WCEF 2022: Reusable identity and Web3

All right, terrific to be talking to all of you today. So as mentioned, I'll be covering reusable identity by leveraging the blockchain. And what I want to talk to you all about today is why we see this as one of the biggest opportunities in tech and why you should be thinking about leveraging digital identity to empower your business, frankly, regardless what industry you're in. We're of course not the only ones that see the world this way. McKinsey, for example, has estimated that good digital identity, reusable user permission, and so on will unlock between 3% and 13% of global GDP by 2030. That's trillions and trillions of dollars in value. And Liminal, a digital identity research firm, has estimated that reusable identity specifically will grow to a $250 billion market by 2027 at 70% year over year. So why are firms like Liminal, McKinsey, and many others seeing this as such an enormous opportunity? And how can you leverage reusable digital identity in your business? I'm Aidan McCarty. I'm the founder and CEO of UnimID, the digital ID card network. I founded it a few years ago with my brother, both of us out of Stanford. We're backed by some terrific early investors, key partners, and so on. So excited to be talking to you about this space. These are some of the parties that we work with. We also work with hundreds of smaller financial services and have a large waitlist of companies looking to start working with us. If you'd like to sign up, go ahead and scan this QR code. Quick promo here at the beginning. Now I'll get into some of the more details about the space in particular. So I want to ask all of you that are on the call today when the last time is that you filled out a form. You might have done this just a few minutes ago, maybe while listening to me talk, logging into your email using username and password. You may have done it last night buying something from an e-commerce website, or you may have done it in the last couple of weeks going to a doctor's appointment, filling out a whole bunch of manual forms so that you could be seen and cared for by the doctor. These sorts of forms where we fill out our name, email, phone, home address, maybe more sensitive stuff like an SSN or a driver's license, these are fixtures in our day-to-day lives. Most people that I ask this question to every day tell tell me, hey, I was just doing this earlier this morning and I was on a bunch of support calls trying to get access to this or that platform. This is what the world of identity looks like today. It's foundationally broken. All of these organizations are independently asking for some sort of shared secret that theoretically you and only you should be able to present. But of course, as we all know far too well, these secrets aren't so secret after all. They can be breached, they can be guessed, they can be derived, and people, somebody on the other side of the world can get access to your most valuable asset, to you. They can transact in the digital economy as you. This is a broken system, and it's something that we've had to live with for far too long. Thankfully, there are new solutions that get around this existing model and this existing paradigm. And in particular, again, what I'm talking about is reusable identity. Hopefully you're already starting to get a sense of how this applies across industries, really quite universally. It's a new layer of infrastructure for the web that was not built into the initial system. And the way that this can work is you can leverage a combination of cryptography and biometrics to create truly one identity per human. You bind an identity online, a packet of digital data that's been validated, cryptographically back to a single device, You can use many devices, bind to the same identity, and bind that device or set of devices back to a single human being leveraging biometrics. You can do that, of course, with the biometrics we're all familiar with, things like Face ID or Touch ID, if you have an iPhone. You can also use a suite of more advanced tools in biometrics, and we at WinMD do both. And the way this works is you have a digital identity wallet, can store data and then share that tied to records on the blockchain that are immutable over time, don't contain any sensitive information themselves. So imagine in that example I gave earlier, if when you're going to the doctor's office, it's one click to present the information and you can instantly be seen. Imagine going to check out on an e-commerce site and it's truly a one-click experience, even if you've never been there before. These are the sorts of experiences you can create with a reusable identity, dramatically more efficient and more secure. And the way we like to think of this, and I think this is a helpful analogy for anybody approaching this space, is as the next big card business. To help you understand what I mean by this, I want to take you back to the first big card business. Credit cards came out of the 1950s in the US. This is actually a fun little nugget of history. In the 1950s, most Americans had a dozen or more different forms of credit. That's what you're seeing here over on the left. These are charge plates, cards, coins at places like Sears, Mobilgas, Gimbels, Diners Club, and so on. This was a huge pain for consumers endlessly filling out the same forms to get access to lines of credit, and for the retailers, where they ran these extremely bureaucratic and expensive processes to extend those lines of credit. So in 1958, Bank of America came along and said, "This is a really broken system," and introduced BankAmericard, a single-purpose credit card that unlocked seamless access to credit across all of these retailers, and of course, many more. BankAmericard blossomed into Visa, one of the most profitable companies around, and credit cards became and remain the most profitable part of retail banking. This is the first big card business, credit cards. And the reason I stress this and the dynamics that were at play in this situation is we see exactly the same thing happening today but with identity data instead of credit. So today we have hundreds of accounts— I just talked about it a second ago— maybe with a crypto exchange, a fintech, health tech platform, shared economy app, a bunch of social media sites, and so on, all of which are collecting the same basic information about us, collecting, verifying, maintaining that swath of personal data. This is crying out for a general-purpose ID card, a BankAmericard for identity that unlocks seamless access everywhere. And if you think about the incentives that are at play here against what I talked about with credit, it's actually precisely the same. Today, this is a huge pain for the same parties, for the consumer that endlessly fills out the same forms, and for the companies that are collecting this data all on their own independently. Extremely expensive, and needlessly repetitive. And the way you can solve this is the same way you solve the credit problem, with an ID card network. So the way this works at a really high level is a card issuer, a trusted institution with a lot of high-fidelity data and a lot of users, can use our software or somebody else's in the reusable identity space to create a reusable ID. In our parlance, we talk about this as an ID card. It's a very helpful metaphor for the user. That's all signed cryptographically, end-to-end, bound back to a specific person and a specific device, as I was showing on a slide just a second ago. That user now enabled with an ID card can continue with one click at any relying party in our network or anybody else's. It's interoperable. A relying party is simply any organization that needs to validate user's identity. So that could be health tech companies, shared economy app, e-commerce website, and so on. With one click, user consents, presents their information, and instantly gets access to whatever service that relying party has offered, or more accurately, gets decisioned by that relying party. That party pays the card issuer for access to the information, and whoever is providing this as a service can take a percentage cut of those transactions. Very much, again, akin to a credit card model. What this amounts to is unlocking the honeypots of information. Enabling them to be bound back to people, put in their control on their mobile device, and permissioned out seamlessly to hundreds or thousands of relying parties that can then serve those users. This is really a sea change in how identity works online. And foundationally, why this is so transformational is it unlocks access. Users continue with one click everywhere that they go. Our dream and the dream of a lot of others in this space is that you will never have to fill out another form online again. You just simply reuse trusted information that's completely under your control. That's the vision of how this can work moving forward. And to give you a sense of just how transformational that is in one niche industry, one of our core focuses right now is fintech. Of course, not limited to that in the long term, but to give you a sense, these are best-in-class onboarding experiences in fintech from Acorns, Earnin, Robinhood. These are actual screenshots. Of the onboarding flow. You can see how many screens the user has to go through, how many clicks they have to make, how many things they have to type in. 26% of people that start this process don't complete it, even with best-in-class onboarding in fintech for KYC verification, for example. This is a really broken system. That's not even accounting for the people that don't start the process in the first place because they know it's going to be a pain. With reusable identity, it looks dramatically different. It's One click, no fields, one screen, 9 seconds, instant full approval. Just about everybody completes the process. This is one quick case study to give you a sense of how impactful reusable identity can be for your business. Imagine how many more people would be using your service if you were accepting reusable digital ID cards. And imagine how many of these experiences you could be enabling if you were issuing your own digital ID cards. I think key thing to note here is a single reasonable ID has many uses. So you can use it, of course, as I just mentioned, to sign up. See over here on the right, you can also use it to log in without a password. You can use it to apply for other products within an existing ecosystem. The use cases of it are extremely flexible. So we at UnimID, for example, actually atomize all of the credentials. So you can ask for derivatives of credentials. You can ask, for example, has the user been KYC'd, and only share a token of that. You can ask if the user is over 21 and only share that. It's extremely flexible to many use cases, which enables a service that has issued one of these IDs to really reap the full benefits of it for themselves and for their users. The last thing I want to touch on here before I wrap up is a common question we get asked, and I think is one of the things in the digital ID space, the reusable ID space, is why would you issue these digital ID cards? Great, I get it. It's so great for the user, They have tons of control over this information. It's seamless, it's secure, it's great for the company that's accepting it. Seamless, secure, fast, right? Why would you actually issue these cards? There's two main reasons I want to touch on. The first is a reusable ID unlocks access. It makes you essential to your user's life. In the same way that Sign In with Google, Sign In with Facebook made these organizations embedded in their users' lives, constantly interacting with their users across the web, A digital ID card can do the same thing. Imagine creating a card that your users are leveraging to sign up for dozens of services every month. You now have a much deeper relationship with that end user. And the last thing, of course, is the financial opportunity. You probably saw this in the earlier model, but the card issuer gets to monetize their users' personal data with full consent and full transparency in full compliance with GDPR, CCPA, emerging privacy and security regulations around the world. And what this looks like roughly at scale for an organization with 20 million users is a net new revenue stream of around $350 million a year, $18 per user per year. So it's a really dramatic opportunity, both for the organizations that are issuing these cards, the organizations that are accepting them, and organizations like ourselves that are enabling this opportunity. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. Hopefully you now have a better understanding of why reusable identity is seen by ourselves, McKinsey, and many others as one of the single biggest opportunities in tech over the next decade. And I hope you consider adding some form of reusable identity to whatever business that you're building. Thank you very much.