Digital Onboarding Game Change: Face Verification and Liveness Detection

Thanks Francis, are there any questions here for any online? Actually, we haven't got any right now, but I think we'll, we, like you say, we have a panel after the next speaker, which is of course the other panel is so she'll, we'll, we'll save them up for them.

So, but for now, I'll see you in about 20 minutes for our panel. Thank you so much. Sounds great. Thank you. Okay. Okay. And now we should have Maxine.

Oh, we are not ready At the moment. Oh, you have a problem. Okay. She share presentation.

Just have, Okay, well we have a couple of minutes, so I don't get to see you back yourself very often. Like that's my best side. Okay. So thanks very much with our next session is with Maxine most who is the principal for accuracy market intelligence.

Hi there, Maxine. Sorry.

We, we had a few problems, but you're with, Yeah, we're having some technical issues here this morning. Sorry.

Yeah, but we're on now. So we ready to roll? Yeah. We're gonna try to do this cuz I can't control the slides from here. Yeah. So we'll see what Happens. Okay. So we have, we have a picture. Yeah. We have your first slide. So or where you go. So go ahead and hit the button. Yeah. It's gonna be a little awkward, but we'll try. Okay. We have your first slide. So yep. Off We go. So what I'm gonna talk about today really is in terms of digital onboarding, how we're harnessing the tornado for face verification and liveness detection. Go ahead and hit the slide. Okay.

Next, there we go. Okay. So everybody knows this COVID is fundamentally shifted the world and in doing so, shifting the trajectory of digital transformation, next slide. And the thing that I think is really fantastic is the way that really COVID has acted as a black Swan accelerant in the marketplace. And this is a quote from Mackenzie from late last year. And basically what we're seeing is years of fundamental in companies across regions and sectors, basically years worth of change in just a few weeks or a few months.

And this is impacting enterprises, not just in their customer relationships, which is where we're seeing obviously a lot of traction, but also across the supply chain and with interactions every touchpoint within the, within the enterprise customers, supply chain partners, staff, the entire infrastructure or the relationships within the infrastructure are being impacted by this rapid digitization. Okay, next slide. And you can go ahead and hit, hit it two more times.

So, and digitization is not just happening sort of in eCommerce and financial services in the sharing economy where we kind of expect it. It's literally happening across the globe for every enterprise, both within the government and commercial sector. And what we're seeing is that we're setting a new standard, a new digital standard for the way that humans interact with all of their suppliers, governments, financial services across the board, right? It's a new standard for the way that we interact with all of these enterprises that provide services with us.

And again, it's not just customers, it's every constituent that every organization deals with on a regular basis. Okay. Next slide. And what I think is really interesting is if we think about the real potential for digital transformation, and we think about the potential for biometrics and onboarding, the picture is really big. It's this digital transformation picture. And I think, you know, I don't often take these large number market projections seriously, even though I do some for a living myself, but this is a big number 6.8 trillion in the next two years.

So, and I think IDC is a very reputable company in terms of providing these kind of projections. And this is, this is just a massive number and it's really redefining this marketplace in a huge way. Next slide, go ahead and click again one more time.

So if you think about where we are today, we think about customer digital onboarding that is this big market that's moving quickly, that's impacting all these different market sectors, but I would argue that that if we're looking at face verification and liveness today, in terms of the overall market traction, go ahead and hit the, hit the slide again, this customer digital onboarding. Okay.

Can, can you click through one more time? Yes. Okay. What we're looking at today is literally one, 100th of the total addressable market, just in this space for customer digital onboarding, looking at the market today. And as I said, this, this is just a small piece, right? Because this is just the customer relationships. These are the customer touchpoints. Next slide, please. If you look at this in context, that is a, it is a very, very small part of that big picture where we're talking about the transformation of enterprise and go ahead and hit the, hit the button again.

And what we're seeing is this shift right now in the market where we're not just talking about a range of companies that are looking on looking at customer onboarding specifically and looking at how you can use face verification to do that. This is starting to bleed into the identity and access management space where companies like ping identity are not only incorporating these capabilities, but are building up staff to think about what this kind of broader customer relationship, identity based customer relationship and enterprise relationships more broadly are gonna look like.

And we're seeing this across the board, go ahead and hit the slide again. You're gonna see seeing, you know, you have companies like on PTO, which is one of the leaders in this digital onboarding space with strategic relationships within that IAM space.

And I think if you think about the future and where we're going, what we're talking about is building towards the kind of technology that we see now with face verification and liveness across the enterprise IAM landscape and essentially bleeding into being the foundation for fully integrated physical access control, logical access control ecosystems for all constituents within the enterprise. And this to me is really the, the big frame, the big picture and where we're operating today right now is a relatively small piece of that space though.

It's critical because we are learning now how to provide these services in a way that reach the goals of the organizations, which are compliance and fraud prevention and cost reduction and privacy and anonymity as Francis was talking about, but also creating a really quality customer experience. And the reason I believe we're gonna see this kind of expansion is because we, as I said earlier, we're redefining the standard.

People now expect a certain level of customer experience and they're going to expect that level not only in their personal lives for their personal business, but in the same way that B Y O D changed the expectations of enterprises because people wanted to bring their mobile devices in the door. People are going to now expect this, this level of interaction with their employees, with their employers across the board. And it's just fundamentally changing the way enterprises are gonna operate. Go ahead. Next slide, please.

This is the market landscape that I developed, just looking at sort of this face verification and liveness marketplace. Now this was published in, in January of this year and, and the market has already shifted considerably.

In fact, it's really interesting. The, the, the, the two organizations that ended up in the top right corner face tech and on Fido are now in a partnership face. Tech is providing their, their technology on Fido on Fido face. Tech is liveness core technology provider, but what's interesting here is you, you look at the different categories of players that are operating in the same space.

So it's, there's a lot of market confusion. There's a lot of overlap.

It's, it's very hard to kind of clearly define the relationships and the players. And this is typical of a market that's really entering this kind of tornado phase of development. Next slide please.

Oh, these slides look a little funny, sorry. So I just want you to just click, you can click again, if you, this is just showing the growth of the market. This was at the end of may. So now we're at June, we're up to a billion dollars. Go ahead and click it again. This was the beginning of July. It was 1.8 billion. And go one more, one more time. So by July 23rd, I kind of gave up starting and I'm apologize.

This slide doesn't look so doesn't look really good, but the notion that in the last, in the first six, eight months of 2021, there was more investment in biometric digital identity than there had been the previous 20 years. And so if you think about the previous slide that I showed you with the, with the market landscape and talking about how many different contenders there are and why that's a little bit confusing now, we're adding to the mix almost am I, this is more than $2 billion right now, 2 billion of funding.

So you have this, this, this exploding market, you have all these different players that are approaching the market from different perspective, and then add $2 billion into it. So go ahead. Next slide. So this is really clearly the tornado phase of the strategic market development. Go ahead and click one more time. And basically what we saw is that the chasm that the, the, the COVID essentially this black Swan accelerant jumped the traditional chasm of strategic market development.

Now, this is, you know, this is, this model goes back to the early nineties. This is Jeffrey Moore's technology adoption life cycle, but I have found over and over again throughout my career, I come back to it because it really, from my perspective defines the dynamics of, of Mar of emerging technology marketplaces in a just incredibly useful way. And so we are now in entering this tornado phase and the tornado phase is different than the early market phase. Next slide, please. And it's really critical if you're gonna be successful to understand the dynamics of that tornado.

Now, if you look, go ahead and click two more times. If you look at the challenges in the market category confusion, as I mentioned, the commodification of some of the technology face matching, for example, one to one face matching is rapidly becoming a commodity. If it is not there today, looking at issues like racial bias in face matching and face verification, the limited reliable testing that really gives us an indication of the relative capabilities of different vendors in this space.

And this is particularly true in the liveness component of the space compliance privacy in general, you know, as Francis was talking about what are you doing with biometric PII, and, and also the proliferation of that PII, because as more and more players offer solutions, we are now providing our biometrics in more and more places. And so rather than trying to address the, the issue of the proliferation of PI, we're now contributing to it. So those are all the challenges, and those are, those are sort of unique to the biometric identity space.

If you look on the other side of the chart, the pressures and the opportunities, those are typical again for this state of market evolution for entering the tornado, demand, acceleration the funding, aggressive competition. And then in terms of opportunities, there's little, really little differentiation between a lot of the vendors. They're still tremendous focus on technology capabilities, and we have this sort of nascent ecosystem.

And again, that's also reflected in the, in the different types of vendors from different categories that are playing in the space. So again, this is these, these pressures and opportunities are, are typical. That's part of the state of play that we would expect at a market evolving in this place. And then we look at the specifics that are unique to the biometric space in terms of the challenges. Okay. Next slide. And so what does that mean?

Like, how do you, so what does that mean for you when you're operating in this space? How, how do you harness that tornado and what do you, what do you need to do as a vendor? And what do you need to look for as a partner or a customer for this technology? Go ahead. Next slide. I think it's really important. Go ahead and click again, to think about the term tornado as something really fundamentally different from the early market space. And we talked about this and really, you know, when I say, I say, no one cares about your technology. That's not, certainly not.

That's not absolutely true, but people are not focused on technology. Customers are not focused on technology in the same way they are in the early market. Customers are focused on solving their problems and to be successful as a vendor in this space, you have to focus on those C level problems. You also have to clearly differentiate your solution. And right now there's, there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace because these solutions are not really well differentiated. You also need to be able to effectively scale and deliver, which is part of the problem.

Part of the reason we're seeing so much funding being applied to the market right now, that funding really is scale and deliver funding. And then finally you need to effectively communicate. You need to have a strategy. You need to execute against that strategy in terms of really speaking to the market and talking about how it is you're solving problems and what your vision is as this market evolves.

You know, as we saw earlier, we are at the beginning of a, of a very significant and rapid evolution. And so you have to play to that. You have to play to those dynamics. Okay. One more time, if you can hit. Yeah. So what that means is you really have to have what, you know, I've long called a strategic development plan, and I'm talking to vendors all the time in this space. And there really are very few that I think have that kind of effective strategic market development plan. They may have pieces of it, but I don't think it's there.

And I think what, you know, in the tornado, we see a lot of carnage that's usual for a tornado. What that means is a lot of companies tend to get blown away because they can't ride the tornado. They can't harness it. And a strategic marketing development plan or strategic market development plan is a critical component of being able to do that. Okay. Next slide. This is just a rough kind of model of a, of a marketing plan. I think what's really important to remember is that you have to do these things quickly.

If you're spending six months developing a strategic marketing plan, by the time you're done, the market's moved. So this has to be a, a very iterative process. There's there's I, you know, I tend to look at this as a 30, 60, 90 day operation with continual feedback loops. And this is not a static, you know, like document that you produce.

It is, it's a, it's, you know, there are different formats for putting them together, but essentially this needs to be something that lives and breathes and, and dynamically reflects the market shifts and, and transformations as you go. Okay, next slide. This is the model that I like to use. When I think about operationalizing marketing marketing. Now there's these four basic components research and strategy, product communications and demand gen.

And, and I have put marketing automation in this model in demand gen, but marketing automation really is the foundational structure for any marketing operation in the 21st century. And again, I'm talking to a lot of folks in the industry that haven't really operationalized their marketing, and they're still kind of using, you know, 20th century marketing models that, that are not very well automated, where you have disconnected customer acquisition and sales funnels. And it's really important to build this, this feedback loop into your organization.

And it's really important to have that sitting on top of automation that is gonna really make that operate in the most effect efficient and effective way. And again, when you're in a market that is rapidly exploding when there's massive growth, when there's a lot of competition, when there's a ton of money flowing in this model is gonna help you actually ride through that tornado and be effective as an organization.

Okay, next slide. So I, I break this down into four critical steps. You can go ahead and hit this, I think two or three more times, you have to create a compelling story that speaks to the big picture. And that big picture is not just where the market is today.

It's, it's working with your customers and partners. It's speaking in, in, in to the community, the broader digital identity community in terms of, you know, what kind of thought leadership you bring to the table.

And it's, it's having that bigger vision and understanding that the process we're in right now while it's very dynamic and there's a ton of opportunity and people are making a lot of money. That is just part of a bigger process. You really need to focus on developing a differentiatable position and that's hard to do in a chaotic market.

But again, the, the secret to that is to go back to your customers and be, and focus on the problems and, and develop a customer centric perspective on the market, not be focused on your technology and technology performance, scaling with a delivery, with a focus on customer delivery and satisfaction. Because in, as you move through the tornado, there's reference selling becomes the key to your success. And what that means is you have to have happy customers that, that are rave about your product. And finally, you know, and this goes back to the marketing model.

I think you really need to innovate your marketing. There's so much noise out there. There's so many different competitors.

And, you know, it's really important to figure out where you play, how you play best and to focus on that area and really develop marketing that speaks to that, and not sort of try to be a generalist in the world and talk to everybody all the time about everything because you can't solve everybody's problems. No single company can solve everybody's problems in a, you know, in the moment. So it really goes to focusing and then having your marketing reflect that in a way that really helps you connect with the customers.

Okay, next step. Next slide. I should say, okay. This is the, this research that I published in January, it's available for preview on my website. If you don't know about acuity. And I didn't really introduce myself at the beginning, acuity's been around for 20 years now, and we have been exclusively focused on biometrics and digital identity, and we provide a ton of research. There's a lot of free material on the website, and we do a lot of strategic work with some of the biggest names in the industry. Okay. Next please. And that's it. I appreciate your attention.

I apologize for the awkwardness of the technology issues, but I hope you found that informative and feel free to reach out direct directly if you'd like a copy of these slides. Thanks so much.