How to use the framework of a Trusted Data Ecosystem to simplify building decentralized identity solutions

Right. I'd like to now invite our next set of speakers. Please join me in welcoming. Heather do, and James schul from Indio. So Heather, James, welcome to Berlin and welcome to EIC. Thank you. So your talk is titled how to use the framework of a trusted data ecosystem to simplify building decentralized identity solutions. And that perhaps ties in well with what John earlier mentioned, you know, Absolutely. There Are a wide range of frameworks be technical and business. So what can our audience expect from your presentation today?

Our audience can take a decentralized identity that they just learned more about. And how do you use decentralized identity? And you put it into a trusted digital ecosystem to power the composable engine. And so what James and I will talk about are stories from the trenches of actually doing this. Brilliant. We look forward to your, your thoughts. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi everyone. I'm Heather doll, I'm CEO and co-founder of Indico. And with me is James Schulte, who is vice president of business development.

And what James and I have been doing for the last two years is actually taking the concepts that you've seen here today and driving them into solutions. So whether we work with a customer from going from idea, or whether they're somewhere in the middle or heading to commercialization, James and I step in. And so what we will talk with you about is what we have learned from actually being there, doing this and seeing the good, the bad and the ugly. And so the idea is how do you take what you have learned today and actually put it into the real world?

And so what we're gonna do is take a look and walk you through this agenda. But first of all, you're saying, where do I begin? I see all these concepts, I'm learning about decentralized identity SSI. So sovereign identity. We've got frameworks, triangles, stacks, layers, where do I begin? Because all of this is wonderful, but when it really matters is actually when I develop a solution and my company saves money or makes money. That's when it gets real. And so what we do is we get the calls and in DC and say, where do I begin? Or I begin. And I've got a big mess on my hands of what do I do?

And where we start is saying, first of all, when you want to deploy decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, SSI, let's start thinking about your business problem. Let's start thinking about the problem.

As we say, that's gonna save you money or make you money. And so where we say is, you know what? Identity is many things, what is it to your enterprise or to your customer? And so you can see here, when you start breaking out identity into the actual valuable data that you need to be immediately actionable to save money, make money. This is how you can start thinking about it. And so we start breaking down Inco, we start working with our customers on breaking down identity, too many things. You look at the car, but as we know, there is so much more information behind that car.

And it's actually the information in the wheel that creates the value here. And so what we just heard about was the trust triangle, but we take this a little bit further because the trust triangle actually has to be deployed into your solution.

And what we do is we start working on identifying with you, who is the issuer, or who is the party that has the information that will help solve the problem who has the information assigned to it, the holder that is going to help solve your problem and who is the, who needs that data piece of data, set of data, all the data identity who needs that information and is the verifier. And here's the thing. Each one of those can be one person, one organization, one entity, and it all can all be inside your enterprise. It doesn't have to be outside. And then what we do is we break.

If you look below, there's actually a ledger, we start applying this to the technology. And so I'm gonna toss it to James because he is often works directly with our customers in guiding them on how they can be successful with these deployments. All right, thanks Heather.

So as, as Heather mentioned, this software and technology exists today, it's open source. It is, there is interoperability that currently exists. There are ledgers that you can use as verifiable data registries and they, they are ready to pick up and use. And that's what we, we do with our, our customers. The ledger in this case is a distributed ledger operated by node operators, distributed across the globe, geographically, politically, and any other way that makes it more diverse and increases the resiliency of the network.

The ledger is what makes these credentials, tamper proof, tamper evident and creates that that trust that's needed between the verifiers and the issuers. As Heather mentioned, when you begin and after you've identified those base roles of who your issuer is, who your holder is, who your verifier is, you're ready to get started, and you don't need to make it more complicated in that first proof of concept or first use case. And so what's interesting is that you can, you can start with a closed ecosystem. You don't need to have three individual parties fulfill those roles in the trust triangle.

In fact, in a closed ecosystem, an organization can act as both as the issuer and the verifier of credentials that they issue to their holders. So here, for example, you have a bank, they issue a customer credential to an account holder. They can use that credential to come back to the bank, open up a new account, apply for a loan or a mortgage use passwordless login to get onto an online Porwal access, other banking services. So right there in this small, simple, closed ecosystem, you already have value that's being created.

You're reducing friction, creating a better experience for the customer and driving value. And at this point you haven't even brought in third parties yet. So this is a great place to start keeping it simple and evolving to scale. And then from there, that's when, or here again, we recommend keeping it simple during your proof of concept phase. If you maintain control over those, those three different roles, it's easier to, to, to work out the kinks and build it up and get ready to open up that ecosystem.

So here's an example where an HR department, internally in a company can issue credentials to employees. Those employees can use that credential with their benefits partner in order to access their employee benefits. So right there, again, already solving an internal problem already creating value for your company and for your employees at this point, governance, isn't that important because it's still internal.

You've created the rules according to whatever your company needs, whatever internal compliance issues would apply there, but you haven't opened up the, the complicated governance box quite yet, that comes later. So again, evolve to scale.

We, yeah, I'm not a developer, but we, when we approach a, a project or a POC, we do take that, that, that phased agile approach of prototyping it, taking it to trial, taking it to production, and then scaling out. One of the challenges that we've seen in this space is that a lot of organizations will start the opposite way. They'll spend a lot of time and resources trying to solve at scale and then figuring out, okay, where do we start to get there? Our approach is kind of the other way around start small and evolve to scale, build it up. And we see that go a lot faster.

And we've had a lot of success doing that so far. And I'll hand over to Heather to talk about how these closed ecosystems can create value for other participants. As they start to open up In our experience, you actually get asked to open your closed ecosystem before you've even finished with it. And that's because partners or other customers or other parties actually want to be able to verify the credentials that you're already using, or they have a credential that you see that you say, you know, that's some data that we want. It is valuable to our organization.

And so it's at that moment that you open your closed ecosystem, but here's the key you've built it. You've built it fast. It works. You've proven it out. And you've actually already created an asset in your organization. And you created valuable data that clearly has value because you have other parties coming to you. And this is what we see as we see over and over again, customer will say, well, it's gonna be X, Y, Z months, years down the road when we'll bring other parties in. And then, you know, a month or two later, they're like, we're ready. We're ready to open our closed ecosystem.

So how do you do that? Usually what we see are verifiers want to be a part of your ecosystem, and that's a, a good way to one create value off of the verifiable credential and the data that you already have two governance. So you initially have a minimal governance with the closed ecosystem, with a larger one. You can deploy machine readable governance that can be used. It can be interoperable. Like we talked about the importance with composable engine and it's actually machine readable governance that allows you to scale without having to rely on a third party.

And because it is machine readable and because the standards and the protocols are available to your partners, you can do that through bringing your verifiers on. So what you do is through the addition of whether it's additional verifiers or issuers, you're creating trust, and that trust accumulates the value of the data in your ecosystem. And so this is where then you can start moving to derivative data.

What information can you take from multiple credentials that you have verified different pieces from each credential, and then create a derivative credential on top of that, and it creates additional value in your, in your ecosystem. So our advice on how do you begin with all this information is start simple solve for one thing, one thing can be solved for it can scale. It can get you going, and it can move you from the idea that you may have today to a commercial product by the end of the year.

Because the technology that we've been talking about is available in open source, and you can start building this afternoon. It's as quick as that. But the main thing is we have found this approach over and over again, James and I have been working with customers and it is taking them to success and scale quickly.

So Raj, we are open to any questions. Brilliant. Please run applause for Heather and James for a wonderful presentation.