The Future of Identity

One of the most frequent requests that we get is to record an episode about Trinsic. So this week we’re doing just that because we recently announced the launch of our identity acceptance network in partnership with CLEAR, Yoti, IDVerse, Airside, Dentity, and more than a dozen others.This episode will outline what identity acceptance is, how Trinsic landed on this approach, and how this might be relevant to you.If this is interesting to you, we’re hosting a webinar next week which you can learn more about and register at trinsic.id/webinar.To read more about our identity acceptance network check out the announcement: https://trinsic.id/first-identity-acceptance-network/Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out on Twitter at rileyphughes, and visit trinsic.id if you’re interested in participating in our identity acceptance network.

In this episode we talk with Adrian Field, the Director of Market Development at OneID, which is a bank-based identity verification product focused on the UK market.We cover a range of topics, including:How they apply a revenue-share model to incentivize banks to participate in their ecosystemThe main use cases they’re focusing on in their go-to-market and the drivers that qualify those as good use casesHow Adrian sees the user experience evolving with emerging standards like verifiable credentialsAdrian has a very good grasp on the digital ID ecosystem and is generous sharing his insights after four years working in this space.You can learn more about OneID on their website: https://oneid.uk/.Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

In today’s episode we spoke with Taylor Liggett, Chief Growth Officer of ID.me, which is the largest reusable ID network in the United States and may be the largest private digital ID network in the world. With over 100 million user wallets and $150 million in revenue, ID.me has figured some things out about reusable ID adoption and monetization.We talk about how reusable identity reduces the friction required to undergo a verification, and therefore expands the market. Taylor shares specific stats on conversion rates and completion times that are very interesting.We cover a bunch of tactical topics, like:The education process needed to onboard relying partiesHow the go-to-market of a reusable ID product differs from a traditional transaction-based identity verification solutionID.me’s decision to prioritize web experiences over requiring a mobile walletThe business model ID.me charges its customersTaylor spoke to some of the common objections that people online and in the media tend to have with ID.me. He did a great job addressing ID.me's tie-in with government, their strategy to build consumer trust in their brand after experiencing both good and bad press, and how they’re thinking about the evolution of interoperability in the space.You can learn more by visiting the ID.me website.Listen to the full episode on Apple podcasts, Spotify or find all ways to listen at trinsic.id/podcast.

On today’s episode we talked with Eric Scouten, Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe, who has been working for the last four years on solving content authenticity. What does that mean? We’ll get into it in the episode, but suffice it to say that it’s an effort to bring trust to content online.Was the pope really photographed in that puffy jacket? Was the photo of a war zone really taken this week, or is that from several years ago? And we’ll get into how to identify the identity of the individual or business behind the content, in a privacy-preserving way.We talk about adoption of the C2PA standard, how the content authenticity initiative recruited so many of the most influential tech and media platforms, and how Adobe built the conviction to ship the first versions into production despite a cold start problem.We also talk about the user experience of content authenticity, both from the creator side and consumer side, and some thornier issues including potential for censorship and deceit.This is a fascinating episode into an emerging standard that I believe will be an important part of all our lives over the coming years, and example of incredible innovation coming from a large technology company.You can learn more about the Content Authenticity Alliance at https://contentauthenticity.org/ and you can find more about the C2PA standard at https://c2pa.org/Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

On today’s episode we spoke to Adam Gunther, SVP and General Manager of Digital Solutions at Equifax. This was a fascinating conversation about Adam’s journey leading decentralized identity at IBM, moving into an operating role within Equifax, and how their reusable identity strategy has evolved over time.We talk about tactical factors that are needed for reusable identity adoption, like solutions to liability and common taxonomies for onboarding and recovery. We also talk about how to move forward ambitious identity projects within large enterprises. Listen for Adam’s three rules for getting products off the ground, and why he says “no smart refrigerators.”You can learn more about Kount, an Equifax Company, on their website and you can find Adam on LinkedIn.Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

In this episode we talk with Phil Windley, Sr. Software Development Manager at AWS, Cofounder of IIW, former Chair of Sovrin Foundation. We talked about his experience building and leading the Sovrin Foundation, which at one point was almost synonymous with the term self-sovereign identity. It was set up to be an identity metasystem that would reinvent how identity was done online… and we talk about why it didn’t end up becoming that.Phil shares lessons from identity systems that got adopted, like the social login metasystem, as well as from things that didn’t get a lot of adoption, like certain identity blockchains and information cards a decade prior. We hope this an interesting episode. We’re glad we got to tell a small part of the Sovrin story as we think a lot of today’s reusable ID projects have their roots in the movement Sovrin started—including Trinsic. To learn more about Phil you can visit his personal website https://windley.com/ where you'll find ways to contact him, and buy his new book.Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Today we talked with Nick Thomas, cofounder of Finicity, which was acquired by Mastercard, where Nick went on to be the EVP of Global Open Finance Innovation. Nick has a fascinating career that has paralleled digital identity for a long time, as a cofounder of Bluetooth and FDX, the major open banking standards body in the US. These are both organizations that brought an industry together around common standards to grow the market far bigger for everyone involved—and we talk lessons learned and how this applies to identity.Nick shares a deep look into Finicity’s story starting as a consumer application and eventually becoming a major data aggregator. Then we dive into Finicity’s journey disrupting themselves by pushing into open banking. We explore the work Finicity did with verifiable credentials as an issuer, and the big challenge that prevented them from rolling it out. You’ll appreciate all of his takes on the parallels between fintech and IDtech.To learn more about Nick you can find him on LinkedIn. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

In this episode, we talk with Jacques von Benecke, CTO of DHI, the commercial and investment arm of the government of Bhutan. If you haven’t heard, Bhutan has launched one of the most complete SSI ecosystems in the world! We spent most of the time diving in to how it’s going since launching just a few months ago.We get into metrics, like how many users have onboarded, and the growth rate over time. We cover use cases, business models, governance, and more! We even cover how they productize wallets for accessibility, and we were amazed to hear they have iOS, Android, and web… but they have 11 other wallet configurations they’ve had to build to cover the whole population!Most of all it was really interesting to see what can happen when you have top-down mandate to develop better digital identity and a strong technology approach to execute.To learn more about Bhutan’s National Digital Identity initiative you can visit Bhutan NDI or listen to Jacques' interview on the (un)Trustables podcast.Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

In this episode, we talk with Jon Gelsey, founding CEO of Auth0 Inc, which sold to Okta for $6.5B, as well as the CEO of Xnor.ai which he sold to Apple for $200m.Jon told the story of the early days of Auth0, including how they got their first $1m of revenue. Then we spent time diving in to how new technologies get adopted—Jon even went as far as saying that technology adoption is always incremental, not revolutionary.Then we talk about the role of big tech, and why he doesn’t think reusable identity will be dominated by massive incumbents. That led us to talk about what he would do if he were running a company whose business model could be cannibalized by reusable identity, which is that he would look to disrupt himself in a safe way.This was a rare look into some great advice from one of our industry’s best operators.To learn more about Jon, you can visit his LinkedIn profile.Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcastReach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

In this episode, we sit down with Harrison Tang, Co-founder and & CEO of Spokeo, which is a “people search engine”. Spokeo aggregates many sources of data about people and sells that data to verifiers. So at first blush, Harrison is an unlikely person to be a massive advocate for SSI and co-chair of the W3C Credentials Community Group.We dig in to why Spokeo cares about verifiable credentials, and how verifiable credentials represent the opportunity to deliver more trust to Spokeo’s customers and how they allow Spokeo to participate in the next wave of digital identity innovation. We also explore complex concepts like negative reputation and how AI will impact the personal data landscape. We finish out by talking about what current IDtech companies can learn from Spokeo’s early go-to-market and what it will take to get verifiable credential adoption.To learn more about Spokeo visit https://www.spokeo.com/ or follow Spokeo on social media (@Spokeo). You can find Harrison on social media as well (@tang_talks) and keep up with his latest thinking through his podcast ‘Tang Talks’.Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.