Episode 20 – Nick Thomas: Finicity’s Journey from Personal Finance App to $985M Acquisition for their Open Banking Platform

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to The Future of Identity, a show that surfaces hard-earned insights needed to succeed in the fast-evolving world of digital identity. On the Future of Identity podcast, we skip the conceptual and theoretical conversations and dive into the tactical lessons learned from people in the trenches taking a product to market. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we are a reusable identity infrastructure company powering dozens of amazing identity products. Today, I spoke to Nick Thomas, co-founder of Finicity, which was acquired by Mastercard, where Nick went on to be the executive vice president of global open finance innovation. Nick has a fascinating career that has paralleled digital identity for a long time as a co-founder of Bluetooth and FDX, which is a major open banking standards body in the U.S. These are both organizations that brought an industry together around common standards to grow the market far bigger for everyone involved. And we talk about the lessons learned there and how they apply to identity.

Riley Hughes: Nick shares a deep look into Finicity’s story, starting as a consumer application and eventually becoming a major data aggregator. And 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 into production. I had a blast in this conversation. Nick is a super genuine guy, and he shares a ton of interesting takes on the intersection of fintech and ID tech. And now to my conversation with Nick. Big welcome, Nick.

Nick Thomas: Thanks, Riley. Excited to be here.

Riley Hughes: I’m so excited to have this conversation too. You’re one of a very small club who has been able to build an identity-related company to great heights. I don’t know how you frame yourself or categorize yourself, but I think of you a little bit as a pragmatic futurist in the sense that you seem to be involved in things that are a little bit ahead of their time or get involved with things early, like open banking and Bluetooth and digital identity, but that actually get adoption. I’ve got to ask, from the headlines, Finicity sold for, I think it was $985 million, and I’m curious, why not the billion? What is an extra 15 million? At that point, right? I mean, there’s—

Nick Thomas: I know. It was a thing for me, but, you know, there was 985 million is just fine.

Riley Hughes: I usually like to just dive right into some of the core stuff, but I think in this case, it would be useful if you could do a brief introduction of just what did Finicity do, and why did Mastercard want to buy you?

Nick Thomas: Back in ‘93, I moved to Utah for an internship with this little company called Megahertz. We were doing modems for laptop computers, and this is literally the birth of the internet, the birth of mobile computing. Steve Smith was the chief operating officer of Megahertz, and I was an analog engineer, went into product engineering, and we built the first cellular-capable modem connected to Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson phones. Right after that project, the folks at Ericsson called us up and said, Hey, we’ve got this wireless version of that connection that we want to standardize. And because we were doing a lot of connectivity in that last short-range personal area network, I became one of the founders of Bluetooth. I was at a board meeting of Bluetooth up at the Ice Hotel in Kiruna, Sweden, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and I remember stepping out of the ice bar and seeing the northern lights, and I even still have the phone that I had when Steve calls me up, and it’s the exact phone that was used in The Matrix when Neo opens the FedEx package and there’s the phone.

Nick Thomas: I still have that phone.

Riley Hughes: I just watched The Matrix literally four days ago. My wife had never seen it.

Nick Thomas: So you get it. You know the phone.

Riley Hughes: Yes, I got that phone.

Nick Thomas: So I took the first call, I got back from my meeting, we went to lunch, and— He was a finance guy and an entrepreneur, and he had come up with this idea. He saw this convergence of PDAs and cell phones and, you know, this whole mobile world coming together. And he said, you know, what would be really helpful for people is if they could basically make budgeting decisions, you know, spending decisions at the point of sale with access to their budget. So this idea of a budgeting app called Envelopes. And Envelopes was zero-based budgeting or envelope budgeting. That’s what Dave Ramsey preaches. It’s been a method of budgeting for a long time where you take your budget for the month and you put it in envelopes and you spend from the envelopes. And so we worked on that for a year. I quit my job at 3Com, and, you know, when we started, we picked like the worst time in history to start a company. We literally chased cash for 15 years. It was brutal. We also chased business models.

Nick Thomas: Under the covers with this data aggregation platform, we licensed the core platform from a company out of Palo Alto. And then we went national with our product. We had all of this consumer interest: Add my bank, add my bank, add my bank. And these guys had like three engineers that were adding these connections. And so we came to them and said, Hey, how do we figure this out? How do we, you know, increase the number of engineers that are building these things? And ultimately landed on, Well, why don’t we do that for you? Because I had set up an entity in India to basically help with that expense of developing and maintaining these connections. And then in 2005, Intuit acquired technology. So Intuit was now the owner of this platform, and then they hired Finicity to basically continue to manage these connections. Fast forward to 2012. So 2012 was really the birth of fintech investing. You know, we were a data aggregator, but it was inside of a budgeting app. And people would come to us and say, Hey, I use your consumer app to check whether this bank should be up.

Nick Thomas: Can we get access to your connectivity? And so I went to Steve and I said, Hey. what if we were to stand this up as a separate service? We could actually maybe make a little more money. And that was in 2014 that we launched that. You know, we would have sold the company at that time for not a lot of money, and the next five years was just this rocket ship to the moon. And this data connectivity technology happened to be really, really valuable, you know, far more valuable than the budgeting app that we originally started with. And so that’s kind of the long answer to that first question.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s really helpful framing, and it actually leads into something I wanted to explore with you. And it may just be because I’m naive about this topic, but it seems to me, from an outsider’s perspective, that Finicity, as a data aggregation company that’s managing all of these connections, that’s a pretty valuable asset, and that open banking, on the other hand, is a more open way of allowing consumers to connect their bank accounts through standardized APIs to, you know, applications that they’re using. And so it seems like the open banking kind of stuff could potentially be a little bit disruptive to the data aggregation stuff. Am I framing this correctly?

Nick Thomas: Let me tell you about the birth of the term open banking. So open banking was actually coined in the UK. They came up with the term open banking so that they could effectively force the banks in the UK to open up APIs so that they could stop screen scraping the banks. So open banking is really just another word for data aggregation in a formalized, standardized way. You still need consent of the consumer to get access to that data because it’s their account. But what open banking did is it created this movement globally around creating standards and then having the banks stand up those APIs so that consumers could approve the delivery of their account data from their bank to anywhere they wanted.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Is it accurate, though, in the screen scraping model, you’ve got to build some capabilities there to keep user credentials safe, scrape the screen, parse the data, normalize it, clean it up, whatever. And there’s just a lot that goes into that. If there’s an idealistic, standardized open banking approach, theoretically a fintech could go directly to the bank and skip the person doing all the technology development for screen scraping and normalizing data and all of that. So was it disruptive to that? I mean, in a counterfactual world that never developed open banking, the data aggregation service would be pretty valuable. What’s your thought on that?

Nick Thomas: Back when I was one of the co-founders of Bluetooth, we created a really unique industry organization in Bluetooth. So Bluetooth is run globally. There’s, how many? I think 50,000 member companies of Bluetooth globally, and it’s run by a single organization. I believe it’s now out of Kansas City, of 100 people. So 100 people run Bluetooth globally. And what’s unique about Bluetooth is that it’s combining to create standards and use cases, but it’s also a way to ensure interoperability between these disparate players in an ecosystem. And so it was super unique. It’s different than open source. It’s different from IEEE. There’s a reason that you don’t see Red Tooth out there is because we locked up all of the IP around Bluetooth or anything like it. So anyone who joined basically signed over all their existing IP and any future IP to say around Bluetooth that, yeah, if I’m a member of Bluetooth, I’m signing over my IP, and now 50,000 companies globally are protecting the IP of Bluetooth so that nobody can come and do anything like it.

Nick Thomas: So it creates a tremendous amount of alignment around it. So when I got into the world of data aggregation, we literally had three of us. Myself, Chip Whitmer was our CTO. Richard Cuen was heading up sales, and we’re three people in a startup. So we’re a startup within a startup, kind of an amoeba on a tick. And so we’re like, okay, how do we make a big splash? And so literally what I did is I took the founding documents of Bluetooth, erased Bluetooth, and put in financial data exchange. FDX was created to basically become a standards body. And you’re right in that it doesn’t make any sense for an aggregator who owns all those connections to promote standardization because the moat is huge of somebody coming in and doing this. As a matter of fact, one of our first board meetings of FDX, one of my fellow aggregators came up to me and said, Why the hell are you doing this? You’re one of three companies that owns all these connections. Why would you do this? And I said, Because data access shouldn’t be a competitive advantage. It’s about the use cases that can be built on top.

Nick Thomas: So we were altruistic in the creation of FDX because we had this vision of standardizing those connections because it sucked for consumers. Data aggregation sucks. Screen scraping sucks. That was really the foundation of FDX, was really taking a cue from the Bluetooth model to apply that to standardizing the open banking APIs for the future. Finicity has signed more data access agreements with financial institutions using the FDX API than all of the rest of the industry combined. And so we led the charge in creating FDX. We also led the charge in moving from this user-permissioned access through this front door to an official contracted connection to connect to the API. And because we have this vision that data connectivity shouldn’t be a competitive advantage. So there you go.

Riley Hughes: I talk to people all the time. It’s probably just because, you know, I’m in this space so deeply, right? It’s my whole business, so of course I’m exposed to this more. But I talk to people all the time who are clear-eyed about the fact that reusable identity represents a disruption to their business. Some see that disruptive potential and therefore are doubling down and aggressively pursuing it. Others are standing by the wayside, and others, it’s clear that there are divisions within the company, right? Some parts of the company believe they should move strongly in that direction, while other parts of the company are harder to convince. I’m sure that as you were pursuing something with FDX that was potentially disruptive to your data aggregation business, or the existing business, potentially cannibalizing in some ways, I’m sure that there were conversations in the boardroom or with your co-founders or on the executive team that had friction, right? I’m just curious, how did you proceed through those conversations?

Riley Hughes: And most importantly, how would you advise companies that are maybe in that position with respect to reusable identity who want to move forward on something like this but need to convince some others in their organization and get buy-in?

Nick Thomas: If you’re a technology innovator, Riley, it’s always a good idea to have one foot in contributing to the industry, as well as building your own products and services. And so there’s multiple business case examples where companies have worked in the open source space and built value on top of that. There’s other examples of taking a project internally and going open source. One of the values in being an industry player is that you actually gain some street cred in being a contributor to what’s going on in the industry. And it’s also an invisibility cloak. You can get any meeting you want if you’re representing the industry. If you’re representing your company, you can get a subset of those meetings. And so, as a small player who is trying to break into an industry, if you can get involved and play a leading role in something that’s happening in, like, a standards organization or something where the industry is coming together and you can play a role there, you’re able to build relationships in a way that you can’t do if you are only pursuing commercial interests.

Nick Thomas: And so, I believe that standardization and/or industry collaboration is critical to a technology company. Finicity was well respected as an organization. We did good work with our product, but we were well respected because we led out and we tried to make change happen that required industry collaboration, and we were really good at bringing other people to the table and achieving consensus. I think a lot of that’s because of our size. We were not really a competitive threat to the banks, and we weren’t really a competitive threat to the other data aggregators that were much bigger than us. And so it was a way for us to get a seat at the table, which also translated into these bilateral agreements. It translated into contracts. It played really well for us in the business space, even though we did have pure motives in what we were trying to accomplish in the industry. So in the world of digital identity, any company who’s trying to play in that space should also look at who is leading the industry, what organization is leading, and how can we, like, pick a standard, pick an approach.

Nick Thomas: Ten percent of our time should be spent in maybe giving back to the industry in a way that creates cohesion. So I think it’s a core strategy to play in the industry as you’re selling product.

Riley Hughes: I also think, in general, it takes a little bit of a leap of faith, and it’s probably different in all areas, you know, in different industries, etc. But it seems to me when I look at things that have been standardized or collaborated on, I think open banking is a good example of that. You just grow the pie, right? The pie gets a lot bigger when the end result for the consumer or whoever’s adopting the product is much easier, right? Imagine if Bluetooth didn’t exist, and every single product that you tried to connect to another product had its own bespoke thing, or you had to use some aggregation service in between to create these connections that didn’t work natively. I mean, you can just imagine how much bigger the market for Bluetooth-enabled products is because of that standard. And I think likewise, that’s what will happen in identity. It just will grow the pie so much bigger. That’s what we’re betting on, and it’s frankly what we’re seeing play out as well.

Riley Hughes: So I say that what open banking did for financial data, these new identity standards are doing for identity data, essentially unleashing the data from its silo and making it reusable and interoperable across multiple places. Obviously, in fintech, you mentioned 2012, the explosion of investment there, and something like 10 years later, 25% of all unicorn valuation companies are fintech companies. And I think something similar can happen in identity, but it requires that reusability, composability, interoperability, etc., between applications to make it happen. But I don’t know. I always say that ID tech and fintech comparison, but as somebody who’s so deep in fintech, do you want to correct my characterization there, or do you see the world differently, or do you think I’m on the right track?

Nick Thomas: So one of the players at Finicity was Jason Law. We went to MBA school together, and he left Finicity after seven years to go and start a company called Evernym. helped write Hyperledger Indy, really was one of the major players in the founding of the self-sovereign identity movement. When he went and did this project, he basically kept me in the loop on the things that they were doing and some of the problems that they were trying to solve. You know, they created the Sovrin Foundation. They really did a tremendous amount of pioneering work in the space. And so I became a student of SSI really early on. This was probably 2015, 2016, really almost in the beginning stages of the Finicity run-up. I saw, hey, we’re getting all this data, we’re getting data about transactions, but we’re also getting identity data. And wouldn’t that be interesting if we could create this credential around this data? Because we’re getting the same data about that consumer from multiple different places. And, you know, the use case that we pursued at Finicity was in the realm of digital underwriting.

Nick Thomas: So the idea of replacing a bank statement with digital data. And you can only imagine if you’re trying to write a trade line to a credit score, you got to make sure that the person that owns the account is the right person. It’s got to match to the profile of the user at the bureau. And so for us, digital identity was a huge part of where we went at Finicity, primarily for the underwriting use case. So I saw it. I saw it as a direction. Like I was talking internally about digital identity almost the whole time as we’re growing Finicity, and had this vision of being able to be an issuer of verified credentials to be used in this realm of underwriting. It was a big part of our vision. It was a big part of our sell. Mastercard was already a leader in the space. They were already on board with SSI. They already had a team. And so our particular efforts at Finicity, while really good, the Finicity efforts around digital identity didn’t really make their way into Mastercard because they were already Doing it inside of Mastercard when they acquired us.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, and I have an episode with Sarah Clark, who’s running the identity network within Mastercard. If you’re a listener, feel free to check out that episode as well. It’s a really interesting one, and Mastercard is definitely a leader there. I want to jump in and just double-click on that a little bit. How far along that path did you get? And I guess I’m interested in understanding and unpacking what you did, why, and whether it worked and whether it didn’t work and what you learned and what others can learn from that, so that hopefully others can shortcut the learning curve a little bit. What would you advise them based on what you did in this space?

Nick Thomas: The biggest issue with identity that I found early days, and this is me going back into my days at Finicity and not talking about the Mastercard strategy at all, because I struggled with how do you make money in digital identity. The government is the one that’s the primary issuer of a driver’s license or a marriage certificate or a business certificate, and then the market can issue other identities to support use cases within the enterprise and within organizations. But this idea of a self-sovereign identity ecosystem, in my mind, always struggled to have a business case. And so that was the biggest issue for me, is how do you go and make money in a world where you’re issuing a digital credential to somebody and then them using it forever? Does somebody get paid when they use it? Like when I use my driver’s license, does somebody get paid when I prove my age? No. And so, you know, I’m sure there’s all kinds of thinkers and strategies in the digital identity space that maybe I’m not.

Nick Thomas: A party to where these ways of making money came to pass, but Sovrin tried to solve the problem by effectively using gas fees as the mechanism of that ecosystem and the issuer being a part of the transaction, and that’s how you made money. And, you know, you have these credential issuers. These are the cat’s meow. So if you have a birth date credential from Finicity, you’re gold. Everyone trusts that. So that’s probably enough said in that particular thing. I didn’t ever solve that problem, but I just saw the fact that we’re getting all this identity data. We’re able to verify, cross-verify the identity with multiple sources. And, you know, we were in an amazing position to basically become an issuer as well as verifier in some of the use cases we were pursuing, but we never solved the problem of how do you actually make money.

Riley Hughes: Similar to maybe a little bit of your story being an intern, you know, in college in a really fortunate kind of zone where you got to learn a lot really fast and position yourself well for your career or whatever. That was me at Sovrin. So as you know, I started my career as an intern at Sovrin. My first day on the job, you know, had a couple of hours on a whiteboard with Drummond Reed and didn’t realize the opportunity that I had, but ended up working a lot with Jason Law on the Sovrin token and on the incentivization mechanism there. And ultimately have my opinions about where that landed and why that was successful or not. I’ve obviously baked those learnings into what we’re doing here at Trinsic and, of course, have some thinking and some answers and hypotheses that are testing around that economic model problem. You’re not the first person to bring that up, and I think there’s a lot more advanced thinking now than I think there was four years ago when I started working on that, even longer, five years ago.

Riley Hughes: I want to transition into, as you were talking about the founding story of Finicity, about the premise of a budgeting app, which led you to build all this infrastructure, and it’s, let’s slap an API on top of this and see if it’s useful for other things too. It’s probably gross oversimplification, but I think of something like Amazon building their own data centers to service their e-commerce site, and then they put an API on top of it and allow other people to use those servers. And now you’ve got AWS that’s basically just as valuable as the retail side of Amazon. And it sounds like something similar happened on the Finicity side. And it makes me wonder, I don’t know, if you put on your speculation hat with me for a moment, who do you think is well positioned to do something like that in digital identity?

Nick Thomas: So this is just me completely speculating, and you can steal any one of these ideas. I’m a big believer in there’s— some really definitive needs of the government, and some of those are infrastructure. And so you look at the roads, you look at the highways, you look at all of the things that the government does today to create infrastructure to support commerce. That is their job. And so as I think about how does government work with industry when it comes to infrastructure? Well, it contracts with industry to do infrastructure. But at the end of the day, who is responsible for the identity of the citizens in a nation? It’s the government. Yes, you can have also your identities within a corporation or within an organization, and yes, there are identity problems to be solved within that context. But the ultimate authority on identity is the government. And so what role should the government play in the future of a digital infrastructure? Should the government own the digital infrastructure? Like, who owns the roads? The roads are owned by the people through the government.

Nick Thomas: The government then contracts with individual companies to maintain those roads. And I think that the analogy of standards combined with infrastructure combined with maintenance of that infrastructure in the old world should translate into the digital world, and that the government can and should take on a bigger role in the future of identity, digital identity specifically. And if I’m a company, I am looking for ways to monetize and exploit that and become a service provider to government entities who are doing that. Then from there, it’s really about identity within an organization, identity between an organization and their customers. Those are all great use cases as well. But, you know, who are the issuers of identity? Who are those that are trying to verify identity of the consumer, and who stand to benefit the most? At the end of the day, identity infrastructure, clearly, in my opinion, is the purview of the government, or it’s the purview of a large company who has employees. My work with the governor’s office in Utah, we’re talking about digital identity.

Nick Thomas: We’re talking about what kind of a role can and should the government play in developing and maintaining digital infrastructure and then partnering with industry to make that happen. At the end of the day, the government is probably in the best position, as it always has been here in the U.S., to be the developer slash maintainer of that infrastructure.

Riley Hughes: A few weeks ago, I watched a congressional hearing of identity, specifically the Real ID standard and then how it relates to mobile driver’s licenses and digital identity generally, and really fascinating discussion. You can see the camps, right? You can see the move fast, we’re losing billions and billions in fraud every year due to the lack of a strong identity camp, and there’s the move slow because there are civil implications around privacy and digital inclusion and things like that. And so let’s move slow and get it right. I think those are the right tensions to have. But I agree that having a strong government-backed digital identity would absolutely enable commerce. I also see, you know, we have the Federal Reserve, which is a kind of a government-enabled thing, and there’s collaborations that happen through government enablement in finance. But then you also have, I don’t know if this is too much of a stretch, government-allowed duopolies, Visa, Mastercard, etc., right? Sort of government-sanctioned collusion.

Riley Hughes: Between industry players to enable commerce like the payments networks, I wonder if identity could evolve in a similar way. It’s interesting to explore. Well, I want to shift into a discussion here. It’s obvious that you took some of the lessons and models and playbooks from the Bluetooth days and applied them to the open banking context, sounds like, with FDX. I’m curious to explore that a little further because what we’ve seen in the digital identity space is anything but what you are talking about with Bluetooth. Or in other words, in the identity space, there are about 25 equivalents of Red Tooth out there. Fragmentation and divergence of standards in the identity space right now is staggering, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing. I think innovation is good, and prematurely standardizing is not necessarily the right path. But I wonder if there are lessons that the identity industry could learn from how Bluetooth was able to bring industry players together.

Riley Hughes: So is there a counterfactual universe where Apple develops their own proprietary Bluetooth substitute that only works between Apple devices, phones, AirPods, that kind of thing? And if so, what is the reason that didn’t play out that way? What is the reason Apple supports standards in that case, whereas in other cases they’re very much a closed ecosystem?

Nick Thomas: I remember my first conversation with Phil Windley and Jason and others, you know, in the Sovrin space, where I shared the IP model of Bluetooth and basically said, hey, if you don’t lock down the IP right now, you know, you’re going to end up with bifurcated standards. That’s a key component of what happened in Bluetooth. We didn’t do it nearly as much in FDX. There’s some component of that. But what Bluetooth did amazingly well is that it prevented anyone from going to create Red Tooth because it locked up the IP from day one. And then we also got all the players around the same table. When we started FDX, we had 25 member companies. They have 25 board members, so financial institutions, fintechs, as well as data aggregators. And so we were able to get enough of the industry together to make a difference. And then you bring people in as they’re researching a space, you lock them into this space, like the— only place that the conversation could happen was here.

Nick Thomas: So, for example, when the auto manufacturers wanted to do the automobile profile of Bluetooth, they couldn’t join together and go create another standard. They had to come to Bluetooth and create a working group within Bluetooth to go and create the auto profile to do, you know, phone connecting to the car. And that has continued to roll forward as new use cases have come about. Digital identity is such a core concept and a core technology that we missed the opportunity to basically lock up the IP and create the safe space to talk about use cases, because that just wasn’t part of the playbook in the beginning days. The only thing the industry can do now is to get enough of the players to the table to say, This is how we’re going to do it, because what’s going to happen is that use cases are going to continue to be developed. There’s always going to be new innovation in the space. The question is, how do you get everyone to the same table so that the future conversations happen at that table?

Nick Thomas: And that’s going to take some heavy lifting, heavy collaboration, and really heavy influencing of the major players to say, Okay, we need these 20 players to come together to create this thing. And we’re effectively all agreeing that all conversations about digital identity and all future use cases are going to happen here. Everyone wants to create their own brand. So now you have fractionalization at the country level. You have… even in Canada, like how they think about it differs from one province to another, and you have competing ideas and standards because everyone wants to go create a platform and— Throw a brand around it and say, Hey, I did this.

Riley Hughes: You know, if you explore how the payments networks vis-a-vis Mastercard originated, really it is competitive institutions coming together and agreeing to do payments in a certain way. It was a massive undertaking to bring these players together, but they did it. And I think the reason they did it, and I would love for historians here to correct me and add any nuance to this, they knew that by creating a common scheme, it would grow the pie. It would make the volume of payments across the network bigger than if they each created their own. It’s a little bit of a prisoner’s dilemma thing, right? Because as soon as you have some of them defecting, it reduces the incentive for all the cooperators. But as long as everybody cooperates, the pie is so much bigger for everybody. And that is, I hope, what we see happen in the identity space going forward.

Nick Thomas: I hope that’s the case too, because it would make for a better world. You look at what’s happened with FDX in the U.S. It’s been very powerful in bringing the industry together. You look at what’s happened with Bluetooth globally. You buy a Bluetooth product in one country, you can use it and buy other Bluetooth products in any other country in the world and they work.

Riley Hughes: That’s power. That’s incredible. It’s led to an incredible ecosystem with so many use cases that I’m sure you had no idea would be in scope when you first started. Nick, this has been a tremendous conversation. Thank you so much for sharing everything you have. I like to ask all the guests on this podcast one question here at the end, and that is: What does the future of identity look like to you, and why does that matter for the world?

Nick Thomas: Another great question. You can go deeply philosophical. You can go totally operational. Let’s go down the operational path. I think the vision of self-sovereign identity, where consumers own and control their own identity credentials issued by the government, I think that’s going to be a future. In the early days of SSI, there was a lot of SSI doctrine, and people were almost religious about not wanting to support a centralized model. And I think that is wishful thinking in most cases. Like, I think government and government-issued identity can and should be self-sovereign, similar to how you carry around your driver’s license or other passport. But in these other worlds of federated identity, companies are always going to have a commercial interest to maintain control of the identity ecosystem in their organization, whether it be for employees or customers. So I think that the future is going to look a lot like it does today.

Nick Thomas: I think SSI will be a thing controlled by the government, but I also think the work of the OpenID has been huge in bringing products together and allowing for the consumer to permission their data to flow and use cases to be combined across products. And so I think we’ll see more of the same. I think we’ll see more shift from physical to digital, and I think the roles will be pretty much as they are today.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. Thanks a lot for wearing your prognostication hat there. I think a lot of what you’re describing is a journey we’ve been on at Trinsic too. We started off as a full-blown self-sovereign identity company, and where we’ve landed today, I think, is a platform that’s much more adoptable. delivers near-term slash immediate business value, as opposed to requiring kind of a 10-year lift and shift of the whole fabric of the internet. So what you’re describing, I think we’re seeing play out. So thanks again for joining the podcast. Do you have anything to plug? Do you have anything you’re working on that people should know about, or if people are interested in getting in touch, how should they do that?

Nick Thomas: I’m working on a book. Maybe we can talk about it when it’s done. And working together with Governor Cox and really turning Utah into the fintech capital of the world. We have a lot of interesting initiatives along that front. And so maybe my biggest plug is Utah is an amazing place, amazing place to start a business. It’s an amazing place to invest. I think the stat is something like 75-plus percent of Americans’ data flows through Utah. We’re in a really amazing place because of all the big organizations that are headquartered here, all the different use cases that are headquartered here. So Utah is really the crossroads of the West when it comes to data, and can be a leader. We were the fourth state to pass a consumer data rights, data protection law, and I think we’ll continue to see that kind of leadership from Utah. We created, what, it was like 72 millionaires in the state through the Finicity exit. There’s a lot of capital in Utah because of these amazing exits that have happened in the fintech space. And so availability of capital, amazing talent, amazing place to live.

Nick Thomas: My plug’s for Utah.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I just moved back to Utah a couple months ago, and I’ll add it’s a great place to raise a family too. Our kids are busier than ever with all kinds of things. They’ve made friends already. The community’s great, so it’s been a good experience so far.

Nick Thomas: Cool. Thank you, Riley.

Riley Hughes: Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this content, please share it with others who will benefit from it. I’ve been getting some great feedback on the podcast recently, and since we don’t do a lot of self-promotion or ads or whatever, sharing the word really is the best way to signal to us that the content is valuable and that we should keep doing it. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or X at Riley P. Hughes, and visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the future of identity. You can also visit trinsic.id/podcast to subscribe to new shows, and subscribe to the Future of Identity newsletter, where we’ll share the essential reusable identity news we rely on straight to your inbox.