The Digital Identity Shake-up we’ve been waiting for: How to Survive, and how to Thrive

Hi there. And welcome back to this session where we're thinking quite a bit about decentralized identity, web three, their business models, where do we go from here? So I'm very pleased to welcome our next speaker to the stage will be discussing digital identity shakeup that we've been waiting for. So let's welcome Jamie Smith to the stage. Hello everyone. Thanks for coming to the session. There is a massive hole in the center of our digital economy. And very few people can see it and businesses have been trying to fix part of it for decades, but they're actually making things worse.

I'm gonna talk a bit about what that hole is, why we can't see it, but when we fix it, there's gonna be five, really big shifts in our digital economy, in our communities. And online, I'm gonna talk about those shifts. I'm gonna talk about what we can do about when they happen and how you can win. But first I'm gonna talk about queuing. Nobody likes QS. Nobody likes standing in line having to wait. And so what do businesses do? They turn it into a digital process. They allow us to create an account so we can get through the Q faster. We get QR codes, just like a EIC.

It's been super slick, but I've created another account, another username and password. Maybe I'll come back next year and have to reset my password. Cause I couldn't remember the one I used. And so businesses are giving us more apps, more websites, more portals to fill in. Maybe we get a one, one time password to have to prove. It really is us. When we set that thing up and digital transformation is making a huge difference.

We're getting rid of cues, but we're starting on the business side and we're creating value for consumers, for people, but we're doing it over and over and over again because businesses are solving their own problems. The thing is it's getting worse for people. We get faceless chat bots, new accounts on time passwords. It goes over and over and over again. Things are actually getting worse for people. It's like a, a low grade headache. We can't shake.

And I think it's a bit like the, the, the parable of the eight blind men and the elephant hands of, if you, you you've heard this before, right? So everyone's trying to feel the elephant. Everyone's feeling a different part, but they can't see it. So one of them's got the tail. They think they have a snake. One person's holding the, the leg. They think they've got a tree, but no one can see the elephant. And I think that's what's happening with digital transformation, but it's worse because businesses can't see the problem at all.

They're in a, like a perfect storm of digital transformation, cloud, new business models, digital disruption, innovation, frenzy, blockchain, new data protection regulations. And all their customers are saying, why isn't our app like as good as Uber or one of the best apps in the world. So they're just trying to deal with their own problems. Let alone think of what this massive hole in the digital economy is. So things are getting worse businesses, can't see it. And when we try and diagnose what's wrong, people say, oh, well, what we need is data protection. We need more slick apps.

We need better customer experiences, but it's always framed as this value or trust. So Elon Musk two weeks ago said, Hey, we're gonna buy Twitter. Isn't that cool? We're gonna sort free speech, but buried in the detail of what he was talking about was, oh, it's okay. We're gonna authenticate all our users. We're gonna get rid of all the, the fake bots and the fake follower accounts. And what he said was we're gonna authenticate all the users and we're gonna balance it with privacy. It's a trade off.

So either know who people are, but then we know who people are and is there a data protection problem or what do they do with it? And so on and so on. So either we collect the data, we create accounts, we get rid of the queue, but are we trading it for trust? Or we lock it down. We treat data like a toxic asset. We don't collect it. We make sure everything's private, but then we don't get the value. And I want to suggest that it's a false choice. We're making the wrong assumptions. So how do we work our way through?

Well, we need a completely new perspective. We can't use the same thinking that got us here today. We've been drawing this picture for decades. Let's put the customer at the center, make things, user centric, make things, people centric, user controlled. But what do we actually put in the middle? We put platforms and we put products and we put businesses. It's more of the same challenge. When we start thinking about what would a tool that really represented the individual that gave us portable identity that gave us portable reputation that solved the queue without making things worse.

Well, let's look at what paper does today. I wanna suggest that paper meets a number of requirements that are human requirements. I can take them anywhere. We're not solving business needs and solving the digital transformation. We're able to take our paper everywhere. We can use them seamlessly in any part of the business interaction. They're under my control. I use them, I carry them with me. It's already a global standard. And guess what? I can put different bits of paper together and hand them over in one transaction.

Maybe you got to the hotel, you handed over your digital identity document, a credit card two months ago. We've also handed our COVID certificate, handed them in when we're doing things with digital transformation. It's not like that at all. Our customer tools are actually business tools. So what do we get? We get SMS one time passwords. We get email, we get a Porwal or get an app. It's kind of it. And so our digital transformation is solving for business needs. And we're forgetting about human requirements. We're forgetting about what this is actually doing in the round for customers.

So we're starting to see the foundations of what this could be. We're starting to see all the topics that we're discussing at EIC and beyond. These are foundational concepts, foundational ideas, their capabilities, but they're not solutions for customers. Once we start thinking about what this could do for customers, we, we need these tools that meet human requirements so we can fix the queue without just making things worse. And we're gonna enable to empower the customer.

And of course, we use that language all the time, you know, empower the customer, put them at the center, but I mean, genuinely solve customer problems on the customer side. Maybe it's wallets, maybe it's D IDs, maybe it's O IDC kind of doesn't matter. We need to solve for the customer problems so that they can get digital transformation on their side. So I'm gonna talk about once we provide these tools, this is the whole in our digital economy. We don't have tools on our side.

I'm gonna talk about solving for customer tools and five big shifts that we're gonna see in our digital economy and what that means for business and what it means for winning in the digital economy. Once we, once we can solve for the customer side.

So, first of all, I think there's gonna be a market inversion. What does that mean? You know, back in, I dunno, 1200, we looked at the stars and said, oh, well, the sun goes up and comes down. Of course the sun's going around the earth. Humans are inherently selfish and think that we are the center of the universe and a guy called Copernicus said in 1,543 or whatever said, no, no, no, actually we think the sun is the middle and we go around it. And I think that's, what's happening with digital transformation today.

Businesses think they're the middle of the universe and all the customers are surrounding. But actually once we give customers tools, we can see that businesses are actually orbiting customers. That's where the value is. So give an example, think of the, the kind of customer journey a business might say, oh, the, the customer journey is I need a mortgage. Do I have a mortgage? When actually the journey is I might need to move home to, I've moved in. I'm living on garden furniture and the disclosures broken. Broadband's not seen set up yet. That's the customer journey.

And once we give customers tools, we can light up that whole customer journey in a new way. We can see the whole thing. And we realize that customers are dealing with three competitors or realize that they're pooling services all the way along through the journey. And so once we give customers tools, we can reorientate what creating value means for people. We can redefine what a product means. And you realize as businesses, customers are dealing with all these other services and products that you can't see, so we're gonna get this customer inversion.

Number one, number two, we're gonna get this experience shift. So if you go back, you know, a hundred years, our great-grandparents the person who was at home running the home, spent most of their day, washing, cleaning, cooking, organizing the home. And it was really manual. It was repetitive, but you were in the home because things two cages. And then after the war, we got appliances, we got ovens and Hoovers and washing machines. And what that meant was the people who were in the kitchen all day were suddenly freed up.

Cause I had two hours cuz I didn't have to scrub the clothes every day I can add washing powder and it just gets done. So they freed ourselves up. And when I argue that once we give customer tools for their data and for automation and so on, we're getting an experience shift. We're going to realize free time.

Why, you know, why can't I just say to the airline, just check me in, just log me in, switch my energy provider. Why are we dealing with all these boring, repetitive manual tasks? And I think they were gonna see an experience shift. This is my favorite one about the, the confidence shift. And what do I mean by that?

Well, today people are not interacting online because they're not sure where their data's going and what's happening to it. I was, I was in, you know, an airport two days ago. I wanted free wifi. Of course I did who can't stand two seconds without being online. And they needed my date birth, my email address, my gender, my email, you know, the, the whole bunch of information that just seemed totally inappropriate.

So, you know, I'm now a 51 year old female, you know, Mickey mouse, gmail.com. It's a, it's a waste of data. It's flooding the CRM systems with waste. CRM is where data goes to die. And once I can actually know where my data's going, who I'm engaging with, we're gonna see two things happen. We're gonna see people sharing real data because of all our clever capabilities we can do. We can ask for facts about the data rather than asking for the data yeses and nos. So I can start to share authentic data about myself, cause I'm more confident, but it's a second.

And I think way more important thing. If you look up at this guy at night, we'll see all the, the stuff we can see and physicists and astrophysicists says, actually we know there should be way more, but we can't see it. We call it dark matter. And then digital economy, same thing's happening. There's loads of stuff not happening cuz people aren't confident. Retailers will talk about basket abandonment, cuz I get all the way through the journey. And I see a huge form and I say, do I really want to complete no I don't or I don't have the information. It's a confidence.

And so I think the second really important thing is that people are gonna come into the digital economy that weren't before, because they build to trust who they're dealing with. They'll have more seamless experiences. And when the business gets rid of the queue and I'm asked to create an account, I'll do it. So I think this is gonna be a confidence shift. I talked earlier about the market inversion and creating value all the way along the customer journey.

Here's another analogy when the industry revolution happened, we created, you know, steam engines we gave to businesses and businesses put them in factories. They put them down the minds to replace animals and it was kind of, we got this productivity improvement. It was great. But the industrial revolution took off when we gave machines to people, cars, boilers, Hoovers. And I think today we've been giving data machines to business CRM, cloud, predictive analytics, AI we've been giving data machines to business. What happens when we give data machines to people?

What happens when we stand up a tool that meets human requirements on the, on the customer side? Well today the customer side is all pre-industrial, it's all manual doesn't scale. I have to go from place to place to place full of errors and the tools were given are businesses. So I think once we saw for this, this elephant, this customer tools, we're gonna see new value created yes. On the customer side. So for example, I change my address, use case the identity community I've talked about for, I dunno, 30 years, but now we solve with these building blocks, change my address on my side.

I can let 39 CRM systems instantly and it can be trusted cuz I've got my data, my identity information in there. So yes, that's great. That's a fantastic experience for me. But think about the head of CRM inside that business. Think about the head of relationship management. Think about the head of marketing. They just avoided the call into the call center to change my address. When I had to stand on one leg and give my inside leg measurement to prove it was me. There's efficiency, there's opportunity, much better customer experience.

So we're gonna see this value shift both on the customer side, but also on the business side, this is massive. And lastly, we're gonna have a risk shift. So once I know who I'm dealing with online, I'm much more likely to interact. I don't have a, you know, very high percentage of the fraud online in payments is to do with not knowing who the other side is, where the money's going, who I'm dealing with.

So solving for customer tools, customer ID, we're gonna get a much more benefit, greater benefit for businesses cuz we know who we're dealing with And businesses are gonna get much better flow of information and identity. That's now portable portable reputation and fraud's gonna plummet business risk is gonna change because I can now ask for facts and not the data. Like I mentioned before, I don't need my data birth. I just need the yes, no compliance is gonna change. But how we think about threats is gonna be upside down. This slide will surprise no one.

We need infrastructure standards portability. Again, the things the identity community have been working on for decades. These customer tools to meet human requirements around seamless combinations of data, around data portability, choice of vendors. We're getting there, we're close, but the answer's not gonna be wallets. The answer's not gonna be data hubs. The answer's gonna be the services and applications that are gonna sit on top that are gonna provide customer tools that allow them to a be independent and B engage with businesses in a new way.

So businesses are gonna have to ask themselves a question. What do we do when these shifts happen? It's not an if anymore, it's a, when these shifts happen, are they gonna happen soon? How do we prepare? And I want to argue that preparation for this new customer paradigm to fix the hole in our digital economy is gonna happen gradually. And then suddenly we've been working for years in all these capabilities.

Soon, the apps and services are gonna flourish and we're gonna see an explosion of value on customer side today, we're doing digital transformation with a hand break on. We're only solving for half the market. And I think many businesses are gonna be disrupted because they can't see the whole customer journey. Once we have customer tools, we can see the whole customer journey we can design for trust. And I think those that organize the leadership to start thinking about these problems.

You know, we've got chief customer officers floating around now, what does that mean? Are they, are they about the experience? Are they about products? I think the chief customer officer is now about thinking about the customer tools and how they engage in new ways across fulfillment, across sales, across marketing, across digital transformation, it's across the whole business. So there needs to be executive alignment strategies to engage with customers in new ways. It's about designing for trust.

It's about thinking instead of designing for engagement, how, how long did they spend on my website? And did they come back? Maybe it's designing for less engagement saying, well for less time, maybe the best customer experience is no customer experience. When the customer is happy for the customer tools to enable that. So I've asked this building this future, we have 400 million over 400 million customers, people around the world. And today we protect their devices tomorrow. We're going to be protecting their digital lives. Thinking about new tools.

We are looking for partners, pioneers, people who can help fix this hole in our digital economy, who can help get rid of queues, help us design for human requirements, not just business, digital transformation ones. And I'd love to continue the conversation and, and work out how we can change the digital economy for the better. Thanks very much.