Thanks, Warik. So, this idea of pioneering is really what I want to dive into with my keynote, because building ecosystems is not simple. For the last few years, we've been very focused on wallets and technology and solving some of the technical problems, and now as we start to look at usability and diving into the business and commercial, there's a whole range of new challenges, and they're some of the things I'd like to highlight today.
Just very quickly, Miko, we focus on helping custodians to build ecosystems, to put the tools in the hands of people in the ecosystem to control and exchange their data. So, a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about today are things that we're working on with custodians, with partners, over the course of the last 12 months.
So, these are some of the real challenges, and in the keynote, what I'm going to do is call out some of the component parts and other speakers that you may have heard from earlier today, or if you were watching online, you may have missed those keynotes, and some of the other keynotes that are coming up later in the week that are important building blocks. So, this big question, what's it going to take to achieve scale and interoperability?
So, if we look at the identity dilemma, some of the challenges, you know, I've been talking about this for a decade. Have we spent millions or have we spent billions in trying to solve this problem? There's still no common global infrastructure, but we're certainly much closer than we've ever been before, and that's largely due to the emergence of standards.
We still don't have ubiquitous scale, but there are some things that we're seeing that are coming from Apple and Google, particularly in terms of usability, that are possibly shifting the dial, and no global interoperability, and a part of that is because one of the things that is emerging is the need for bilateral and multilateral agreements, or for some countries to actually change the laws to enable the technology. So, we already know here in the EU that we've been focused on this for some years. We've got the EU digital identity wallets.
We've got a very large population that is about to have these tools in their hands, and that's focused on Europe for now, but what we know is as digital citizens, we're constantly crossing borders. So, there's this growing urgency to look at how we can join things up around the world. As I just mentioned briefly, Google announced, I think, just there was some news of this last week, that you can now add your passport to their ID pass. They're already supporting the mobile driver's license, as is Apple.
Last year, Apple announced that it was going to support the My Number card in Japan, and that came ahead of the Japanese government actually changing some of the laws to enable that to be possible, and that capability is already supported by about 200 Android devices. So, what we see is this move from Apple and Google to start to train users on the ability to easily add identity artifacts into their wallets where they already have their concert tickets and they already have their boarding passes.
So, we're starting to see that shift in usability training, and as I also spoke about very briefly last year, is that they also have the back office business platforms because they've been approving apps for their app store, and so one of the questions is how easy is it to then start approving an organization to either be an issuer or a verifier.
So, one of the keynotes that I would encourage you, or the sessions I'd encourage you to go to this week, is Elizabeth Garber is going to be presenting on some of the work that OpenID and the City Hub is doing around this cross-border interoperability, what's important from the bilateral and the multilateral, getting governments involved.
I had an important discussion today around a cooperation opportunity, and the first thing is do you think that country's government would be able to talk to our government because we know without that agreement we really can't move beyond sort of the interoperability profile.
So, the other challenge that we also have with the ability for these capabilities to be in the hands of people is that we've got an acceleration of AI, an acceleration of fraud, and as Martin pointed out today when he was looking at 2040, his keynote was focusing on, okay, what are the kinds of signal management that we need, how can we be using the evolution of our identity fabric to make sure that we can detect this so that we can have these great experiences for people, and at the same time protect and manage. Cross-sector trust is critical. This is one of the challenges.
Something starts out in, I think, Christina today in the presentation showed that it starts out with renting a car, next minute you're making a payment, you're proving something, and so being able to make different sectors talk to each other is part of this challenge in terms of ecosystems because it's not focused on one area or one domain, and then one of the other challenges we have is that borders are digital but identity is still local, so we see lots of fantastic solutions that may work in a particular domain or sector or country but aren't necessarily going to scale beyond that, and part of that is back to us getting the legal agreements in place.
So, what are some of the problems with today's approach? So, we have some great solutions that may be fragmented because they focus on solving a single problem or they work in a single jurisdiction. We may have either siloed standards because people feel like, okay, we're making a decision now or we feel forced into making a decision about the standards that we build on, and then all of a sudden we see an ecosystem moving in a different direction. This is certainly one of the things that we hear all the time. How do we choose the right set of standards? How do we choose the right profile?
We also have an ongoing challenge where we have redundant verification, so it's actually technically possible to do something that's entirely digital but physical documents are still required because it's either a legal requirement or the police require you to collect a photocopy of a passport because you've checked into a hotel, so we have this kind of confusing situation where something's really simple on your phone and then the next minute you're pulling out a physical artifact.
And we also have the issue of frustrated users and blocked innovation, so I'd like to also call out Paul Toomey, who's going to do a really interesting keynote later this week from Guide on what can we do to actually empower digital consumers? What kind of representation will actually help to solve some of these frustrations? So why focus now on ecosystems rather than solutions? We've been talking about solutions for the last number of years because if we want to actually move beyond isolated single solutions, we need to start thinking of interconnected.
We need to look at moving away from silos into shared rules, shared signals, shared solutions that can plug and play. We need to start thinking of infrastructure rather than apps. Imagine if you had a credit card that only worked for a single vendor. You know that might be a great experience, but if you needed a different credit card for every type of vendor, we know that doesn't work and that doesn't scale, so we've got to be focusing on what's the underlying infrastructure to make ecosystems work. What are the key components to defining identity ecosystems?
Many of these things are really obvious and there'll be great sessions on these throughout the week. Interoperability, obviously very important. Trust frameworks and earlier today John from the UK government presented some of the things that are happening around governance and standards, which was fantastic because for the last few years we've been very focused on the EU regulation and now we're starting to see other countries say okay what's the overall governance? What are the standards we're advocating for? What are the technical choices that we can allow to develop that trust?
And then we heard from Max earlier today around some of the challenges where ecosystems cross borders and what happens is that you may have strong user agency, data protection, privacy in one jurisdiction and then all of a sudden your user, your customer, your employee is flying into another jurisdiction and all of those things go out the window. So in building ecosystems, understanding in those bilateral agreements how can you secure either the core rights or some interoperability around some of the things that protect users.
Some of the pillars for success in terms of building ecosystems, trust frameworks, open standards, governance models, public and private collaboration.
This is one of the things that we hear the most is the technology is evolving but without the public cooperation in terms of evolving either regulations or acceptance or support commercially for these ecosystems, it creates barriers and user-centric design and I think this is one of the areas where Apple and Google gently take users on a journey to educate them towards doing things that are really simple and so that's one of the challenges in terms of building ecosystems to have that simplicity. We've made significant progress on open standards.
There'll be some fantastic sessions on this during the week. Already I had the privilege of being in the OpenID workshop earlier this morning and it's just amazing the amount of progress that they're charting this year versus last year. So we know that in terms of having the underlying capabilities for ecosystems, we're seeing it there. So then how do we build trust at scale? Part of that is starting out in an ecosystem by looking at, okay, what's a simple use case where we can agree on mutual recognition? What's the assurance level that we require?
How can we be transparent around what's required for verification? And I know my go-to is always the holy grail of KYC or something that is high assurance and provides the most ubiquity, but to start an ecosystem, starting on some use cases where there's low assurance and you're just building that ability to prove that the ecosystem can work is a great place to start. And so I would encourage you to attend this Building Identity Scheme.
Steve Pannifer from Consult Hyperion, now FEME, together with MUFG in Japan will be talking about some of the great things that they're doing to start building a consortium around interoperability in Japan. And Steve's going to focus on some of the core things that need to be in place to get a scheme up and running. So one of the things that I hear constantly is, what's the killer use case? What's the killer use case? And I would like to challenge us to think about what are the range of use cases for scale?
When you're focused on a single solution, yes, you want the killer use case, but when you're thinking of building an ecosystem, what you want to be able to do is to think about what's the reusability, what's the portability of one thing across many use cases that build that utility? And so the question from an ecosystem is much more around how many things can a customer, a patient, a student, an employee do with this credential versus what's the single thing that they can do? And there are some really great ecosystems that are evolving that are focused on these.
APDI, the Asia-Pacific Digital Identity Consortium, ConnectID in Australia. I heard Dima give an update on some of the things that are happening there.
SelectID, which recently launched in the UK, and the Nordic Bank ID that has been around for some time and is really making massive progress. One of the interesting things about a lot of these groups is that their partners are banks or they're supported by banks that are looking to make sure that there is that utility for customers, but the possibility of also interoperability. Some of the common use cases are right to rent or let employee onboarding and age verification. So there's some of the use cases that we see.
So on APDI, another great session that you'll see this week is an ecosystem approach to cross-border in the Asia-Pacific region, specifically focusing on tourism and looking at some of the challenges, particularly from South Korea into Japan. And one of the really interesting things about what's happening in hospitality in Japan is that there's a growing shortage of people to work in hospitality. So more and more, checking into a hotel or a hospitality experience is via a kiosk or a robot.
So how do we start to build this capability when there isn't actually a person on the other end of what we're doing? So what's our call to action? If we're focusing on pioneering digital identity ecosystems, if we're now starting to look at the ecosystem that can sit around the EU digital identity wallet, if we're starting to look at the bilateral agreements between Europe and other countries, what's our call to action in terms of what we can focus on? So a few things to sum up.
Standard, standard, standards. Moving from product to protocols. What are the common things that we can agree on? What's the profile that we can agree on that we know that we can test interoperability and conformance on really, really quickly? How do we move from competition to cooperation? No one wants to hear that. Everyone wants the killer use case and their wallet. But a single wallet that can't exist in an ecosystem is not going to grow in scale. And then moving from isolated solutions to ecosystems.
That doesn't mean it's not important to test and validate something in a local market or within a specific cohort. But if it's going to then play a part in an ecosystem, it's thinking more broadly about what needs to happen. So if it takes a village to raise a child and as we look to Martin's 2040, so we've got the next 20 years to think about this next digital generation, what do we need to do to make these cooperative ecosystems to ensure that this next generation can transact in the digital world with trust? What role will you play in building these ecosystems?
And what is it that you can uniquely contribute to this pioneering work? Thank you. Brilliant as always. What can I say? Thank you so much for wrapping up what I hoped for all of you has been a really exciting first day. I know it's been a long first day, but I think as Katrina's pointed out, it's been full of really useful content and she's done some nice forward-looking pointers for you. Some great sessions coming up this week, I think. Yeah.
So yeah, so please give another round of applause for Katrina Dow.
