Written by Well, Know 2019 in Las Vegas was great. Having attended the One World Identity (OWI) “KnowID” Washington events, it was exciting to see them grow and relocate to Las Vegas!
The event began with an “Education Day” on the Sunday preceding the main event. Consult Hyperion ran a couple of the sessions and we were taken aback at the turnout – standing room only in the session discussing the digital identity of people, companies and things that we presented with Mastercard and PaymentWorks (the hotel staff had to bring in three stacks of chairs during the talk!) and while we’d like to think that this is solely a reflection of Consult Hyperion’s leading position in the industry, we took it as a reflection of the increasing importance of digital identity across corporate strategies in a range of sectors.
As most of our clients are in the financial services sector, we naturally paid most attention to the presentations and discussions around digital identity in banking and finance. Mastercard chose the event to drive a stake into the ground around digital identity, with the launch of their paper on the topic, “Restoring Trust in a Digital World”. This presented a framework of how digital identity will work, putting the individual at the heart of every digital interaction. Mastercard’s commitment to the sector reinforced many peoples’ view that digital identity has gone up the priority list to become a matter of immediate concern for financial institutions, regulators and customers. The scale of identity theft and fraud on the one hand and the costs of patchwork digitised identity solutions on the other hand may not the pressure for real change is growing.
Outside the financial sector, I particularly enjoyed the keynote on the third day from Colleen Manaher from the US Customs and Border Control. She was talking about the use of biometrics and spent some of the time talking about the specific use of biometrics in airports as an interesting example of how to use biometric technologies for security but at the same time deliver convenience into the mass market.
The point of her talk, was partnerships around identity. In this case, she was talking about quite complex public-private partnerships in travel. The investments made in biometrics to allow paperless travel have obvious benefits in terms of security but, as we have found in our other work about the cross-sector exploitation of digital identity, intelligent use of these new capabilities can also transform the customer experience. The same biometric system that scans your passport picture on entry to the airport and then checks you in for your flight can also be used to direct you through the airport and implement smart departure boards that as you approach them switch from displaying a list of all flights to displaying your flight only.
The use of digital identity, as a means to provide what looks like convenience to the man in the street but under the hood provides much higher levels of security than are currently obtained through the use of physical documents and manual checking opens up new possibilities and set me thinking about how to replicate this dynamic, in other sectors. An obvious example of this back in financial services is for the kind of digital ID called for by Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, which would result in significant cost savings around the K YC and AML for the banks but should at the same time mean that customers can connect securely and quickly to their financial services providers.
We were sad to leave Las Vegas after such a great event but I can assure you that we’ll be back there again next year for Know2020.
