Thank you Mateus. Good morning everyone, I realise that we're just kicking off so I'm hoping that we'll see more people and greetings, konnichiwa to everybody that's watching online as well. I'm really excited to extend the story, if we can jump to the next slide actually, who has the clicker? I have the clicker. Last year we kicked off the story of the Cross Border Working Group by focusing on Australia and Japan, including ConnectID, MUFG Bank and also the National Australia Bank in Australia.
So this year we're broadening our horizon, we will visit Japan again but we will also visit South Korea and Taiwan and talk about some of the work that's happening in the broader Asia Pacific region. I'm delighted to have Rintaro Okamoto back from last year, also Jan Vareken, and this year joined by Jin Jiang from South Korea and by Jeff Hu from Taiwan. So I would love for us to dive into the session, there's a lot of great things to cover including a really inspiring video that the team have created to showcase this work, so I'd love to hand over to Jeff to start. Thanks.
Alright, hello ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jeff and really nice to see you here, and thank Katrina for the great opening. I'm the CEO and founder of TwinSpace based in Taiwan, so for all of us, it's a 14-hour flight to here, and I really enjoyed the session, two or three days, and it's lovely. So the thing we're going to talk about today is most of the topic for the previous two days are in the European regions, right, talk about quite a few countries within the EU, outside the EU, and how do people collaborate across the borders.
But there are another 36 countries in the Asia Pacific regions with quite a few populations, I'm going to mention a number later, and how we are going to do it, the digital identity, and what is the progress. The number is, we have 36 countries, and the population is 4.78 billion, with nearly 60% of the world populations.
The progress of digital identity is not as fast as what Europe has been done so far, so our goal is actually like each of the leading countries right here in Asia Pacific, we're trying to reach together, and collaborate, and trying to build a equivalent, EUDI equivalent association called APDI, right, so European Union Digital Identity, right now we have an Asia Pacific Digital Identity APDI consortium forming up last year in Tokyo, and the goal is, as we might know, the 36 countries we speak totally different languages, with totally different cultural backgrounds, that we might seem similar, but actually we don't know as well as the pronunciation languages at all.
The founding country last year is by five, so Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Myanmar, we formed together, and then one of the leading ID company in each country come to the same table, and trying to bridge the real scenario of the traveler, students, and migrant worker for this three type of category, and how people going to use. One identity from Taiwan can be recognizable in Japan, identity from Myanmar can be recognizable in Singapore, so that's the final goal of the APDI.
So as I mentioned, like increasing efficiency, as at the same time I also protect the safety of the data production, and also make sure everything can be paperless and sustainable growth. So three category, a lot of traveler in Asia Pacific, moving from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and other places, how can they feel at home when they move to destination countries? Can their driver license still be recognizable in the destination country, or do they really need to apply for international driver license? Can their working visa much more easier to be applied for?
Can they migrate your bank account from the original country to the destination country within 24 hours? So those kind of things are the discussion within the association, and the starting point is pretty hard, right? Because for Taiwanese to get a bank account in Japan, it's nearly impossible. You might spend a half a year, six months, to get everything done, a lot of paperwork. So can we build the connectivity between a KYC list in Taiwan, and also a KYC list in Japan, so to make everything happen within 24 hours?
And here, let me introduce Okamoto-san to talk about much more use cases in Japan nowadays. Thank you.
Thank you, Jeff. Hello, everyone. I'm Rintaro Okamoto from DNP.
Today, I'm excited to show our work on implementation of digital ID solutions that address genius custom programs. This isn't about technology for technology's sake. It's about solving real pain points for businesses faced every day. So before I dive into details, I'd like to show you this short video of a solution we are implementing. Okay. As you can see, this technology creates a seamless experience for both travelers and hospitality providers. Last year at EIC, we shared the technical capabilities of our Japan-Australian digital ID collaboration.
Today, I'll explain real use cases that solve actual customer challenges beyond technical demos. Through this presentation, I hope you feel the future where digital credentials are implemented in society is not so far away.
First, let me explain the social context of challenges we are trying to solve. After the pandemic, international visitors have returned stronger than ever.
In Japan, we hit record number 2024 with 36 million visitors. The Japanese government has set an ambitious target, welcoming 60 million foreign tourists by 2030. That's nearly double today's numbers. This growth is wonderful for our economy, but it brings significant operational challenges. The most pressing challenge is severe labor shortages. The hospitality sector has especially faced challenges with 70% of hotel reporting staffing issues. With more guests but fewer staff, the industry is struggling to maintain Japan's reputation for exceptional services.
To address these challenges, Japanese businesses are tooling technologies. Hotels are introducing solutions like the robot services used as seen on the left, and self-checking kiosks shown on the right. These automation tools aim to reduce the workload on limited staff while maintaining services quality.
However, there are fundamental challenges that these technologies haven't fully solved. The critical question is, how do unmanned systems verify identity? When a robot or kiosk serves a guest, how does it confirm who they are? This isn't just a theoretical problem. As you can see in this real example from Henna Hotel, a strange hotel in English, that opened in Nagasaki, there are robots struggling with different passport formats and couldn't effectively handle identity verification. The article states that human staff constantly have to step in, defeating the purpose of automation.
The check-in process faces two critical challenges. One is the physical passport verification procedure and inadequate technical solutions. In Shinjuku hotels, with 90% foreign tourists, the time reached 2.5 hours during peak periods. Some hotels have attempted to automate check-in with passport scanners, but scanning produces brutal text issues requiring human verification. These problems result in decreased customer satisfaction and staff overwork. There are also significant issues in post-check-in operational efficiency. The key problem is inefficiency of double data entry.
According to front office manager, we have to manually enter all guest information from registration form into our systems. This is not only a waste of time, but also affects data accuracy. Many guests write quickly and miserably when they are tired, making information difficult to interpret. Through our research, we've confirmed that these challenges we're addressing are real problems that both hotel employees and foreign tourists are genuinely struggling with, problems they would be willing to pay to solve. Digital Credential offers a practical solution to these challenges.
As you can see in these screens, we will implement digital certification verification capabilities from various countries into hotel reservation website, free check-in systems, and kiosks. This allows hotels to receive guest information digitally before checking elimination through traditional manual processes. For hotels, this means more efficient opportunity and fewer errors. For international guests, it means faster check-in after long flights. This represents a modern update to Japan's traditional omotenashi hospitality. We are beginning with the Japan-Korea connection.
Korea sends 8.8 million tourists to Japan annually, making it one of our most important economic partnerships. We are also collaborating with the APDI consortium and plan to expand the number of available countries further.
Next, Ji-hyun from Rhodo System will share a concrete example of Korean implementation and demonstrate how this system works. Now I will hand to Ji-hyun. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you, Rintaro. Hello, nice to meet you. I'm from South Korea. My name is Ji-hyun Jang from Rhodo System. We are based in South Korea, operating financial and tourism digital services based on our mobile passport digital ID.
So, the travel industry problems Okamoto has been described are not unique to Japan. Many other countries, including Korea, faces similar challenges.
So, APDI is now working together to create cross-border use cases to address these shared problems. In my presentation, I will introduce a more detailed real-world use case and how it's being validated. I will start my video presentation with a short video. It will show how the service concept of Okamoto's video has been implemented in the real world. We are now conducting POC with Seoul city governments for inbound travelers. Travelers do submit their passport VC when they do reservation, and with that VC, they can do check-in with their face recognition without waiting or paper forms.
The process takes just seconds, room assigned accordingly, and then guests can just go up to their room directly. And also, with that brief background, we are now conducting POC with Seoul city governments and also with that brief verified VC, customers can use various digital services like delivery and AI robots are privately and safely that handle your service.
So, our dream is with one single digital ID, contact at every step of the traveler's journey. So, these business models address five pain key points faced by hotels in Korea. The core issue is there's no secure way to digitally identify foreigner's identity since the passport is their only public ID. But by using mobile passport and our blockchain-based DID, we are solving this problem by enabling automated identity verification services through every step of the hotel's journey.
Now, I'll explain a little bit more details of each business model. Some are now implemented in Korea and some are now planning to do in Korea. First model is hotels fast check-in and check-out service. As you saw in the video, customers already sent their VC when they did reservation, so they can check-in without waiting or do like cumbersome paperwork. And with this system, hotels can eliminate the inconvenience of the customers. They can reduce the burden of the manpower and also strengthening the satisfaction of the customers, alleviating the manpower burden.
The second business model is blockchain-based accommodation leisure management system. As you might know, the many of the hotels, they handle the passport like they scan it and they stored it manually. But that means if it leaked even once, the whole the personal data is just exposed.
So, to solve these problems, we built this system. With this system, we encrypt all the personal data when it's submitted or stored in hotel server.
And also, we give customers ownership over their personal information based on the blockchain. Third model is hotel smart key. Instead of using plastic key cards with DID and authentication technology, our customers can identify themselves with their mobile passport VC and access to every facilities in hotel. With this system, we eliminate the risk of the key loss and also reduce the material and production costs and decrease the needs of the labor demand. The last business model is AI concierge service.
It's a little bit kind of unique because it's possible we integrated financial payment services with the mobile passport VC. We are now operating our application attached with mobile passport VC. And by using repeat use of our VC mobile passport, the payment history is accumulated on the VC.
So, when customers arrived on that hotel and use our VC to check in, then AI can analyze past payment data and then they can automatically recommend their optimized and personalized service or benefits for each customer's preferences. For example, if that customer has been choosed some contactless and private service options before, then that AI will collect, AI will collect, the AI will take this AI robot to handle the request of that customer. Yeah.
So, all of these business models are possible because now foreigners can do digitally identify themselves with their mobile passport VC. And with this VC, we are now making possible to foreigners access to various digital travel and financial services just like local residents. Building on the POC now we're conducting on Korea, we are now trying to expand our business models to global starting from Japan. These business models are now being customized for Japanese market and we are planning to deploy the POC in Japan in October of this year.
So, to a little bit wrap up, the two videos that Okamoto has shown and mine are actually represent one continuous service flow. When Korea customers trying to travel to Japan, they do reservation for hotel and at that moment they submit their VC online. And after they arrived at hotel abroad, they do use this pre-submitted VC for digitally identify themselves at abroad. And also they keep using this verified VC even after they check in and check out to access to local digital and financial travel services.
So, we are now realizing one whole continuous travel journey using single digital ID from departure to return, including identity verification, transportation, payment, and even tax refund. It is already operational in Korea and the service model is now being expanded to global with APDI members.
So, you might already know that there are many digital IDs are existing in the world, but many of them are quite limited to the local nationals. And especially for cross-border travelers, there are nearly non-existent of digital identification of the passport.
So, that is the point that what we are now trying to change. Through true interoperability and international collaboration, we are now trying to build a new global standard of traveling, global travel. And in this point, I will hand over to Jan. He will explain how APDI is technically implementing this interoperability. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I have to switch.
So, I'm Jan, the Chief Product Officer of MECO. So, last year, I shared with you how we looked at the use case where we did presentation-level interoperability between different countries.
So, for example, we looked at the use case looked at the use case where we did presentation-level interoperability between an Australian issuer and then a Japanese verifier. We looked at how we're using technologies such as OpenID for VP and STJOT to achieve this. And since then, we've been building on the road, continue our journey.
And yeah, in this part of the talk, I'm going to share some of the challenges and solutions that we've seen. So, as Jeff already highlighted, it's important to see that the Asia Pacific region is massive. It has lots of different countries and each of these countries have different identity solutions. They're at different stages of their development, of their digitalizations and let's say mature frameworks to working are really missing. This is contrary, for example, to the situation that we see in Europe where there's a lot of top-down regulation.
There's someone forcing these member states to develop these cross-border interoperable systems. So, this leaves a bit of a vacuum. And on the one hand, we can see that lots of governments within the regions are announcing their solutions.
I mean, just to name a few, I saw the Taiwanese government I think is launching at the end of the year a digital wallet solution. Papua New Guinea also did some announcements quite recently. But on the other hand, what I think we also see is a lot of bottom-up innovation.
So, there's a lot of companies in the ID tech space, in the FinTech space that are building their own solutions. And some of the partners here on stage today are a perfect example of that. And if you think of achieving interoperability, it's actually quite a difficult concept to sort of grasp. And I like to use this mental model where you can roughly identify three different layers.
So, at the top, you have the protocols, the rails. This is the mechanisms to do secure data exchange. Then you have the credentials.
I mean, Mike Jones gave a good intro conversation or talk this morning that went deeper on this. It talks about the structure and the way that we secure the data. And lastly, it's what's generally named trust. But I wrote a recent article where I would actually like to change this name more to assurance or verification. But that's essentially the confidence that we can put into different entities and to make sure that as data is moving across border, that we're also have some notion of provenance.
Now, there's an infinite amount of ways that you can actually tackle this challenge. And while we are taking good efforts and moving along in all of these standardization groups, widespread global interoperability is not something that's likely to achieve anytime soon. Because remember, it's not enough to just align on one or two of these layers. All of them need to match at exactly the same time. And even then, even if you solve that challenge, there's the final boss, the user. The user doesn't care about whether it's STJOT or an MDOC or whether you're using OpenID for VP or NFC.
Every new app that they have to install, every new flow that they have to undertake, that's friction. And if the value is not apparent, then they'll just simply not adopt. So to tackle this, we've come up with, and especially tackle this in the context of this fragmented Asia context, we've come up with, together with DNP, an identity framework that allows partner schemes to develop or issue and verify credentials in cooperation with international schemes.
And for example, the Japanese hospitality could be the partner scheme, and then the Lord system led South Korean scheme is the international scheme. And at the center of that is the bridging entity. It's actually quite simple concept, but it's an entity that acts as a normal member in each of these schemes. And it is responsible for the mapping between the two domains and any of the protocol and data mappings that need to happen. And we have a two-pronged approach. The one that everyone loves to talk about is the wallet-based approach. So this is where the wallet itself acts as the bridge.
We hope to build and develop these very capable wallets that are multi-protocol, multi-format capable, and it will then be this universal adapter that is able to make policy decisions in these two domains without the user ever noticing. And this approach kind of reaffirms what you already presented last year, but also some of the work in the OpenID Foundation's City Hub and Open Identity Exchange. They're coming to the same conclusions. And this model is really gaining traction. Just last month, Google announced that they are putting in the digital credential API.
They are supporting OpenID for verifiable presentation on top of their already existing support for MDocs. And this is not just a small technical update.
No, this is proof that the big technology platforms are investing, and it's very likely that they see these wallet-based interactions as the default way for users to work with data. Now, wallet-based, that's all fine and powerful and good, but what it requires is a strong alignment between the two schemes. So that's why, and we don't think we're just there yet, so that's why we've come up with a second approach.
And this second approach relies on a bridging entity deploying a service or a set of services that serves as an intermediary between the two domains and doing the mapping over those three layers. And one example where we're actually doing this is schemes that use OpenID Connect to allow them to present into the Japanese verification scheme that then expects verifiable credentials.
Now, we're fully aware of some of the downsides of this, some of the trade-offs, like you're creating derived credentials. These derived credentials don't necessarily have the same authority as first-party credentials. The chain trust becomes longer, but it has one important advantage. It works today. These are things that are already existing and deployed today, so it allows these ecosystems to grow organically, to experiment, to learn what works without requiring every participant to immediately adopt to these newer ways of working.
And a second part that we also learn is that often these use cases, they don't just need, there's not one data set, like the data set doesn't come from one credential, one provider. Very often you need multiple sources, so it's a composite data set. And it would be foolish to think that requiring all of these participants, all of these providers to immediately adopt, that's probably going to take too long.
Now, to bring it back to the demo that Rintaro was showing earlier, here we've taken a wallet-based approach, so where the South Korean tourist is using the Lord System 3Pass application to present to the Japanese hotel using DNP's Identity Verification Service. This enables a smoother check-in experience, there's automation, and it also reduces some of the errors that we've seen when copying of handwritten information.
And to make this all work, we're using a profile that's called the High Assurance Interoperability Profile, again, worked on within the DCP working group of the Open Identity Foundation, and as we believe that's a very secure and effective way for different parties to use across these boundaries. Okay, as I come to my conclusion, like as Rintaro already highlighted earlier, the Japanese tourism has lots of challenges, and we're trying to build products that solve real-world problems.
Right now, we're riding this new wave of digital wallets that give more control to the users, but we also think that it gives more opportunities to businesses. And we're doing all of this in the very diverse context of the Asia-Pacific. I've presented two solutions for that, a wallet-based approach, and then an approach where you're using an intermediary that provides flexibility.
We're learning by doing, we're adapting as we go, and as we look ahead to this year, we're hoping to put more use cases into production and push the boundaries of the models that we've presented, and we're hoping next year, if God allows it, to present these findings back to you, the community, and also our findings back to the standardization bodies that are working on these things. I want to quickly leave you with two notes.
First is if everyone, if anyone, is interested, everyone would also be good, but if anyone is interested in doing some interoperability testing with us, then please come and talk with us. We're always interested to test out. You can do real use cases using Japanese verifiers. And then I'd also like to quickly do a shout-out to a second session which is related to this tomorrow, which will talk more about the scheme, as now I've sort of touched on some of the technical aspects that are needed, but the scheme also covers legal and business things that you have to align to.
So that's me done, and I'm gonna hand over to Jeff. Thank you.
All right, it's me again, and thank you, Yong, for the detailed introduction to how the thing can be laid out. So I'm gonna give a quick summary. You can imagine, like, for the 36 countries in Asia-Pacific, we just pick two, one and one, and then we can view the gateway, and choose one scenario. It could be traveler, it could be students, it could be migrant workers, and then, so, you know, we can pick one, and then we can view the gateway. It could be migrant workers, and then, so, two countries, one scenario, we have so many different kind of combinations that we can do.
And this is actually describing, like, when we're talking about digital identity in Asia-Pacific, we have so many different ways to pronounce it. And, yeah, so we just put all the languages, some of the languages right here to describe the identity. And what's next, right? So this is just a starting point. What's next? Right now we have five countries, but this year, in 2025, we are adding 20 to reach the number 25 countries out of 36 in Asia-Pacific. So if you are any, like, dominant, how to say, dominant ID company in your Asia-Pacific country, please come to us.
We're always expanding and recruiting, and then our job is to make you the top player in your country, because by our, like, external connection with the other countries' use cases. And also, other than banking, travel, there are so many different things we can do, for example, like health care. We can do it for car rental, for more, like, casino, we just show up, and also buying different products from one place to the other place. So how can we make the scenario adoption that is less friction, much easier to use, and everyone just want to use it?
They feel like their local credential in one country are the same in the other 35 countries. That is the goal of ABDI. And the other next step will be when ABDI has formed up to be one, like, consortium, we also want to build much more stronger connectivity with the EUDI and also the other continents. So your credential in the 36 countries in Asia can also be recognizable and applicable in the European region, same mutually. So the goal and the vision is huge. Let's do it all together. Thank you so much. And thank you.
Thank you, Jeff. That's great. And I think that's one of the really important points, maybe to underscore from Jan's presentation, because we're very active also in the work that's being done in the European region. And the aim and the goal is to nurse along and encourage some of the standards and decisions that have been made that will make this interoperability much, much easier. And we hear from many countries, look, we just want to focus on domestic use cases first, we want to get it right.
But as we know, by the very attendance in this room, many of us have come from another country to be here today. And so whilst we may have very good domestic solutions, we understand that a big part of our digital lives is international. And so finding a way to continue to build these bridges, and also encourage some interoperability and bring awareness of some of the standards and the work that's being led in the EU and other parts of the world. This is a great opportunity into Asia.
So what I'd love to do now is to open the floor to questions to the panel, and also any of our online participants. So do we?
Yeah, we have questions. Thank you.
Well, first of all, congratulations. This is really exciting stuff in cross border use of digital identity and the for the region. And I'm sure that the use cases you mentioned will be there are many, many more use cases. I have two questions. First of all, how do you derive the passport data? What standard do you use? Are you using IKODTC standard? Because that will be important to eventually also, that's my other question. Are you talking is the APDI is between governments, right? Is this looking at possibly also actually crossing the border using this solution?
So not just checking into your flight, but actually, you know, actually, you know, presenting it maybe to a border authority at some point? Or will the airlines use it to share the data with the receiving country? I'll take the second question. And then maybe to Jen for the first question. APDI at the moment is a consortia of organizations that are coming together.
However, our interest in the work that's being done in City Hub, and the bilateral agreements and some of the working groups. So as I mentioned, last year, we focused on Japan, Australia, we have interest from the governments in working out what those bilateral and or multilateral agreements are. And as Jeff said, and Jeff, you may want to add to this, the aim is to get some representation from each of these neighboring countries, which will encourage the combination of public and private sector.
Yeah, Jeff, I don't know if you want to add to that. So, as all of us know, that getting two countries' governments to sign a contract might take a long while. So how to deal with it is because all of us, domestic, we are working with a lot of national identity projects with the government already.
So we start with the private company to private company, build up a scenario, build up traction, and then we report to the, for example, Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Digital Affairs, and make sure they are aware of it, and then they endorse the traction, and then they become part of the consortium. So you take step by step. And starting private is the easiest starting point. Yeah.
Yeah, I'll answer for that. Thank you for your questions. And so mobile passport seems like the government's operating some kind of digital ID, but you know, we are the private sector, so passport, as you might already know, it is like global standard form. So especially the electronic chip inside of the passport, it is like the global standardized format. So the mobile passport technological function is actually starting from that standardized chip. So we get the information from that standardized government issued chip, and we get information from that.
And also with face recognition, we do biometric check to prevent the use of that. And also, of course, we do legalize our use of mobile passport in Korea. We already got legalized in Korea government from Korean government at service sectors, and we are now supported by Korean governments to export this mobile passport to abroad. Like passport is really delicate ID because it's like global common ID. So Korean government, even the government of Korea, can't really activate this mobile passport by themselves.
They have to like do business with Japanese government, do some, you know, but it is really heavy and long-term discussion. So actually, well, I'm not the representative of the Korean government, but just my view.
Well, we are, as a private sector operator, we are now trying to operating and support these mobile passport user ID from private to private, and make real customers use case first, and let governments being more little bit lighter to enter and support these cross-border identification together. Thank you. Yes. I was wondering, who's the owner of the data?
Well, we have in Europe, we have the regulations, data protection regulation. I was wondering how does that work in Asia? And because you're talking about governmental information and data, but also you have the private sector and every other sector, all this data, 35 million faces and passports and data, who's the owner?
In Europe, we are the owners of our own information or own data. So we have, we can choose whether we want to connect with whatever company or even with the government. I was wondering how does that work in Asia? And if you can explain more. Thank you. Maybe I jump in with an overarching answer. And rather than ownership, talk about control. One of the things that in the video is that within APDI and the DMP platform and the work we're doing, making sure that there is user transparency and user consent is really important.
So across Asia, there's lots of fragmentation in terms of regulation and privacy and rights. But what's at the heart of everything we're doing is that user transparency and control and consent. So even though that may not be a requirement from the country under their privacy laws, we believe in order to build traction and trust in this ecosystem, making sure that the passenger, the student, the employee actually understands that it's a rights-based approach and that there's nothing happening with their data without their consent or understanding is really, really critical.
But what we don't have in Asia is a pan-Asia regulation. In fact, there's one of the questions that's come in from online. And the question is, is there a general data protection regulation, GDPR, that operates strictly across Asia? The answer is no.
Yes, exactly. So the answer, sadly, is no. There's not a single. And so the rights-based approach is different across many of the Asian countries. I think Nick Mothershaw, for those of you that know Nick, either from OIX or the work he's doing alongside CityHub, he has, if I can remember correctly, this accept, adapt, or is it adjust, or something like that.
So we're using those principles where, as part of the bridge, is understanding whether or not there's parity to connect, or whether or not the user may need to accept or adapt their understanding of what happens, because the data regulations may be different into the country that they're going into. So this is a big piece of the transparency work, because there isn't, unlike Europe, a single approach that's seamless across borders. It's another layer of complexity. Jan?
Yes, I think your speaker should be on. I don't think so, but okay, now it is.
No, just to add to Katrina's point, I think what we're also doing is, of course, looking a lot to Europe, like Europe has really a lot of regulation, maybe sometimes too much. So we're trying to mirror that and use some of the same reasoning and technologies that they are also requiring their member states to deploy. And ultimately, we believe that that will also protect the privacy of the people in the Asia region. But I think, as I sort of mentioned, there are no frameworks, definitely not across those countries, and sometimes even not within the country.
So I think, yeah, it's a completely different way of thinking, especially when you come out of Europe, I think. And I think CityHub or previously OIX started to do some interesting mapping of those frameworks country to country. I know that that work's being extended into Japan and Australia at the moment.
So again, I think the regulatory environment is evolving. Jin, there's a question from you. Is TripPass available for international tourists or only from Korea? Thank you for your question.
Yes, it's available for international travelers. For now, there are more than 178 passports registered in our mobile passport, TripPass application. And because it is possible, we have a dedicated network connection with Korean governments. So the function is kind of simple because when foreigners enter into Korea, then of course, the government gets passport information from the foreigners when they do immigration. And then as we have network connected with government, we can get this passport information approved by the government.
So when that customer shows their mobile passport to a duty-free shop or casino, wherever they want to verify their passport, and then that QR popped up, and in real time, we pass this passport information to Korean government. And the immigration sector of the government database, they check that, oh, this passport is okay, and this person is not illegally coming to Korea kind of thing. So we got okay from the government. And then after that completed, they can use this passport as like instead of the physical passport.
Yeah, so this is, so that's why all the nationalities who coming to Korea can use this mobile passport as their, you know, mobile passport. Okay. Let me stand up. Thank you so much. I have several questions for Jin, I think mostly. So it's about the use cases that you presented. So you say there were like four use cases, and they start in October, right? Or somewhat from October, you want to, so they're not yet in production, is it?
Sorry, yeah. So in Korea, we are now conducting POC in May, right now, with Seoul city governments in Korea.
And some, and for cross-border, Korea, Japan, POC will be conducted in October of this year. Right, I'm just curious, how do you select, because it's for hotels, like how do you select the hotels? Are you like, have a pool of people that want to join? Or do you like go, do you recruit?
Or like, how do you, how does this process go? It's for Korea, because we are now doing project together with the Seoul city government.
They have, they connect the network of the committee of the hotel committee of the Korea. So we get, have network with hotels, that committees, Korea committee, and then they just ask for if there are any body wants to join this POC and just come to us.
So, and the problem, like the shortage of the manpower, like the digitalization of, need of the digitalization is quite severe in Korea's travel industry. So there are many hotels that who want to join this POC project. And also for the Japanese market, maybe Okamoto. Yes. In Japanese market, we conduct with Kyosuku, check-in Kyosuku vendor. So we collaborate with them and arrangement POC now. Okay. And my last question, is that okay?
Because you were also saying that then next year you will like present results and like, I hope that of course is all successful, but how do you then measure like, or what are your KPIs? How do you measure the success? Is it like the more hotels and the more people are using this, the better or yeah. That's a good question.
For Korea, well, because we are now conducting Korea and Korea-Japan cross-border cases. So Korea-Japan cross-border POC will be, we are now planning and the business model, like we are now customizing the KPI for Japanese market itself. So it's not concrete yet. So I can just tell you about Korea's KPI for this POC. The POC KPI for this Korea use case is, we will track how conveniently that customers feel, can feel that, and how efficiency can be strengthened through this operation and how the protection of the data is, can be strengthened from our blockchain-based this management system.
And also we will hear the real voice of customers and also the hotel front lines voices after this one month POC. And then we will make like public report because we are now doing business together with Seoul city government. And then after that, in Korea, aligned with this cross-border Japan POC, at the end of this year, we are now also expand the POC in Korea itself, like more than 10 or 20 hotels. Yeah.
And if I could just add to some of those KPIs, just in the last 12 months, as I mentioned last year, Rintaro and Yan together with Dima, who I think was in the audience, Amuro-san from MUFG, we were able to show that it was possible just to get Japanese bank and Australian bank talking to each other through Connect ID in Australia as the bridge. And then show that there could be technical interoperability. So that was the focus. So once we had that technical interoperability, this year, the focus is, okay, how are we able to support DMP and the APDI to start growing?
As Jeff said, starting with five, but the aim is to bring in 20 countries. Yan is focused on the harmonization of the technical standards, the interoperability, testing this bridge capability. So the good question about privacy policies and digital rights, and then the bilateral agreements that go into countries, and how do you start to train users to expect something like a consent receipt or to be asked about what happens with their data? Introduce new data patterns and UX so that people feel empowered and in control.
So if I step back, our KPIs are across many different things, and the aim is each year, back at EIC, to be able to showcase that there's been movement in some technical, legal, or commercial domain towards this very ambitious goal. Yeah, thank you for the answer. I have a question about how you verify the identities of the people when they register to your service. So I can fully understand that passports or ID cards with chips, you can verify them, but what about the passports or ID cards without chips?
How do you verify that they are legit, or how do you verify that the identity of the person who's presenting it is legit? Thank you.
Okay, so maybe it's like covering all the questions, but well, for passport aspects, of course, there's some passport that doesn't have chips. Like, in some countries, they still don't have chips with passport, and in that case, still, like, you know, the governments do immigration for their passports. So actually, with the creation procedures of Moab passport digital ID, it contains EKYC procedures.
Like, we read, of course, OCR recognition. If the chip has existed, we do NFC recognition of the chip, and then after that, we do facial recognition of the biometric check, and then also, we send this information, passport information, again, to the government to double check together.
And so, with those processes, even without the chip, we can still do the EKYC for the passport itself. And without the passport, like, for the big view of our APDI system, maybe Jan, can you answer for that?
Okay, yeah, I think so. What we prefer, of course, is to connect straight into governments and have them issue credentials. I think ISO is now working on interesting standard 23220 for the geeks out here that, yeah, that we're hopefully that they will start issuing those different countries, and then, yeah, that would be the perfect stepping point to use. And the aim, in terms of building up the ecosystem, is to get as close to the source, the issuer, as possible, and then following the patterns established right through to the providence and the verifier.
Hank, there's a question from you. Did you want to ask the question?
Yeah, I took the GG approach, so I put it in the app, but I also wanted to ask if you could elaborate a little bit more on, like, building this ecosystem, because part of it is technical, and you can use the standards, etc. But actually, on top of that, like what at the beginning of the conference, OpenID Foundation also said, there's also trust on that level on top, so people and organizations need to work together to create this ecosystem that can use the technology.
So, could you expand a little bit on the challenges that you've had on that layer of getting organizations on board, why they would join, why they wouldn't join, etc.? Jeff, maybe do you want to start and just talk about the APDI as a starting point?
Yeah, it's going to be a long journey, because everyone has a different intention and interest. So, the step that we're trying to do is, each country, right now, we have different progress on digital identity.
So, the first thing we can do is, looking at each country, who are the major player in a private sector, they are talking to government and handling maybe at least, like, 30%, 50% of national ID cards. For that country, for that company, we join all together, and then try to build connectivity.
So, every citizen can actually register in their own country, and then use and be benefited from the use cases across countries. So, that's a starting point. The second thing is building the trust list.
So, each country, some having their trust list, for example, like Taiwan, we don't have it today. The government is trying to get it finished, but we are currently below the budget, but we're trying to get it done before the end of the year.
So, some countries have trust lists, some countries don't have a trust list. So, ABDI is also trying to bring the trust list together, that we have a kind of, like, aggregation of all the trust lists that we can do due diligence on each of the players who join the entire ecosystem.
So, I think that's the second thing we can do. And the final thing I want to mention is, for ABDI to be alive as sustainable growth, I think merchants and real life scenario is a key.
So, if ABDI support a driver's license from one country, how many countries recognize this driver's license and they can use it to rent a car out of 36 countries? Is it 30? Is it only 10?
So, adding merchants and ecosystem to each of the countries and into ABDI will be also the key responsibility of each of us. And I think in a way, it will be much more easier comparing a country A company going to country B to get merchants. It will be easier that country A company get the country A merchants get 20, 200, and then we add everything together into a merchant list and also the trust list I just mentioned. Thanks. I think we have to, do we have time for one more question, I think?
Yeah, I was going to, yeah, I would just like to add there are no shortcuts with building an ecosystem. Like, one of the biggest challenges is the community has been working on a lot of technical interoperability and technical proof, and then being able to show that the hard work is now this legal and commercial layer.
And sadly, that requires, like, focus and work. Yeah, no shortcuts. Last question? I'm not sure, not a short question. I think we will reach out to you.
Okay, great. All right. Would you please join me in thanking our wonderful panel? There are many, many, many hours of work and some blood, sweat and tears behind the scenes that have gone into making today possible.
So, huge thank you to each of you.
