Ward Duchamps is responsible for Product Strategy and Innovation at OneWelcome, part of the Thales Group. Thales is enabling innovation with security. In this podcast, Ward is discussing Consumer Identity & Access Management as an enabler for digital services.
Welcome to the DynaFin podcast.
We bring you the latest Finance and Technology news straight from the market.
Don't hesitate to contact us, we'll be pleased to meet you!
Ward Duchamps is responsible for Product Strategy and Innovation at OneWelcome, part of the Thales Group. Thales is enabling innovation with security. In this podcast, Ward is discussing Consumer Identity & Access Management as an enabler for digital services.
Welcome to the DynaFin podcast.
We bring you the latest Finance and Technology news straight from the market.
Don't hesitate to contact us, we'll be pleased to meet you!
Koen Vanderhoydonk 0:09
Welcome to the DynaFin podcast. My name is Koen Vanderhoydonk and we bring you the latest news from the markets.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 0:27
Hello, and welcome to a podcast from DynaFin. It's a real pleasure to have you here.
Unknown Speaker 0:33
Hey, good. Thank you for being here.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 0:35
Can you tell me which company on up representing today,
Ward Duchamp 0:37
I'm representing Thales Thales Group, it's a publicly traded company, multinational 80,000 people, we are known for bringing trust in a digital world. And we are like a global leader in cybersecurity and data protection.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 0:51
Wow, that's a lot of things in one sentence. Today, we agreed to talk a bit more about customer identity and access management. And I know that a lot of people a lot of the audience that is listening in knows this, and they think this is KYC. Does that make sense?
Ward Duchamp 1:09
No, it's not the same, but it's related to each other. So consumer identity and access management is a set of processes and technologies to deal with the identity that consumes a digital service. So it's all about making sure that you get an identity for the user and give that user particular access to a digital service of financial platform or what have you.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 1:32
Yeah, thank you. Well, I did my own research. And I found out that there's a tremendous spent to be expected in the realms of customer identity and access management. Is that right?
Ward Duchamp 1:44
That is absolutely true. There is an estimate in billions with a yearly growth of about 15%. For the next years to come, there is an uptake in the industry of this particular topic of this particular part of the technology landscape.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 1:59
And why would that be? Why is there a particular uptake on that
Ward Duchamp 2:03
it's all about digitization. So in the financial sector, we see that we went through a first wave of digitizing the financial services, but we are not yet at the end, there is still a lot to be done, especially in the insurance industry, we see that the insurance industry is kind of lagging behind in digitizing the operation processes that they go through with our customers. And so as part of digitization, we see particularly in the insurance industry, two main drivers why companies invest so much in digitization, okay, and one is really on the on the bottom line, trying to avoid cost by making sure that the customer can do more on him by himself will also sell that services. Exactly. Investing in self service makes make sure that you can basically reduce back office processing, which reduces cost, which is a good thing for the company in place. But equally important, or even more important is also the top line revenue by digitizing. In the financial sector, we also see that in the insurance industry, we see new products that arrive in the market. Okay, because with digital products, you have a very fast interaction with your consumers, and with that fast interaction, you can basically bring new types of products. Think about micro insurances. For instance, you're at the airport, you forgot to insure your luggage, you go to the website, and you basically take an insurance for the next three days for your luggage. When you've got the bachelor party and you invested a couple of friends, you invited a couple of friends. And you still want to make sure that these friends are insured. And an activity that you want to do with these type of new services are only able if you support them with a digital process. And a digital process requires that you know who is actually dealing with the platform?
Koen Vanderhoydonk 3:42
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So in your opinion, the role that customer identity and access management has is large.
Ward Duchamp 3:52
consumer identity and access management is an enabler for building new digital services. It is a must have for organizations that want to invest in digital services, and an enabler, it also means that you have to have technology that is convenient for the end user. So we as people that actually use on a daily basis digital services, we have got a certain expectation, and that also applies to consumer identity and access management. Like for instance, passwordless login. If we sign up for a new digital service, we do not want to choose another password again, we want to rely on Apple ID or Google ID or to you or maybe itsme in Belgium, where we reuse an identity where we bring our own identity to a platform that you want to use. Okay. In addition to that, we also see that there is a an uptake of the Privacy Awareness and by customers, especially in Europe, so customers get more and more aware of their own privacy, and they are concerned about the data that they share with service providers on the internet. And so there is also a role to be played by consumer identity and assessment because we want to make it tangible to the end user what type of data is shared with a digital service and give the user a level of control that he can determine what he wants to share for what particular purpose? Like, for instance, your home address? Do you want to share your home address for getting the next delivery of a good? Or do you want to share your home address together to get marketing material is two different purposes. And we have to make sure that we find a way to give that flexibility to the consumer, because that's what we see as an expectation from the consumers in Europe.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 5:32
And what would you say this is the topic around European sovereign identity? Is that is that the similar topic?
Ward Duchamp 5:39
Absolutely, yes, that is all the initiatives that are going on with self sovereign identity and alike. And there are also initiatives that more likely call it identity wallet, that's all linked to the same idea that and the idea is that the user needs to get control on the data that he wants to share with a digital service provider. And the technology that is used there is that we that we envisage a future or there is already actually in place today. But people haven't an app or a digital service, where they store a number of credentials, we call credentials, they can selectively share with digital services provided. Like, for instance, an example is car insurance. So if you want to sign up for a car insurance policy, as an insurer you want to make sure that it is indeed a valid license for that particular user that motor signers. How to do that is that you get the driver's license from government or, or what have you, you download actually the driver's license on your wallet, and you present that driver's license to the insurance company before that you can actually underwrite the car insurance policy. And it's very similar to what we all know with from the COVID pandemic, you've got the COVID, up, and in the up, you've got certificates that you've got vaccinated. Actually, this is already an also an application of identity app. So we see more of these types of use cases popping up in the in the in the very near future.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 7:04
Well, two things that actually popped to mind to me is, and there has been this case in the Netherlands, specifically with COVID vaccines and the certificates, because they had a whole issue around not showing certain data. And then by coincidence, this data became available through the app, totally unwanted. But what I wanted to say is that it shows the risk that you have in terms of losing your own identity, I guess there is a whole structure, there's a whole technology around it that actually makes sure that these kinds of breaches do not happen. Is that a right guessing
Ward Duchamp 7:40
it's definitely a correct observation that this is still a very immature domain. Hence, why is that it's still it's still too novice There are a number of standards that are in development and current currently in adoption by startups. So I think that the big tech companies do not have the right technology yet. So the technology today for identity wallets, still comes from startups and scale ups. And so we still have to go through some learnings before that it actually will become mainstream technology to be used.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 8:14
What are we missing than a few say startups are bringing this type of technology.
Ward Duchamp 8:18
So the big challenge for the for the startups in this domain is the business model. Because who wants to pay for this, it's no longer the services provider[GP1] because he doesn't have doesn't own the data anymore. And he used to have a business driver, because he was he owned data that he could use for marketing purposes. That business driver now kind of disappeared populace society, absolutely. But at the other end, the consumer is not yet prepared to pay for these types of services. And so today, there is still a challenge on who will pay for that for the infrastructure to make sure that there is, for instance, a digital backup, if your identity, like the use case that you mentioned, is indeed a very valid use case. But that means that you need an infrastructure, if you if you need an infrastructure, you need service providers, and there is still business case to be resolved.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 9:06
Would you then say this is something to be resolved by regulators? Is that something that they have to step into? Because I think recently that I heard about, not a startup, but some discussions on regulatory level are starting. So there's communities being formed.
Ward Duchamp 9:22
That is indeed one of the options that is ahead of us. And some countries start to build the identity infrastructure for all their citizens.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 9:29
And itsme is that one of the examples and you mentioned it earlier,
Ward Duchamp 9:32
itsme has the ambition, as far as I know, as the ambition to go into that direction. And the the Nordic countries are a bit ahead of us in this game, and we see a stronger position of the government. The challenge that we have in Belgium local market is that similar initiatives in the past were not always adopted by by public middle but also by the private sector, because it was a government issued identifier and something similar happened like like a decade ago with the UK as well. There was an initiative sponsored by the government to build a centralized identity platform. Okay, but it basically failed because there was insufficient support from the private sector as
Koen Vanderhoydonk 10:08
well. So nowadays, everything is about collaboration. So I truly hope that in those discussions with the regulator in the market, that there's a lot of collaborations would you set yourself because you represent one welcome as a company for in the Thales[GP2] Group, you provide solutions in this domain? Do you consider yourself as one of the startups or rather one of the big Tech's?
Ward Duchamp 10:28
I would say that we are somewhere in between? Okay,
Koen Vanderhoydonk 10:30
that's an interesting answer.
Ward Duchamp 10:32
Absolutely can go both ways. So Thales does have a very solid install base, and it's a technology company through its DNA. So it is built to deliver High tech [GP3] at high scale. But at the other end, there is also a very heavy weight that is put into innovation. So there is a lot of labs innovative innovation labs that actually take place that develop new technology based on new standards and new ideas, even the quality of standards. And Dallas [GP4] is also very active in the standardization community as well.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 11:02
Okay. And what does Thales that mean? Because I also did my research and I actually found out that there was some merger and acquisition fever recently, and you became one company or how can I see that?
Ward Duchamp 11:15
So the consumer identity and access market is is indeed consolidating. And you see that not only with OneWelcome acquiring Thales, there are other companies in this domain that got acquired very recently, as well. A little bit of background on one welcome. Thales is also that they acquired a company called scaled access in Leuven, which was basically a startup dealing with authorizations. And I was part of that team. And so you see that these type, these companies actually buy technology rather than building technology, and then consolidate and illogical,
Koen Vanderhoydonk 11:48
which makes sense, because that's how you get customers, which at the end,
Ward Duchamp 11:54
which makes sense, and which also illustrates that there is a certain level of maturity that comes into the market, it becomes sense that we do proper standards to deal with identities and access and links with KYC. And whatever you we now get to the point where it's not about what you do, it's more about how that you do certain things
Koen Vanderhoydonk 12:14
are interesting, that the innocent audience, it's definitely a lot present in the financial industry. If you would give them a couple of tips, the what what would be the reason to contact you guys.
Ward Duchamp 12:26
So number one would definitely be if you're in a process where you want to digitize services, or build new services, and you need to get a certain level of assurance of what users actually will make use of that services, then we can then we can have a discussion. What is important from from an architectural point of view is that we now see that new digital services are built on microservices architecture, which is a concept where you've got several components that all act on a particular what you also see that companies struggle with identity and access and such microservices architecture, instead of trying to build everything from scratch based on open standards or what have you. I think I think it's worthwhile to also consider buying such a platform to not miss talk to not make the same mistakes again and again. I
Koen Vanderhoydonk 13:14
think that's very clear language wise, thank you very much. And thank you also for participating to our DynaFin podcasts. I would also like to thank the audience for tuning in. And please stay tuned on our channel. Thank you very much.
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[GP2]Thales
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