The Empowered Consumer and the Next Era of Digital Identity

Great. Hello all. And hopefully this is broadcasting.

Well, if the moderator could just confirm that through a thumbs up, So very good. I, I will begin. Welcome. Welcome to all this morning. Hopefully a good evening. Last night on the, on the cruise.

Again, my name is Charlie Walton. I'm from Avast in Prague. My apologies for not Dean there and my thanks to Andrea and, and the others that KuppingerCole for the invite again, quite sorry. I cannot be there in person. I've asked, as you might know, as a company that's been involved in cybersecurity for, for quite a number of years, back to 1988, about 2000 people and serves interestingly 435 million consumers with, with our products. We've recently entered the digital identity space.

I've been with the company for about a year having come from MasterCard, but we have joined forces with two very, very interesting companies. The first company named, ever dam, who is really the pioneer in, in what's called self-sovereign identity decentralized. And the second Toronto base secure key has joined us within this past month who have pioneered work in the area of, of bank ID and extensions from that within the Canada market.

I'd say in terms of the empowered consumer, as we've started, I, I surely see three cha three key challenges, one the very paradigm with which services and people interact. That's number one, number two, really the design of those services, what they offer and how they're offered. I don't feel we're actually designing consumer first and, and the third in order to achieve a great end for consumers, collaboration is, is really quite key. So I'd like to advance to the next slide, if we can, and talk a little bit about the centralized world that we live in.

I think everyone here surely knows the history of Fernando Carto and the invention of the password in 1960 at MIT that still remains with us. And it's very centric to how we deal with digital services today. Digital transactions that are dominated by an account, and then a password that account paradigm in a, in a silo in many ways is at the very heart of how we engage digitally.

I, I see that we have many of those siloed relationships, as we all know, hundreds to 200 O of these sorts of relationships. In most cases, we live in a very centralized digital world today dominated by the platform paradigm on the next slide.

We see we, we are over the past 30 years living very much with the notion and the general acknowledgement of that problem, that general absence of trust this cartoon of course remains as is relevant today, as it, as it did back then, the difference being not only is it a dog, but it is a bot that's actually unknown out there. The good bot and, and the bad bot were fundamentally lacking in my view, a, a digital trust foundation, not only for the consumer, but the services the consumer are, are actually dealing with.

I do think we can do much, much better for, for the user and for digital businesses. And it's all about solving that absence of trust issue. So with this 60 year old invention and a 30 year old problem, how do we solve this problem? That goes two ways trust in the digital provider and their trust in me, as many of you may know, and, and, and Rachel batsman's book about trust defined as the confident relationship to the unknown.

We need to interconnect and, and, and trust in a much better way and in a new digital wave, if we could move on the, to the next slide, please, the, the very perfect storm that I see that we're facing really goes like this hundreds of digital relationships that, that we all have those existing in silos. We've got 4.5 billion smartphones out there, and 200 billion connected devices.

And those, as we know, are growing, we're seeing as well with this identity and payment fraud, continuing to grow. We've all done great work at combating this, but it's growing in 2020, we ended up seeing 37 billion digital account records stolen. That is the bad guys are going after data in our digital honeypots.

And, and fundamentally, we all know that the digital economy is quite driven by ads, nearly half of, of all the half. The value of digital commerce marketplace 375 billion in 2022 was all taken up by ads. So if we doubt that this uncreative model Azure of surveillance, capitalism, where I, and my data are actually the product of great evidence at, at, at these sorts of numbers. Now with platform centric computing, fundamentally, we've got my relationship with this digital platform and, and this business model that I think we can do much better at.

So the poor user fundamentally at the end of the day gets a, a raw deal. Doesn't have a choice. And frankly, seeing this get worse in the next page quickly, we'll diver digress for just a second, and just examine this idea of trust models that we have applied today.

The very siloed model as I've just described is really out there, we've become frankly, a bit more efficient there as we've federated social login that solved some problems of convenience, but has created other problems of data, access and control we've applied bank Federation, which in my opinion, in a privacy blinded manner has provided really great, great value in community. And then a decentralized model.

Now, in many respects, as I've talked to general business persons and have explained the idea of decentralization or, or SSI, we can simply talk about the model that was applied. And we all sort of lived in, as we perhaps checked into a hotel this week, presenting the credit card from our wallet, presenting the ID document from our wallet, presenting the COVID credential from our phone or our wallet. These are credentials I hold, I own, I control, I never had a pre-established relationship with that hotel. The transaction worked just, just fine.

So that is digitally signed credentials that I hold that are then presented almost in a, bring your own account type way, that model, that very model we begin to eat away and help us with dealing with cyber attack because we reduce the attack surface associated with, with the, with the gold, that is the data held in a, in a data structure. We end up becoming more privacy friendly for people.

And also that end point, the end point that the user or the consumer holds ends up becoming a lot more integration, friendly, and fundamentally we have the advantage of people able to provide much more accurate data. So in this category on the next slide, we'll see that digital users we feel are just not really not really well served. My conclusion is they don't have a raw deal. We all know we don't have much of a choice that if we want to interact great with or interoperate with platform a or service B, we don't have much of a choice on the terms and conditions with which we do that.

But click the check box on the privacy policy at 17 pages and we're often running or, or not, if we choose not to engage, and those are fundamentally our choices, what this means is that we have to do better on the user side and bring to bear great user experiences and a business model, frankly, that works with the empowered consumer. We all know the problem. We've got managing the hundreds of relationships managing the 50 or more digital credentials that we all end up Really helping to advise the user as they interact with brands that they, they choose to doing this really across PC mobile.

And then non-personal digital device engagement models and doing that across the globe and an inclusive manner.

We're ready to move beyond niche implementations that we've seen around the planet into something that really sings and really ends up working quite well for, for the user by way, the business model, this flip from the user being a valued customer, as opposed to the user being the product that flip and, and the creation of business model that really works along those lines is where we see the world evolving to now in the next page, we see this embodied this tool for the empowered consumer in the form of what I will call a digital smart agent.

So that is software that works for me and in, and in much of our language, think about it as a, as a digital identity wallet on steroids. It's it's software that actually works for me controlled by me to help me create and manage my digital personas, bring together my travel relationship information, my eCommerce information, and other in the things that I do every day and, and every week to help me confirm through appropriate sources, my, my personal data and my personal attributes to help me manage my digital relationships, to allow those to be turned on, turned off as an example.

And, and today's not a good example as I didn't travel, but in 2019, I was on the road quite frequently. I ended up having 200 nights in a hotel 10 nights where I slept on a, on a plane, on a red eye flight. And I found that I was managing my travel life in the form of 50 different apps with data that was all over the map, not well controlled, not well organized. So beginning to provide ways of managing the aspects of me and where I engage with with digital to be able to authenticate without passwords.

Let's, let's finally put the password to rest and then to transact with trust and confidence in a more balanced way to take back control of that digital me and to, to help me interact and, and, and deal in a, in a matter that's, that's fairer to help me with my identity, my data, and importantly, my digital reputation. And it is in this category of digital reputation that I believe we're gonna see a, a great deal of innovation coming in these these few years ahead. So we all see this digital smart agent to be the, the, the direction helping to protect our, our digital freedom.

Now that all cannot come with ease and simplicity on the next slide, we, we see this key point that commercial collaboration is, is just absolutely critical.

There's not one organization on the planet that can roll out a digital smart agent network, as I've described without the great involvement of those around the globe that that collaboration is called for with, with private sector innovation, with investment, with DNA and the energy that then fuels service growth through that, it evolves as well, key stakeholders in government, within financial services and, and amongst technology and, and other communities, and importantly, with, with digital businesses.

So in many respects, we've begun to do work in the commons in standards groups in best practice groups and in niches within countries. What we really see called for now is a commercial collaboration. That's broader in scope, and that's focused on delivering great outcomes to people empowering that consumer that we've spoke of and, and as well to do that in a standard manner, in an open manner, in a non monopolistic manner. And to do that in a way that also serves the interests of society and the form of government and serves digital businesses.

What I may say is that this innovation around collaboration is, is this third challenge. So with that, I'd like to like, to really wrap up. We do see a vast, if we can go to the next slide quickly, that, that we see that Ava is, is really working to help protect digital freedom. We do see that the consumer is in a circumstance of, of, of having quite, quite the raw deal, this migration and evolution to a decentralized digital identity paradigm for greater user centric services. And for collaboration, we do see to be just exceptionally critical.

So with that, I'd like to thank you all again, my apologies for being remote, I miss the energy being face to face with you all. I do hope a, a good event today and in the days that come, I, I will have to point out that a number of Avast colleagues are live in the flesh in Berlin today. I'll mention Drummond Reed Drummond was the past CTO at, at ever. And as you know, one of the, one of the co-founders of the trust over IP foundation and is really driving digital trust services here now at, at Avast. So Drummond is, is around.

He does give a talk a little later today, and I'd also like to mention Didier. Sarah Didier is the head of commercial at Avast today. He was driving the same at Toronto based secure key.

Prior, both are around, along with others in our team. We do have a meeting room B 92.

Again, Avast is relatively new to the game, but we see ourselves as a, as a key scaling player. We're investing strongly to empower that digital consumer. So thank you very much and have a good day.