah.

So, so a lot more questions and answers for the year ahead. Yeah.

But no, but to your point, I mean, if I would suggest three things to the companies is, is be aware that the change will happen. So take this time not to rush into choosing one factor or one technology, but make an assessment of how you deal with identity across your whole estate and get ready for the change. And then if there's one technology from a consumer side that I would say do a proof of concept, get to know it.

And again, sorry to come back to the point when a security technology in a operating system like Apples becomes a high level in Ventura, which says pass keys. You're gonna be asked about it and you know, the CEO will be asked for it because he maybe has updated his mark at home or whatever. So get ready and understand it, how it fits and, and in, in your, in your way and prepare the plan. Don't don't rush into things. Right.

Now, Following on from that, George, this idea of piloting prototyping, do you think that's where the focus should be in this year Ahead? I think in, to say it shortly, you have to think how to make change work for you. And it might work differently for different entities, but I think piloting, trying out and, you know, doing your best in that area to convince your hire apps also to, to be more adventurous and you know, that Siam is not just token provider software. So it can do so much more. You can do amazing things. So bring these people together to, to make the change work for you.

A business case or a technology case. I think, yeah, A strategy. It Has to be both together Or even just find the owner. Because these days customer identity, right? Exactly.

Like, oh, talk to this guy. No, no, no, it's not this guy.

I, I think that's in the workforce is very different, right? Absolutely.

And, and just in answer to your question about what we talking about next year Yeah. Chat, G P t wasn't even on our radar. Let's not even talk about last year. It wasn't even on our radar when the call for papers for this conference went out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

So in it, it went, it its user base grew on what took, what took Facebook, what, five years or something. Check in six months he did in a couple of days, you know. Oh yeah. I mean the, the, the level of those absolutely wacko random changes that no one sees coming, that's where the fund's gonna be. Those are the ones that are going to make us all sit back and say, whoa, now what?

Yeah, We've got a couple of minutes. Do we have a question from the audience? Let's see if we can get a, I'm actually flabbergasted how casually you posit that we will have convergence and yet throughout the conversation mention all of the problems that we will have in that, or all of the challenges that will surface from that in the sense that I don't know anyone in the identity community sort of that runs workforce that would understand what a desirability viability feasibility analysis is. I don't know anyone who would be able to structurally interact with a design team.

I don't know anyone who would understand the connectivity to a customer data platform. And so before we talk about, I, I know however a lot of people who would love to do or make you re-certify that yes, I still want my online banking account.

And, and so from from that perspective, I think there would be a massive unlearning and relearning or that there, there needs to be massive unlearning and relearning before you actually can think about a convergence that may technically be absolutely desirable. But sort of from a, from a, from a skills perspective, very, very different and difficult from my perspective Is the question then I like what, what's the pre-work we have to do to even get to the place that we can draw something? The question is, the question is, can you stop talking about con Convergence?

I'll, I'll respond. I respond exactly to your point.

No, I do not think that from a product perspective, there is convergence that a single product is going to meet all of the requirements. Yes.

However, I think that from market verticals, the requirements between the two of them are beginning to look more and more the same. And so in terms of convergence, there's going to be things where one enterprise might choose something that's very strong on iga, traditional workforce and another enterprise might choose something that is much more comes out of the traditional CM space because we are solving the same kind of problems, the same scope of problems, the same scale of problems across both of them.

And so my original comment was, I think it does as a disservice to think of them as two completely separate verticals. They not, they've got a lot more in common and has become so over the last several years, that was sort of the comment, Closing comments from Phil George?

No, I think you mentioned something fundamentally, which we haven't touched, which is the skill gap. Yeah. I think like we're saying, you know, that's why I'm saying with prepare, get, you know, the ownership, the skills to understand and it's really hard to find the people that have done it.

On the other hand, I'm encouraged over the recent years that people are more open between even competition to, at least from an IM practitioner perspective, to talk about that we have similar problems and less, oh, I'm not gonna talk about my problems because I'm saying that maybe we are brittle or, or things like that. So that sentiment, that culture encourages me. On the other hand, the, the need and accelerated by covid everyone becoming digital of knowing how to do it.

You, you would see, you know, you can pull whatever little hair is left out when you see what some people do. It's, it's, it's, it's a reality.

And, and I think that is also a big, big challenge that organizations will have. George, I think it depends on the company.

It's, I've seen it being encouraged, this interaction between different teams and, you know, but depends, I think a skill gap is there. It has to be solved, but it's for everything at the moment, right?

So it's, it's technology is improving, but we need to, we need to have more people, more and more people get interested in it so they can solve those problems. Unfortunately. That's a wrap. We're out of time. I think we're due back in the plenary. We'd love to hear your ruminations over the year ahead, how you think about and go about solving these problems. And mostly because we'd love to see everyone back here in 2024. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you George. Thank you Phil. Thank you Alan.