Embracing Diverse Specifications – Abstracting for a Plurality of Markets With Multi Stack Solutions

Yeah. All right. Thank you for staying, for staying before lunch. That's very kind of you. I promise not to bore you guys. And I head right in The topic of today's presentation is embracing diverse specifications. I think it's something that we all, can I wait until a few people close the door? Let's see. Okay. So the title of today's presentation for me is Embracing Diverse Specifications Abstracting for Plurality of Markets with Multi-Stack Solutions. I saw that in the app of the event. This title's not even shown because it's too long. So sorry for that.

Good that you're still here because today I'm going to talk about, let's see, yeah, I'm going to talk about the history of a 500 year old company that started its work as the printer of stock documents in around 1500 and in Switzerland. So coming out of Zurich or fiscal group is until today one of the leading providers of analog security documents. We're printing the Swiss Franc, we're printing the Swiss passport, and we're a big group of companies working in different fields. But so far we haven't really been active in the world of digital identity and digital products.

And proce, the company that I'm standing here for today is a company that has been active since 2017, focused explicitly on the topic of digital credentials and wallets ever since it started.

So for us, the journey of bringing these two companies together and coming to a coherent strategy on where we want to go to bring the analog world of document security and issuing these kind of documents to people and utilizing them in everyday life into a digital realm and playing a role there as a company, bringing our like century long experience together with this new innovative space was a strategy journey that took us over the last three years even more.

And the first thing we had to do was acknowledging the complexity that we have to move in as an organization because unfortunately, every customer is different. There is no one solution for every one you ever encounter. There is no one solution for every use case. As soon as you tackle a new topic, be it an employee credential or a student ID card, a bunch of fundamental things change.

The trust registry you have to include into the process has to change because sometimes you rely on something coming from the state, sometimes it comes from industry associations, but you can never really tap into the same thing twice. If you go through different credential use cases, then there's legacy. So unfortunately, you have to always live with what's with what has been built before. And in our case, this means really understanding for each of the use cases where a technology will be built, what will people have to plug themselves into?

Which kind of business process will they have to enrich with this new technology and new system and not just completely replace, right? We've been in this industry for quite a while, and in the beginning, and also for me personally speaking, being in this space since 2017, we thought we can just completely erase the history and bring our beautiful new solution of digital credentials and decentralized identity to the market. We had to learn the hard way that this is not going to be happening.

So for us, understanding this complexity, understanding the legacy means that you actually understand reality, right? You understand where you have to move in with your product, which led us to the embracing part, right? Building a product strategy in this market means you have to understand the legal requirements You're moving in. We had to understand that there is for each market, but sometimes not just for the country or the European Union as a kind of regional legislative legislation space, but sometimes even for the sector, you have different regulation, right?

So there's the IDAs 2.0, a hot topic on this conference because right now it's just in its implementation phase and in its last stretches of architecture development, you have the Swiss EID. The first time that Switzerland will have a digital identity solution. It's just about the around the corner as well. You have mobile driving licenses also on an international level, right? So we have an international mobile driving licenses directive in Europe, it's going to be there very soon. In the US it's already present. And then other examples are digital travel credentials, right?

Totally different field. Another bunch of actors responsible for it, but ultimately we all expect them to reside in the wallet and to be interacting with systems, be it in tourism, travel, the work environment, and understanding that as the kind of foundation really builds up to the understanding of, okay, what do we have to cater to? What do we have to kind of, yeah, work with? And next to that is the customer needs because for us really serving what a customer needs is in the focus, right?

We started off really exploring technology, exploring these new ideas around wallets and credentials, and then we more and more learn through customer projects, through actual production solutions that we have to really come from the need of the customer and not so much from us as the brilliant minds of innovation that have this new technical idea that they want to bring to the world. So merging these two things, bringing them together is really important.

And coming back to the start of this section, the whole point of uncertainty unfortunately plays a huge role because for most of the things on this slide, we don't know the answer. So we don't know the final architecture for E IDAs 2.0, we don't know the final architecture for the Swiss EID project. We don't even know how exactly a trust anchor will have to be added to the credential. All of this stuff is still under definition, right? For mobile driving licenses, we're actually rather certain.

But even there with dash seven, for those of you that are a bit closer to the standard, the online exchange is still coming up. It's still forming, right? So evolving architectures are unfortunately something we have to deal with. And this idea that at some point it's going to be done, it's gonna be ready, probably not, right? So we probably have to deal with constantly evolving architectures. And this means that a product that you want to bring into this market has to handle this extensibility, right? You have to be able to constantly bring it to the next level.

Scope creep is another big thing that you have to be aware of. Unfortunately, whenever you work with the customer, he's gonna want something just before the deadline. And you have to have a system that can handle that. If you cannot handle a change in requirements or a change in additional needs coming in from the customer and your system is just overwhelmed by it, you're not going to be successful.

Again, kind of going into this area of extensibility and flexibility and then the unknown unknowns. And this is really just there as a spot to be left blank because we just oftentimes do not know what we'll have to face.

For us, all of this resulted around two and a half years ago in the strategy to build a multi-stack solution that is really optimized towards flexibility and scalability. I said that we've been active in the space since 2017, and I myself have been working with other startups before that also emerged around that same time. These startups went through at least three to four different architectures. We went through different approaches of solving the problem of bringing digital credentials that are trustworthy and independent from the issuer into a wallet and makes them make them exchangeable.

Doing that really requires you to understand the things I mentioned before, but unfortunately bringing it to production. So really bringing it into the big world that we also talk about here at EIC. And that's I think why just only in the last two editions of this event, this really started to play a role at EIC has come with a lot of different requirements. So bringing the kind of innovation space of digital credentials and wallets into actual scalable systems is another challenge.

And that's why us starting two years ago with a completely new product development, completely new code base, completely new architecture without any legacy code inside was a purposely made decision because we wanted to make sure that we can really optimize for the right things right from the start and don't have to deal with our own legacy. Multi-stack on our side means that we have a non-exclusive unified interface for all implementation flavors and implementation flavors.

I will come back to that in a minute, is really that it doesn't matter which credential format, which exchange protocol, which transport layer, which key signing algorithm. You have to truly be agnostic to that. It also means that we deliver parallel like we deliver into parallel regulatory environments. I started earlier with this acknowledging of the reality of different regulatory requirements.

The Swiss EID ecosystem will likely be different from E iida in what it wants from an identity solution, from what it expects as a credential format, from what it expects as the trust anchor to it and the way it's linked. So our solution has to be capable of doing both at the same time, delivering potentially invisibly to the user to different or multiple different credentials serving the same informational need, but doing it into different ecosystems. And then lastly, really just supporting everything that will come on top and that is already there today.

So the whole point that I made before about formal formats, protocols, et cetera, flexibility for us, and that's what my co CEO already talked about yesterday in his presentation, is that we want to be fully futureproof, meaning that the solution cannot be considered final at any point in time. The way we develop the solution onto the next lay level or next stage always only has to be a step on the way.

So for us, the whole kind of architectural approach is making sure whatever you build is built so it can be extended. We never think this is the final step in the development process. We always think about it as it's the next intermediate step in the development process, then making sure that it's really allowing for context dependency. And that would probably be a full talk here at the conference next year because context dependency means that for the user in the wallet, their credentials will all look the same.

But underneath having a gym membership credential is very different from a national EID. And they come with different contextual requirements. They come with different contextual needs, different contextual regulation, and you have to be able to account for that within your system. And that's what we try to do with this whole approach of flexibly integrating the different protocols, allowing you to link the different trust anchors referring to different policies without having to leave the solution or customize it to your particular case.

And then this brings me to the whole point of modularization. So it all goes down to keeping it really neatly separated on the components that you can separate in order to be able to kind of lift through this extensibility over time. And now scalability as the kind of last big point is developing it for performance at scale. That's really something that unfortunately we as a decentralized identity startup and innovation space haven't been doing very well. And also for good reasons. When you only make the technology come kind of into the world, it's about proving the point that it works.

It's about proving the point that exchanging credentials via wallets really brings a benefit. But unfortunately, these very same implementations usually don't work very well at scale. So the challenge is making sure that you can, now that it's a proven point and there's a huge demand in the market as we know that you can now make it so it works with millions and hundred thousands of credentials.

The Deploy Anywhere approach is something I will talk about in a second when we go to the architecture and the partnership driven implementation is just a hint on, we are definitely not doing that all ourselves. So Prosci is focusing only on the technology side of things. We're working with different partners and integrators to bring the technology to the customer to bring it to the particular use case, to the com particular implementation.

But from, for us and on our end, the focus really is down on making sure that these integrators, these developers can work in the best way possible with our solution. And this is the kind of marketing slide or the most marketing slide in my presentation, and that's about how it's set up as a system. So wherever you want to put it, be it on mobile as a wallet application, it's a verifier application, whether you want to embed that into another system. So we've been just talking also here on the conference with people bringing wallet capabilities into existing applications.

You can do that utilizing the core, the pro service one core. It's the kind of unified basis for everything that I talked about. It's really the focus of our work. And then wherever you want to utilize this, you can choose to do so. So either on mobile or on the server, this goes more into the issuer and verifier worlds and the lifecycle handling and management of credentials, or even on IOT and smart hardware, because luckily we decided to build this whole thing on rust, and that makes it work in very kind of confined environment as well.

When I spoke AMO about the modularization part, the core is really where all of this happens. So there's a module for the whole exchange protocol perspective. There's a module for the credential formats, a module for the signing, a module for the key storage alternatives, going from hardware security modules all the way to stored in software. There's a module for the DID methods as a meta layer for the identifiers. There's a module for the whole revocation world, right?

Different revocation methods for different contexts again, and there's the whole trust list and trust anchor component that you can plug into your respective implementation. And then below that is the trust layer as such, which we also don't provide ourselves, but really just allow everybody to tap into depending on their context.

And the only message that I want to kind of leave with here is that whatever way a wallet or the whole kind of wallet development affects you as an organization, as a business, precipitous one will allow you or can allow you to tap into that and connect your respective need to our solution and to the wallets thereby. So open for questions. Thank you very much. Thank You. Okay. We do have time for questions or a question. Okay. But you're around I guess for, I'm around lunch. Yeah.

So if, if you want to catch up with Kai, then you'll you, you'll be upstairs, I guess. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you so much. See you at lunch and thank you very much.