Introducing: The Future of Identity

Welcome to The Future of Identity. Normally, show host Riley Hughes (Co-founder & CEO of Trinsic) talks to the people building IDtech products, but the purpose of this solo episode is to introduce the purpose of the podcast.

In this short episode, Riley covers:

1. The future of identity and why it is better

2. How great products will get us there

3. Why now is the right time—IDtech is the new Fintech

4. Why the identity space needs a term like “IDtech”

5. What to expect from The Future of Identity podcast

Thank you for joining us. Make sure to subscribe to the show to get new episodes as they drop. Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Hey there, I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic and the host of the Future of Identity podcast. Normally on the podcast, we talk to people who are building the ID tech products of tomorrow. But today, I’m here with a solo episode to introduce the purpose of the podcast, what you can expect, and why I’m spending so much time digging in with these guests. We named this the Future of Identity podcast because the future of identity will be so much better than it is today. Today, it’s pretty remarkable that we’re sending people to outer space and beaming Wi‑Fi down from satellites. We have, you know, AI that can write my shopping list, plan my meals, and then write me a poem about it. And we’re editing genes and doing all sorts of unbelievable things with technology and science and innovation. And yet I can’t even prove that my legal name is Riley Hughes digitally. The only way I have to do it is pull a plastic card out of a leather pouch in my pocket and show it to you in person. Even then, that’s not even a great solution.

Riley Hughes: Some of the most innovative identity companies of today are built around this premise of taking photographs of that plastic card, taking a selfie, and checking to make sure that those two are likely from the same person. It’s always confused me that we don’t take photographs of handwritten checks to send people money. I use PayPal or Venmo or Coinbase, and I don’t take photographs of handwritten notes to send messages. I use Gmail or WhatsApp or other products that allow me to communicate. But somehow, identity is still largely analog. Our identities are still the last thread tethering us to the physical world. The primary reason I still need to carry my wallet around with me everywhere I go. And when we get off of the, you know, SpaceX craft onto our Mars colony, we’re not going to pull a plastic card out of our spacesuit to get access to the things we need there. The future of identity is clearly going to be better than it is today.

Riley Hughes: And the reason I bring up the payments analogies and the messaging analogies is because the way that we will get there, the way that we digitize and move identity into the future, is not going to be necessarily through technology, although that’ll have play a role. It’s not going to be necessarily through concepts or ideals like self-sovereignty or decentralization, although those will play a role too. This will happen through great products. I manage my email through Gmail because it’s a great product. It allows me to search my email and I never have to delete things. It allows me to filter spam. It gives me a lot of benefits that make my life better. And frankly, it means that I don’t need to manage, administer, and worry about running my own email server. It’s awesome. It’s a great product. I mean, with Gmail’s flaws aside, it’s a great product. There’s a reason that these products don’t already exist in most people’s lives today. Identity is hard. Identity is a big problem.

Riley Hughes: Identity requires interoperability on a scale that is challenging because it covers so many aspects of our lives. But identity today is where finance was 10 years ago. 10 years ago, we had some fintech products that were useful for point solutions, and we had the seeds of a fintech ecosystem. But with the emergence of open banking and fintech infrastructure platforms that enabled the proliferation and explosion of fintech innovation, where today any company can be a fintech company and many companies that seem to solve a completely unrelated problem. are primarily monetized and growing via their fintech offerings. Likewise, today there are IDtech products in all kinds of industries that have created the seeds for innovation in the identity industry that wasn’t possible in the past. Some of those new innovations have come from groups trying to solve for things like decentralized identity.

Riley Hughes: And if you really break down how verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers and other new protocols are being used in the wild, if you squint, it looks a lot like the way that developers use open banking. Open banking enables your financial data to be reusable, composable, and useful across a variety of applications. And likewise, verifiable credentials make identity data reusable and useful and composable across a variety of applications while maintaining privacy and doing so in a standard way that enables developers to get a host of valuable features out of the box instead of needing to build everything in a proprietary way. For the last five plus years, the industry has focused so much on getting these technologies right, which is important. But until recently, the way to talk about products in the space was to say the application layer of self-sovereign identity, or some other variant of this somewhat convoluted sentence.

Riley Hughes: And recently we started using the term IDtech as shorthand for describing the product application layer that is causing these technologies and concepts to be adopted in production. Because after all, we could build the most amazing and elegant technologies and protocols, but if they’re never adopted, then we’ve missed a big opportunity to make a big impact on an important problem. So during the Future of Identity podcast, our goal is to talk with people building at this level, who are building amazing products that solve real-world problems, and that are driving adoption of identity protocols and solutions that enable a better future. Building products that allow people to more securely and safely access the things that they need and get on with their life. So in these episodes, we’ll dig into some of the tactical and relevant boots-on-the-ground, rubber-meets-the-road kind of questions. We’ll try to talk to the people with real experience deploying IDtech products to users, and unpack the lessons that could only be learned by taking a product to market.

Riley Hughes: We’ll aim to keep these episodes less than an hour so they’re digestible, and try to summarize the takeaways in a way that’s useful as you seek to build these products in your industries. We’ll dig into some of the most challenging and hairy problems with launching an IDtech product, things like onboarding stakeholders into an ecosystem, things like building a great user experience for end users, or overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem that’s inherent with a lot of these use cases. And we’ll try to examine some of the unique opportunities for identity products across various industries, things like healthcare, finance, real estate, and employment and education, supply chain, and a variety of other industries, and some of the unique ways that you may think about taking a product to market in those different industries, geographies, and use cases. If you’re interested in following our journey, I invite you to follow us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to your podcasts.

Riley Hughes: I’m always around on Twitter @RileyPHughes, and Trinsic is a great place to start if you’re interested in building an IDtech product to solve problems in your industry. You can find us at trinsic dot ID or on Twitter at trinsic underscore ID.