Into the Wild and Beyond the Enterprise

Hey everyone. Isn't it great to be back in Berlin? I think this is, yes, I think this is maybe year nine or 10 for me. So it's so wonderful to look out and see so many familiar faces. My keynote today is really dedicated to the enormous amount of incredible collaboration that has been going on over the last 12 months since we were all last together.

And when I first talked to the to Yorg about this talk and he suggested this idea of into the wild, beyond the enterprise, it builds a little bit on what Martin has already presented this morning, is how we can start to move out of the enterprise into this, into ecosystems. But first, very quickly, I'm the founder and CEO of Miko. We focus on enabling custodian partners to give their customers access control in exchange of their data and, and digital assets.

And I, I, I want you to keep in mind that word custodian because I really think that's the key to where things are moving from an ecosystem point of view. The enterprise view or the Siam view, or the I AM view that we've had for a number of years always had the enterprise in at the center with customers around the outside. And so everything was perceived from the perspective of the enterprise. We know on and off for the last decade we've been talking about this SSI perspective where the citizen is in the center and they are mediating their relationships with their service providers.

However, we know that without trust anchors and without relationships with those service providers to be able to verify data, this model doesn't build trust end to end. And in fact, what we really are starting to see now is that our lives are moving between these ecosystems just as Martin showed this wallet that may have all of your personal credentials and other that may be asserted associated with your professional and another one that may be used over the course of your life to make financial decisions or health decisions.

And so if I just look at my life, I have a relationship with my government at home Australia, the government in Belgium, I'm traveling for business and there are credentials that are as relevant in one part of my life as they are in another part of my life. But it's very difficult for me to have that movement or for those credentials to make my life seamless as I move from ecosystem to ecosystem. We know already in Europe that we are focused on bringing this wallet capability to over 300 million citizens or residents of Europe.

And so there's vision towards what is now, I guess will be SP spoken about quite a lot this week, E IIDA two and getting clear in terms of the vision for all EU citizens, residents and visitors businesses to be offered this opportunity to have wallets and these wallets that should be able to interact across various ecosystems. We've already seen from some of the great sessions this morning that it's financial services and governments that are really leading the charge either in the innovation or starting to develop solutions in this area.

And if we look very quickly at the timetable for this year, this is the first time that we've had so much clarity around where we are, what's coming and where we need to be. My prediction is that there'll probably a lot be a lot of consulting work over the next 12 to 18 months in helping organizations work out what's the strategy, what are the technology choices, how do you get ready?

However, there are already many organizations that are on this journey and Neil covered that. And some of the great sessions this morning around some things that are happening with governments, with financial institutions, the race is already on in terms of being ready. So the wallet is emerging as this new citizen or customer channel and has the potential to replace apps and provide much more connected digital services. And on this theme, I I would encourage you to catch the session on life management platforms, which I think is on Thursday.

And I'm reminded of the life management paper that Yorg and Martin wrote 20 12, 20 14, something like that. I'd encourage you to go back and read that paper. It is so prescient. I understand now reading it with what we know about AI and decentralized identity, that many of the use cases and that vision of a decade ago is now possible. So what we'll start to see is this foundation for being able to manage our life across, being able to issue, prove, store access, track revoke. The difference is with you and I actually having an active role in that, in that ecosystem.

So if we look at this new channel, big question is, I was in a session this morning that was really looking at the UX of wallets or the customer experience. We already have two platform players that that really excel in ux. So does that mean the whole wallet capability has already been one? Or will we find that what we are doing here in Europe together with the work of the Open Wallet Foundation, or in fact the collaboration between these major platforms, this regulated shift and this open ecosystem is gonna produce the best results? And I hope that's the case.

I hope we don't have a situation where we have very limited choice in terms of the wallets that we have. But one topic that we haven't been talking about very much until now is the business side of this platform orchestration, which is onboarding issuers and onboarding verifiers. And I would say at the moment, this is an area where the two major platforms have a huge advantage because we have almost a decade of onboarding to manage legal entities for app Store.

So you can imagine that it wouldn't be too difficult the next time you submit something to one of those platforms and opt-in process to become an issuer or to become a verifier, confirm the legal entity you're already associated with. So if we really want the richness and diversity of this choice, then we really need to be thinking about these onboarding and these interoperable business platforms so that we've got the business infrastructure to build that trust into the user journey.

So now what I'd like to look at very quickly is some of the challenges from a technical perspective, a commercial and a legal point of view.

So on the technical considerations, notwithstanding what Anil said in terms of having time to work things out and to trial things and that we have this timetable that's still a couple of years, but I think one of the things that I'm reminded of constantly when we say the word wallet is I worry that we've settled into a particular form factor or we imagine this is something that is just automatically on our phone when in fact a wallet can be software running somewhere with some policies, claims context against a security posture.

So I wonder, and I think it's too late for us to change the word and container is not a very sexy word, but I wonder if we started to think a little bit more around the label of container, a secure container that that can help us understand that actually we have a lot more flexibility. A wallet is not an app, but a wallet can be embedded in an app. But exactly as Martin said, if we end up with as many wallets as we have apps, then we will not have made this amazing evolution at the same time.

My fridge could be a wallet, my coffee machine could be a wallet, or I could have a very nice yellow, shiny wallet. So the ability also for us to be thinking about where these relationships might be machine to machine relationships. My coffee machine is able to order and pay for pods. My refrigerator can stock up and my car can detect the identity of the driver and then any of the associated permissions. But just to sum up some of the considerations that where I hope there is still time for us to work these things out, we probably don't wanna end up in a per credential wallet world.

That will be a disaster, that will be a massive fail. We don't wanna end up with just two platforms dominating the whole ecosystem. We need issuers to be able to issue to multiple wallets.

And again, as as Martin said, we want the ability to say, I have something in my professional wallet. I now wanna put it in my personal wallet, or I want this particular credential, which maybe is an emergency credential to be available in any wallet that opens up. We also therefore need to be designing for interoperability. And we obviously need to get the security right. Last week I had the privilege of seeing a presentation from John Bradley on the Federation of Wallets.

And as he so kindly pointed out the solution to the problem that we don't understand that we already have, I would really encourage you to go to that session this week. I think that is also on Thursday. So now to the business model. So for a decade or two, what have we been doing? Collecting data, monetizing data, maybe not so much here in Europe compared to other markets in the world, but what are some of the business considerations?

And this is something that we've been tracking over the last couple of years, particularly because we've been working in this end user citizen-centric for this citizen-centric perspective for some time. And what we're charting is two business models that we think can be even more valuable than data monetization. The first thing is the creation of net new value, and the other one is time to value. So net new value is a whole range of services that will arise in and around this ecosystem that we've never had before.

The time to value is going to be again, like the examples that Martin shared with how quickly we can onboard cross board off board. So this ability to have an employee up and running to triage a patient to enroll into a service. And so very quickly we, we see there are at least seven new net new services that could be built into multimillion dollar businesses that have not existed in the same way before.

And on the time to value just the business and backend back office savings can also lead to really, really strong commercial models where you don't ever have to touch the data, see the data, read the data, monetize the data. So now quickly to the legal considerations. We know here in Europe that we have over the last five years been working alongside new regulation that has either been passed or is now coming into coming into play, including the EIS two.

And a lot of that based on the European data strategy of not just the idea of us being able to be cross border but also break out of the silos. And for us to be able to move between these different data spaces and have some portability. I I must say there is a lot of work on in the data spaces still on the enterprise or the service provider view and probably not enough on the role of the citizen within those data spaces or the employee in those data spaces or the patient in those data spaces. So I think we still have some work to do there.

So if we now look at this ecosystem perspective, this is really the segue into the heroes and heroines of of, of the work that's been bubbling on in the background. And that is alongside government initiatives. We've got standards bodies working and working groups across the landscape focused on interoperability and scalability beyond borders. This is a really challenging task.

We have some amazing organ organizations that have been around for some years and we have some new entrants over the last couple of years that are helping to build bridges between technologies and, and also between regulatory regimes and countries. However, there's a lot of work to do.

The fact that I can take a credit card out of my pocket and use it just about anywhere in the world and it works the same way, is because what sits underneath that are universal scheme rules, clarity around where the risk sits, clarity around who's responsible for issuing that card, who it will accept that card, and on what terms. So we've got work to do.

However, very positively over the last through last year, this year we've seen an increase on initiatives working on these legal and commercial frameworks to see how we can start to harmonize that. And I'd like to especially call out the work of OIX in this regard. I had the privilege of catching up with Nick Mother Shore last week and he was talking, he, he also gave this presentation around the harmonization between the UK and the US in terms of what they're calling this trust framework for roaming wallets.

So specifically when we're crossing borders and traveling, and I love this idea from a rural point of view of working out really quickly between different regimes. What can you accept from that other regime?

Tick, okay, let's move on. Okay, we can't accept that. What can we adapt? Can we come up with something that both parties or multi parties are comfortable with? Or can we align on something so that we can start to build some of this logic into the backend of the wallet so we can leave one country where we may have a specific set of protections and rights, we can cross the border of another country.

We have some of the benefits, but we also recognize that we get a message from our wallet very quickly to say, now that you're entering this regime, these are the things that are contextual for this place. But the minute you leave this place and go home, all of those rights within that ecosystem are restored. The other piece of work that I'd love to call out, and I had also the privilege yesterday of the, of attending the city hub in Berlin yesterday, is the work around the sustainable and interoperable digital identity.

This is a massive task, this is an extraordinary feat, but so was credit cards working everywhere. So was the interoperability of passports. So was the interoperability of so many things. And the great thing is that this work has started it's gathering momentum and support from countries and communities and NGOs and governments around the world, which is really important. And it also extends into the amazing work that's been happening are on the FPI work over the last few years. Look at how many countries.

I remember seeing, I think Nat do a, a presentation on this, what doesn't seem like a very few years ago. And you know, there was one or two flags. And so what what we're starting to see is that the work that has been done over the last decade is now coming up with these choices to provide some certainty.

However, we are going need to, we need new tools, we need new workflows, we need new business tools for issuers, for verifiers, for revocation, for trust list, for profile interoperability and, and most importantly for scalability, we may be able to fix these things within a closed ecosystem to start. And then we need to think of how does that ecosystem link to the next and to the next, which leads me into some work that I feel very privileged to have been part of over the last six months.

Again, I would really encourage you to attend this session tomorrow. This is focused on real interoperability from a multi-stakeholder point of view between DNP and Japan, MUFG Bank together with Connect ID in Australia supported by National Australia Bank. And they will all be here to present tomorrow together with Jan Reen from Miko and also featuring the work that we've done through Open ID standards. This is real tech, but what I can tell you, having been involved in this for the last six months, the technology is the easy bit.

It's the rules and the harmonization, it's all of that work to do behind the scenes that is so important. But I would very much encourage you to attend that. So in closing, technology alone doesn't change the world.

It can, but for the world that we want, we need the social contracts, we need interoperable trust greens to realize the change we want. And the last thought that I would leave you with is everyone needs to trust someone at some time. And the work ahead of us for the next year years is for us to create that trust and be worthy of that trust. Thank you. Thank you so much Katrina.

Well, I understand there's so much work to do on technology, on legislation, on policies and agreements and so on. What would be, in your opinion, the priority, priority thing to start with? Get started. Get started? Okay. Yeah.

I, I think if, if I was very encouraged this morning to already see how many organizations are starting down this path and I think it's pick something, a use case, a collaboration, an ecosystem that's adjacent to you, a community that's working on the same kind of technology and try something. So build your club and go, yes, Exactly. Okay. There's also a bit more technical question if that would be not, isn't a wallet policy risky when roaming?

That's, I think that's why the work of OIX is so important. And, and again, I would encourage you because the, the short answer is yes to these policies. We will have to be able to detect those and we'll have to understand where a policy that may be very favorable ceases to be when you cross the border. So for instance, I was in the US last week and it's a requirement now for the Esther that I provide my social media login details. Yeah. So that's not something I would do by choice, but in order to enter the country, that's a requirement.

And so yes, which is why a lot of the smarts that we need to build into the backend is, is, you know, it's a whole new field of work really that that policy translation. Thank you. And then one last question we have you recom, it says, if you recommend the availability of a high number of wallets on the market, how could a simple citizen be able to choose the right one without being caught in any type of fraudulent fraudulence?

Okay, So this is where this, I, I know there's a school that says I, you know, my wallet should be trusted in any ecosystem, but we also have responsibilities to make sure that those ecosystems are not fraudulent. And, and again, if you're working in any kind of regulated market, government, financial institution and enterprise that has a fiduciary duty, we need to get this onboarding of issuers and this onboarding of verifiers, right? To be able to make sure that we can not only mitigate those risks, but we can understand the right security posture and the protections to have in place.

So it would be very nice if I could show up anywhere with any wallet network, anytime. That's a, that is a great goal. But the reality of that is, is that we also have a responsibility to protect people and to understand whether or not that piece of software can be trusted. Yeah. And of course wallet certification as described in the EI desk could also help to select the certified wallets. Yes. But I think everything doesn't have to be such an extreme step up.

I think there are many, particularly for prototyping and getting started, there are many use cases that don't require high assurance, still requires security and and trust, but may not be as complex from the perspective of getting started and proving out or starting to work with the work that Open Wallet Foundation is doing or many of the other initiatives to try stuff and get started. Yeah. Thank you very much Katrina. Thank you. Interesting to listen to you. I hope to speak to you more often. Thank you. On this topic.