Good morning and also a warm welcome from my side. Thanks for the great introduction. My name is Sadrick. I'm part of the cidaas management team and happy to have you here today with me. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch.
I would like to start with a short sketch. I would like to start with a short sketch.
So, as you might know, I will talk about digital serenity. So, Europe, we have a problem. Let's be honest, while the U.S. and China built the platforms that shape the digital economy, we in Europe still debate about policies and regulations, which is an issue, right? We are great at setting rules, but not at building platforms or infrastructure that enforces them, and that's crucial, in particular, for something as critical as identity.
And, to be also clear, digital serenity is not equal data privacy. We often celebrate GDPR as the peak of digital serenity, but digital serenity doesn't end with constant banners or constant checkboxes. It requires much more. It's about owning the platform and the infrastructure, about the control over the access, control over the data, the flows, and the identity.
So, serenity means being able to choose, and that also requires owning the platform and offering platforms in that world. We have big ideas in Europe, so we have seen EIDAS 1.0, we have seen now EIDAS 2.0 in the sketch, we have seen Gaia X, we are now talking about UDI wallets, many great ideas, but quite often, they get stuck in studies pilots.
No scale, no user traction, silence, basically. And, if we delay further, we will lose the momentum to shape the digital experience, and even worse, we risk increasing dependency and irrelevance, and not only for customers, so end users, and also companies who are using such solutions, but also for the providers, so we at EIDAS, and all our competitors and other software service solutions, infrastructure solutions in the market, we need to use the momentum there. And there will be no serenity without European platforms, and serenity isn't something you declare. It's something you build.
And that means building platforms and infrastructure for identity services in Europe, and we need to go from policy to product, basically. So, setting up all the policies which are in the market which should help us define the requirement will not help us utilise it. We need real platforms, real infrastructure which we can utilise, and we need to use that. So what does that have to do with identity in the context of infrastructure? Every service starts with a lock-in. EM controls who has access to an environment, what they can do there, and how they can behave there.
So all the permissions, authentications, and everything. If we don't own that layer, we don't own the data, we don't own the experience, EM is basically the starting point or the cornerstone of digital serenity. So what does that have to do with CDAS now? And that's basically the starting point of the love story I want to talk about today. In the past, we thought about what can we participate in the European digital ecosystem? We saw that many of our customers struggle with compliance, fragmented identity solutions, data privacy issues, scalability, and much more.
Then we thought about, okay, there is a blind spot in Europe. Everyone needs identity management. No-one wants to build it. Let's take it up.
But, to be fair, we didn't start as a broad company. My father founded the company in 1997, and we started with the IT consulting, custom software development, so we started building software solutions for banking, industry, for finance, media companies, energy suppliers, e-commerce companies, so everything which is out there in the world. We saw in many of our customer projects again and again that identity becomes a blocker. So we started to build a first basic version of CDAS, I would call it, which we utilised in our custom projects.
To be fair, it wasn't pretty in the first beginning, but it worked. And most of the customers at that time who are part of our IT consulting projects or custom software development projects didn't care about buzzwords. They cared about that it works. And then that's when we realised, okay, maybe there's a market, maybe there's a chance to enter, and maybe we should make the custom implementation what we had and what we use in our projects to a product, to a platform, what we can offer. And then the hard part comes. Winning trust. And here's what no-one tells you.
Even if you build a great product, no-one will use it, unless they know you and they trust you. And we didn't have brand awareness. We didn't have great and fancy customer success stories to show that's where CDAS was implemented successfully. We also didn't have a one-size-fits-all customer case which we could show to a banking industry, finance industry, insurance, media, energy supply, whatever. We didn't have all the references, and we didn't have a pattern at work. That's for sure.
If I'm a customer, the first thing I ask is, can you show me a case study of a project which you have successfully implemented CDAS of a comparable customer, comparable need? No, we didn't have that. The partner asks, are there potential customers we can jointly work on and do joint business?
No, since we don't have customers yet. So we started POC by POC, integration by integration, step by step, and learned, adapted, and also earned credibility for our solution. And that's when we gained traction. And to be also clear here, the trust didn't explode. It accumulated slowly, step by step. The first customer recommended us to another customer. The second customer extended the business. The third customer decided to reach out for a new partnership. Partners reached out for joint collaborations. And I just had a talk with Martin Kupinger yesterday.
We also started 2018 jointly with Kupinger Coal. We also had the support of analysts. That helps on the one side for the awareness in the market, but on the other side also to get advice. Since our journey from a customs or IT consulting company to a product company, all your structure changes. You have a different sales process. You need a product team, which needs to operate differently than in a project business. You need advice on how to build up a partner network.
Obviously, in the past, we didn't have an extensive partner network. In particular, we had providers as partners. Now all that changed, and we needed partners with whom we can collaborate. So where do we stand today?
Today, we have millions of identities, what we manage, across all industries, from banking insurance to media companies, e-commerce providers, retailers, and much more. But there, it doesn't stop with identity management. Identity management is the cornerstone of digital serenity, and it's an infrastructure topic. And infrastructure never ends. We extended our platform where we started with customer identity and access management in the beginning to enterprise and workforce identity and access management.
So now we do not only serve our customers for their end users, but also for their employees. We added the ID validator as a fully automated AI-powered ID verification solution, utilised for onboarding of employees, age verification, driver licence check, or also in the end-user case of onboarding of customers in the finance, so insurance, or banking sector. And all that gives a piece on the overall set-up.
And, just last year, we added KNIPS. In September, our own event, we announced it as an integration platform as a service which helps our customers to integrate CDAS in the customer identity and access management use case, for example, to a CRM, much more easily, but also in the workforce or enterprise use case, we have the possibility to provision identity and user data from, for example, an HR solution to CDAS, and build up all the workflows, all the different use cases from join, move, deliver, and much more.
So, digital serenity begins with identity, and the courage to build platforms. So, for you, the question arises, who is your partner of trust, which doesn't bring you into dependency or the risk of irrelevancy in that use case, and with whom can you collaborate on an equal level, which can work with you, collaborate with you in your projects, whom you can trust in good cases, but also, if times get more rough, and who has the same philosophy and mentality as you.
So we are talking here about not only data privacy topics, we are also talking here in the serenity use case about mentality of creating the project, finishing the project, and achieving the success of the company. Thank you for your time. I would be happy to connect with you. We are downstairs in the exhibition area. We can show you quite a lot of customer cases there, but also in particular talk about how old our journey was from a consulting company to a product company, what shifted in our minds, and how we can work maybe closer together. Thank you.
Thanks, Patrick, again, for another very interesting contribution. It's always good to kind of meet up at EIC. It's kind of like an old friends club. We kind of meet up with the same people every year. One of the questions I wanted to ask you, you said that IAM is kind of central to sovereignty. I just wondered whether, you know, what role do you see that decentralised identity playing in sovereignty, self-sovereignty, and sort of what are your plans around that into the future?
Yeah, I think decentralised identities are quite important. So for us as a platform provider, we offer quite a different range of feature sets, and decentralised identity will become one cornerstone of identity provider capabilities there, and about also the possibility for users to manage their identities themselves. And therefore, for us itself, we will integrate such capabilities into our solution. That's also a big topic about this UDI wallet and all these things, and where does the user data reside, and then also how do we bring it to our customers, basically, which are B2B companies.
And therefore, for us, it's a critical capability to connect the needs of our customers and the possibilities with decentralised identities on the other side. Okay, great.
Thanks, everyone. Cedric Wiedmann!
