Katrie Lowe: Stop Selling SSI, Sell Answers to Problems

Today’s guest is Katrie Lowe, Co-founder and CEO of Domi Labs. We start the conversation talking about how Berlin’s hyper-competitive rental market led Katrie to build a digital rental passport to streamline the experience for property managers and tenants to exchange information in a rental process. We go on to talk about Domi’s product experience, including the clever ways their product implements verifiable credentials to crack what she calls the “SSI trust triangle.”

Katrie then breaks down why Domi chose to focus on a very specific use case in the real estate vertical. A theme of this episode is focus, and that focus has led to a super deep understanding of the value propositions that Domi’s customers are willing to pay for. The answer is surprising. We’ll give you a hint—it doesn’t have to do with self-sovereignty, decentralization, or privacy. And despite that, it was fascinating to hear Katrie break down why Domi chose to build their IDtech product using self-sovereign identity anyway.
Learn more about Domi Labs at https://domilabs.io/ and on LinkedIn. Reach out to Katrie on LinkedIn.
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: Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast, where we talk to the people building the ID tech products of tomorrow. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Trinsic, and we build infrastructure for launching identity products. Today, I spoke to Katrie Lowe, co-founder and CEO of Domi Labs. We start the conversation by talking about how Berlin’s hyper-competitive rental market led Katrie to build a digital rental passport to streamline the experience for property managers and tenants to exchange information in a rental process. We go on to talk about Domi’s product experience, including some of the clever ways that their product implements verifiable credentials to crack what she calls the SSI trust triangle. To me, though, the most interesting part of the episode is when Katrie breaks down why Domi chose to focus on a very specific use case in the real estate vertical. A theme of this episode is focus. And that focus has led to a super deep understanding of the value propositions that Domi’s customers are willing to pay for. And the answer surprised me.

Riley Hughes: I’ll give you a hint: it doesn’t have anything to do with self-sovereignty, decentralization, or privacy. Despite all of that, it was fascinating to hear Katrie talk about why Domi chose to build their ID tech product using self-sovereign identity anyway, and there were some good reasons. I hope that you love listening to Katrie as much as I enjoyed speaking to her. She has such a compelling vision for how identity will impact the real estate industry, and there are so many lessons for ID tech founders to learn from Katrie’s more than three years building Domi. And now, on to my conversation with Katrie. Welcome, Katrie.

Katrie Lowe: Hi, Riley.

Riley Hughes: It’s great to catch up with you. I think we don’t get to catch up nearly as often as I would like, so I’m happy we have this excuse to get the latest. For those of our listeners who don’t know you already, what is your story? How did you end up building an identity product?

Katrie Lowe: Well, I actually am a civil engineer. I was a consulting engineer for 10 plus years. My passion is cities, and so I was working with a lot of urban development projects. And I guess the journey of founding Domi is very closely tied with how I ended up in Berlin and how I met my co-founder, Pavel. Essentially about five years ago, I took a sabbatical from my job back in Australia. I was awarded this grant opportunity to look at different urban challenges that are happening in different cities. A year on the road, I ended up in Berlin. And for those that aren’t familiar with the Berlin housing market, Berlin has one of the fastest growing rental prices in the world. That has doubled over the last 10 years. So Pavel and I met actually a few months after I arrived in Berlin, and it was at a hackathon event. And the very, very early beginnings of Domi was actually looking at transparency around rental prices, so slightly different from our current focus. But as we kind of dug deeper, we realized that one of the key frictions in the rental application process really comes down to data.

Katrie Lowe: So the way that landlords and tenants establish trust, essentially, they share information. And as we kind of explored that further, that’s where I came across self-sovereign identity technology and met you, essentially, back in 2019, part of the self-sovereign identity incubator cohort, and that really was the big sort of starting point for Domi Labs.

Riley Hughes: So it sounds like the problem that you’re solving is related to establishing trust between the landlord and the tenant through the sharing of information.

Katrie Lowe: I mean, when we started out, that was very much the value proposition. And I’d say a lot of the work that’s been done in the last three years, particularly in the last 18 months, was actually challenging that and actually really understanding what were the key value propositions that really mattered to property managers and tenants. And so the way I describe Domi to people, you can think of it like a passport for the rental market. We’re essentially creating a faster, more secure way for property managers and tenants to exchange information, as well as navigate that whole experience. The pain point that we’ve sort of boiled it down to was actually around process optimization. So it’s not really about trust or privacy or user data control, which is sort of, I think, the first thing you think of when you think about self-sovereign identity technology. But really, for tenants in capital cities, they’re competing against hundreds of applicants for one single listing. So for them, all that really matters is getting in first and actually being able to establish that trust.

Katrie Lowe: But first thing is to get their foot in the door. And for property managers, it’s being able to make those fast decisions with confidence based on verified data.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. So what I’m hearing is that data, trust, identity, these are parts of the solution, but that the key value proposition for tenants and landlords is actually the process optimization and convenience, probably. Is that right?

Katrie Lowe: Yeah.

Riley Hughes: How does an identity product help with optimizing processes better than maybe what exists on the market today?

Katrie Lowe: So if I kind of walk through the journey of a tenant, you know, you go to an online marketplace, you browse your rental listings. Then usually through the platform, you can submit an inquiry to attend a viewing. At least that’s how it works in Germany. So you have to be invited to go to a viewing. At that stage, you only share a little bit of information. So then you will often be sent an email by the property manager inviting you to a viewing. That’s when it gets even more complicated, because there’ll be some property managers that do use rental management software platforms, where they will require you to upload documents or fill out these online forms. And then there are some that don’t use any software solutions at all and will just get you to email your documents over as PDF attachments. With existing software solutions, they have done an incredible sort of job in trying to streamline those workflows, but they’re still based on legacy technology.

Katrie Lowe: So they still require people, well, number one, to have to register accounts to them on the tenant side in order to actually feed them through the more optimized workflow for property managers. And the other thing is that they still rely on PDFs and people to fill online forms. They call it smart tenant matching. I call it the OKCupid approach, because essentially what happens is property managers sort of nominate their preferences for the type of tenant they’re looking for. In order to sort of percentage match accurately, it relies on the tenants having to have 100% completed the form, and for every single tenant to have filled out the form in the exact same way, which obviously isn’t going to happen.

Katrie Lowe: So I guess where Domi comes in is we’re not looking to build another property management platform, because there’s some really great solutions in the market there, but it’s about, I guess, being that bridge — we call it closing the digital identity gap — creating a mechanism that makes it easier for tenants and property managers to exchange that trusted information so they can actually streamline their processes much more smarter and efficient way.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s interesting. So what I’m hearing is kind of this concept of going from PDFs, accounts, forms, profiles, and turning that into a passport, which, when I hear that word, I think about something that I obtain and, I don’t know, at least with a government-issued passport, it’s kind of a hassle to obtain in the first place. But once you get it, it’s nice because you can kind of, you know, take it lots of places and use it for lots of things and get right through when you need it. How have you made that user experience easier for the tenant?

Katrie Lowe: Yeah, I mean, I think you captured it quite well there with the analogy with the passport. I mean, the various sort of reasons why we’ve sort of landed on passport as the kind of way to describe Domi. And one of the key ones was the idea is that you can move from Berlin to London to Munich to San Francisco and actually passport your rental history. In Europe, for example, they have free movement, but you move from Poland to Berlin, which is like only less than an hour away, and you have to start from scratch. You are in the same boat as, for example, myself that’s moved from Australia, which is halfway around the other side of the world. So you may have an amazing rental history in the last place you lived, but there’s no way to be able to have that trusted or recognized in a new city or particularly a new country. That’s where we see the advantage with taking an SSI approach and also a verifiable credential approach as well, is because it’s based on this global digital identity standard.

Riley Hughes: So, you know, one common challenge that I see many ID tech products grapple with is that they see the potential of an identity wallet or of a reusable identity credential or a passport or something like that, and they see all the opportunities that that gives them, and they build something for all of those opportunities. They build something that is generic enough to serve lots of different use cases, and I’ve seen challenges with that approach in terms of getting that kind of a generic product adopted in the market. You have focused on a singular use case, and you focus pretty narrowly on that, and it’s not even just on the real estate market. You focused on the rental piece of the real estate market. And that focus, I wonder how you think about that and how do you balance kind of thinking big of all the opportunities and the potential that there is versus thinking small for your first kind of—and not really small, the rental market’s big—but you know what I mean, right? Like thinking small in terms of that first use case. And yeah, could you unpack that for us?

Katrie Lowe: We have been unique in the identity world, being very business use case focused. That is very much tied with my background in industry and engineering, not just from experience point of view, but valuing or prioritizing making sure that there’s a tangible outcome. Also, one of the key evolutions of ourselves as a company is we have started to lean more into digital identity DNA. We introduce ourselves as a digital identity company, whereas I think in the early days we were saying, We’re Domi Labs, we’re a prop tech company. We have gone on the journey of actually embracing the broader potential of our technology because that’s the reality. We’re not building it just for the housing rental industry. This just happens to be the starting point, so we can seed the market with verifiable credentials.

Katrie Lowe: But I guess our perspective on it is that in order for SSI technology to be adopted by the mainstream, which I think is everyone’s ambitions, but really is where the world of the internet should really be heading, you need a very sticky problem and you need a large proportion of the population to be adopting it almost at once. And so for us, that’s renting. If you look at the rental market in Germany, I think 52% of the population rents. In a city like Berlin, 85% of the population rents. And so that was one of the key reasons why we decided to focus on the housing rental space first. It wasn’t just a default decision. It was something we actually strategically looked at. Our conviction is that you do need to have a really painful problem that hasn’t been solved. That is experienced by a large proportion of the population. And actually, the advantage of doing that is that the go-to-market pathway is a lot more straightforward, because you can actually pinpoint your target customers, and you can actually tailor a product for that use case.

Katrie Lowe: But you can still do that with the potential other use cases in mind. So have a clear, tangible product that you can start selling from day one, but design it in a way that still allows you to expand and scale.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I’ve seen. a lot of people who you may ask, who is your target customer? And the answer is like, well, it’s either banks or healthcare companies or governments or insurance companies or travel companies. It’s like, wow, those are very different. And also each of those categories, there’s a whole bunch of subcategories within each of those with very different needs. And I think something you said there is like really understated but outrageously important, which is the ability to identify your target customers and make a list of like 10 or 50 or 100 or 200 or whatever it is, but like make a list of each of them and then go talk to all of them and find out kind of the commonalities and then take a product to market that way. And I think that level of focus breeds a lot better, like you mentioned, the ability to sort of tailor your product to that market.

Katrie Lowe: I think I’d take that even one step further. So I think the true challenge is not only identifying who your target customers are, but how are you going to get them? And I would say that’s the biggest challenge probably for any startup. For us, we realized actually how important that is. You can do as much research as possible to like prove out your market, give your product every fighting chance to succeed, but, you know, you also need to figure out how you’re going to get these customers and actually have those conversations. And I think it’s harder when your attention, I suppose, is spread because… Probably sounds exciting at the surface level to say, yes, I can apply my product to all these different industry verticals. And first glance, the potential sounds really exciting. But actually, when you start sort of drilling down and figuring out how you’re going to actually get the customer, that’s where the hard work happens. And it’s not often very apparent when you’re looking at that high level.

Riley Hughes: I agree, and I’m curious, as you have done that hard work and drilled down, if we picture a drill drilling into, like, layers of rock or something like that, right, what was your initial expectation of how deep that drill would need to go versus how deep it has gone in terms of that target customer?

Katrie Lowe: Yeah, so I understand that. The real estate industry is very complex. The main reason it’s so hard to sort of break into the real estate industry for any company — so I’m saying generically proptech companies — is because they historically have been quite conservative and resistant to digitalisation. And I think there’s been an acceleration towards digital. As the industry has realised the importance of actually having that digital infrastructure, but also the economy right now, you know, profit margins are a lot lower, so there’s not the capital there to grow teams. They need to digitalise. So coming out of San Francisco and the first three months of the company, heading back to Berlin, the thoughts were, right, now we’ve got, you know, a click prototype. We can start showing people we can raise money and secure our first customers in the first six months. That was not the case. And when you talk about the drill, I mean, the thought was, okay, well, we know our target customers. It’s just property managers.

Katrie Lowe: So we just look up the people on the major online marketplace and just reach out to them and give them a phone call. Actually, when you think about the real estate sector or the rental sector, there are a lot of different stakeholders. There’s actually quite a lot of different segments, and probably it’s the same in other industries. But I guess for us, what it looked like was you’ve got your big housing companies, you’ve got rental managers that go from small to large. Then you’ve obviously got the big online marketplaces. And then within that, there’s also some other niche areas, for example, build-to-rent property developers. And I guess understanding the different pain points in those different segments and actually what was our sweet spot, because actually, yes, theoretically, Domi can be adopted by every single one of those players in the market. But in terms of, like, first customers, what we realised was for us, our sweet spot was the mid-sized rental agencies.

Katrie Lowe: So these are customers that may have tried some existing software solutions, but the existing solutions in the market aren’t a good fit for them because the price point’s too high, the feature sets actually aren’t designed for them in mind. So that’s where we saw our early entry point. And to get to that point, we’ve been around now for about three years, and I would say the first two years was just really doing a lot of research. And that research wasn’t just a case of calling up a few people and lining up interviews. It’s actually finding out who’s who, who are the influencers in the industry. We finally feel like we’ve hit rock right now. We know that we’re speaking to those influencers in the market, the people that really know what’s going on, other PropTech companies in the market, having them on board as allies as well. But I think that that is a factor of also coming into this space. As an outsider as well. So yes, I have background in the urban development sector, but that’s not the same as real estate.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, wow. So I’m thinking about drilling into the earth and you get real estate, and then subset of that is rental, and then subset of that is landlords or property managers, and then there’s like segments of that, and then there’s segmenting that.

Katrie Lowe: Yeah, and you’ve furnished apartments, you’ve got short-term, medium-term, long-term rentals. You know, there’s all types of rentals.

Riley Hughes: And I guess the takeaway to that is the reality that I think any identity company needs to face when they’re trying to pursue a use case is that they are going to have to drill as deep as we have, and that’s a lot of work. I think there’s also often this concept of an issuer of data, or the source of the data, right? That issuer gives some data to the renter. The renter then takes that data and uses it with the landlord. That is the typical model that we see a lot of. And we’ve spoken a lot about property managers and renters. We haven’t spoken as much about the kind of data source side or the issuer side of the equation. I wonder how you think about that third aspect, which is where does the renter get their data from?

Katrie Lowe: So we’ve been very pragmatic with that. So tenant will download the app, and as part of the onboarding experience, they fill out their renting preferences and their cover letter, and we help them secure their identity, financial, and credit checks. And the way that we do that is that we partner with third-party providers, so KYC providers, open banking providers, and credit agencies. And essentially through the app, these providers sort of do the verification checks. They push the raw data to us. We convert that to a verifiable credential, push that to the user, and then we forget about it. So that’s how the user is able to hold their original credentials. We’ve taken that approach because there’s a lot of work happening right now, particularly in Europe around setting up that infrastructure so that government official bodies can issue these credentials to individuals. But that probably is a couple of years down the track. And also, you know, to roll that out also will require… A lot of work.

Katrie Lowe: And so essentially, to a property manager, for example, or to a tenant, the experience is just the same as signing up to a car sharing app. Take a photo of your ID, selfie. They’re used to that experience now. So the idea is that a property manager is actually getting a direct insight into someone’s income from their bank records. So it actually doesn’t rely on Domi to be the trusted source in many ways. I think that’s one of the first questions I often get from a lot of people is, Oh, you know, why should I trust Domi? Well, you’re not trusting Domi. You’re trusting actually the original documents that the person has. So in terms of the SSI triangle, yes, we are the issuer, but we’re relying on established third-party companies, very familiar practice in the market.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. So you’re not waiting around for the governments and the banks and the credit bureaus to sign up to issue verifiable credentials into your product, it sounds like.

Katrie Lowe: Yeah. And I think also we’re not looking to be that source. Like we’re helping facilitate the exchange of that trusted data, but we’re agnostic about where that comes from. So Domi is set up so that when there are other parties that are issuing credentials in the SSI ecosystem, there’s a lot more development and robust, we are able to consume those credentials and to facilitate the process. But I mean, I think if you are claiming to be helping a KYC process or an onboarding process, the first question you’ll get is, Well, how are you different from the blank, blank, blank, the XYZ? There’s many other sort of KYC companies out there, and that’s sort of a very established industry. So yeah, we’re not looking to replace that.

Riley Hughes: I mean, it sounds like a very pragmatic approach. I guess, how would you respond to someone who wonders then? Couldn’t you just do this then without verifiable credentials, without self-sovereign identity, without any of this sort of added digital identity standards, and simply be an app that integrates the open banking providers and the KYC providers and everything else and sort of does it that way? You know, it sounds like if you’re the issuer, that theoretically could be done, correct me if I’m wrong, but if it could, then why go to the effort of exploring SSI and utilizing verifiable credentials in your platform?

Katrie Lowe: Well, part of the answer is scalability. The bigger answer is around trust. Essentially, we’re looking to plug into every online marketplace in the world, or every B2B integration with any rental management software platform. And I think you can’t credibly do that if you are building the conventional centralized app where everyone is storing their credentials within the Domi database, for example. For Domi, in our particular use case, what’s really important is privacy, user data control, and also the selective disclosure functionality. In our use case, I would say persistence of identity isn’t the most critical thing. So when we think about the rental ecosystem, it’s a very large but a very enclosed ecosystem.

Katrie Lowe: So for us, the way we’ve designed Domi is we don’t have like a blockchain where it’s anchoring the public keys to a blockchain, but we’re still ensuring decentralization in terms of where that data is stored and ensuring that tenants actually have full control over how that information is shared, what information is shared at what stage of the rental process, because when you think about the rental process, it’s not as simple as, look, here are my credentials. There’s a few steps there that makes it quite complex. That’s why SSI technology. The ability to do that, as well as have the receiver, being the property manager, be able to trust that what they’re seeing is trustworthy, not just because it’s coming from Domi and it’s our brand. I think that’s really important, so that’s why we’ve gone down the SSI route.

Riley Hughes: That all, I think, resonates with me. On the other hand, the space is moving quickly. The standards are changing. There are a host of them. There’s a bunch of blockchains and a bunch of verifiable credential formats and NFTs and a whole bunch of stuff out there that people think about. And so how would you advise an ID tech product builder who who’s evaluating the pros and cons of going down this path, based on your experience and what you’ve learned?

Katrie Lowe: I think it comes down to focusing on the business use case. Figure out what are the elements of SSI principles that are really important in your particular use case, and design your solution around that. Because we’ve seen so much development and maturity in SSI technology and the pilots that have got off the ground since then, and there’s going to be a lot more in terms of developments and standards in the next couple of years. It’s a full-time job to keep on top of all those developments. So if you’re going to be designing around trying to align with the standard, I think you’re already behind in many ways. You’ve got other battles to fight as a startup, I think. So yeah, design your solution with the end outcome in mind in terms of what your customer wants to see. Yes, you’ll be kind of not being an SSI purist. You’ll be fudging a few things, but that can be worked out later on. That’s my belief.

Riley Hughes: That’s helpful and a nuanced position, so I appreciate you expanding there. I’ve heard two pieces of concrete advice so far. One is this: focusing on the business use case and fighting the most important battles as a startup. That’s probably a related advice to the feedback you gave earlier around digging into your target customers and getting really, really deep and peeling off the layers of the onion there, that it’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s important work. What other advice do you have, maybe generally? You’ve been at this for three years. I’ve seen the product evolve a little bit in terms of how you’ve presented it and the product form factor and things like that. But what are some things that you would have done differently if you could go back and have learned those lessons?

Katrie Lowe: One piece of advice would actually be bringing on a business development and sales person early. Part of the reason I say that is also linked to the second piece of advice I have, is stripping away the whole concept of trying to sell privacy and try to understand actually what is the pain point or value proposition that your customer is aware of right now. You can get caught up in this idea of you’re selling a new tech, and so therefore you have to educate the market. You know, of course they don’t know why it’s so amazing, but that’s your thinking, I think, and it’s important to put that to aside because the customer actually is feeling a pain point. And a lot of the times when we were speaking with customers in the beginning, they expressed a lot of curiosity, but it was hard for them to articulate why they were interested in it. And what we sort of realised and we dug deeper was that for them it is purely the frustration of dealing with paperwork. It’s as simple as that.

Katrie Lowe: And looking back to my first sort of piece of advice of having a business development and sales person, I mean, I’ve been doing a lot of our external engagement from day zero, and I think I’ve been doing a pretty okay job. But I think with an early stage startup, moving fast is really important. And I think getting to the heart of understanding what’s so compelling about your product, but then actually starting to secure customers is really important. And I think you can burn a lot of money focusing on other things, for example building tech. So I would actually bring on a business development sales person a lot earlier, so you can actually get the customers on board and then figure out your product and tech development.

Riley Hughes: I appreciate how, like three years ago, when you were part of the SSI incubator in San Francisco, you were listening to people like me and others talk about decentralization and user sovereignty and user centricity and personal dignity online and privacy and all the SSI principles and everything like that. I love to hear that coming out the other end, it’s like the value proposition is paperwork is frustrating and we can get rid of the paperwork. Going from all this, like big brain, very kind of cerebral, very conceptual value propositions down to a very tangible one related to an actual pain point people feel.

Katrie Lowe: The value of having someone that is like an expert at business development, sales and commercials is that they’re probably very well equipped to articulate that value proposition in a clear way, which I feel like a lot of people that come from the identity world or form identity startups perhaps can’t really articulate, you know, perhaps tap into as fast as perhaps needed for an early stage startup.

Riley Hughes: You mentioned that talking about Domi as a prop tech company was sort of how you started, and you’ve ended up talking about Domi as an identity company. How has that language affected the conversations with customers? Has that come from this kind of business development work that you’ve done?

Katrie Lowe: Yes and no. Actually, it’s come from having spoken to a lot of different people, particularly investors, to be honest, and understanding what they’re looking for when they’re investing in prospective companies. So I think the perception is when you speak with investors, typical question will be like, Well, what’s your market size? You know, what is the value of the market? And we found it was a little bit harder to, I mean, the real estate industry is massive. It’s point number one. But also historically, prop tech startups have struggled to get off the ground. But it doesn’t mean that there isn’t money there. And so one of the pieces of advice or feedback we took away from these conversations was that if we could come back to them and say, look, these are the other different applications and actually spell out what those applications are. and could look like, that would be sort of an exciting value proposition. And so that’s what pushed us in that direction to go, okay, well, you know what, we are a digital identity company.

Katrie Lowe: So yes, there was a big nudge through the investor conversations we had, but it definitely sort of feels right in the way that we describe ourselves. I feel like it’s sort of been a really good process and experience for us to go on that journey. But when you talk about actually how customers perceive us, so when I started saying, look, we’re a digital identity company, my first concern before I even trialed this was they’d probably not know what a digital identity company was, like, you know. But I was really surprised. Actually, a lot of people know what digital identity is. They’ve experienced it in lots of different ways, particularly the other proptech companies as well. Think keyless entry locks. Currently, the way they provide access, they’ll send you an email, and they’re trusting that the person that has access to that email account actually is the person that really should have authorization to access that apartment. And there’s many other use cases where digital identity is key.

Katrie Lowe: And it was only when I started having those conversations with these other sort of key proptech digital solution leaders in the industry where I realized actually digital identity is a big problem. And then that kind of pushed us, encouraged us more to kind of lean into that further and say, there’s no one else in the industry that’s actually being that leader around digital identity and creating that conversation around digital identity. So it actually opened up more space for us and got us invited into a lot more conversations because we were talking about a very important problem that actually wasn’t being talked about, but everyone secretly behind the scenes was going… This isn’t the best way to do things, you know, so actually it’s been really good for us.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s almost counterintuitive that you would think that going from proptech to digital identity would reduce the scope of your market, but it sounds like it actually expanded your potential.

Katrie Lowe: It gave us a stronger platform to talk on, I’d say, and also meant that we didn’t have to, like, awkwardly sort of avoid certain things compared to competitors, for example. We could comfortably have conversations with perceived competitors and actually genuinely have partnership conversations.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, and solving a problem in a little different way, right? A unique way. So I like that. Kateree, tell me what the future of identity looks like to you, and why does that matter for the world?

Katrie Lowe: I guess this comes back to the whole concept of describing Domi as a passport. When you look at the demographics of how people are renting or who’s renting, that has changed a lot in the last 10 to 15 years. Now you’ve got a lot of people coming not only from elsewhere within the country, but also globally to capital cities. And so that presents a challenge for people moving, but also for property managers as well. You know, documentation isn’t standardised. And then when you factor into things like the GDPR regulation, that adds another whole layer of complexity to the whole conversation around digitalisation. And so the idea is if we can eliminate that stress by partially—and obviously there’s various other factors to it—but, you know, make it super simple to navigate that whole experience and be able to establish that trust with someone in a completely new city, you know, that may not speak your language.

Katrie Lowe: But you’re able to prove that, you know, you are sort of have a credible rental history, do all those identity, financial and credit checks in a seamless way at a click of a button, so that, you know, for a property manager, it’s just an easy process to say yes. I mean, that’s where I’d say the future of identity is. It enables the ability for streamlining, like global mobility, streamlining sort of business transactions. So one of the things we realized was that the same frictions that property managers and tenants face are the exact same frictions that any business customer transaction faces. So being able to sort of make those confidence decisions based on that verified data, you know, in a seamless way, I think that’s the future of identity, and that’s where I think the real power of SSI lies in being able to make that such a seamless process.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. Thank you. Well, you said that so well. Katrie, it’s been fantastic to catch up. Before we wrap, is there anything that you would like to plug? Anything you’re working on that people should check out? Or, you know, if people want to get in touch with you, how should they do that?

Katrie Lowe: Well, I mean, our website is domilabs.io, but I guess the big things we’ve got lining up is the launch of our pilot. So if you do live in Germany, particularly Berlin, you know, hop onto our website. There’s also a link to our other launch site, domiapp.io, where you can sign up to our waitlist. But also feel free to also follow us on LinkedIn for any updates about the company. And yeah, feel free to drop me a message on LinkedIn as well. You’d love to chat.

Riley Hughes: Well, we’ll drop those links in the show notes as well. Katrie, it’s been such a pleasure. Thanks, everyone, for listening. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at Trinsic underscore ID and me at Riley P. Hughes. And visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the ID tech products of the future. Thanks for listening.