Robin Tombs – Building Reusable Identity at Scale and Driving Real-World Adoption with Yoti

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast, where we talk to the people building the world’s most innovative digital ID ecosystems. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we help businesses accept dozens of digital IDs through a single integration. Today, I had an excellent conversation with Robin Tombs, co-founder and CEO of Yoti. Yoti is one of the most highly adopted private sector identity wallets on Earth. Robin shared an insightful look into their founding story and their early traction, as well as how regulatory factors have impacted their growth rate over time. We also discussed the digital identity ecosystem in the UK, which is a very hot market right now due to the way the government has been approaching it. And it’s an interesting time, and Yoti is right in the middle of it, so this was a very pertinent conversation. Finally, we talked about the role that identity acceptance networks, such as Trinsic, will play in the adoption of digital IDs. Some people ask me things like, How does Trinsic convince digital ID wallets to join its network?

Riley Hughes: And Robin gives a good answer to that that I thought was pretty interesting. So I think this episode is super relevant to folks interested in the digital ID market in the UK, policy people thinking about relying party adoption, and hopefully other people as well. So now on to the episode. I’m thrilled to be joined by my friend and partner, Robin Tombs, co-founder and CEO of Yoti. Robin, welcome to the show.

Robin Tombs: Thanks, Riley. I’m delighted to be with you.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I am as well. I think we met maybe, I don’t know, four years ago or something like that, five years ago maybe. And I remember at that time still, but even more so now, definitely view Yoti as one of the preeminent, premier private sector reusable ID wallets on Earth. So really big congrats to what you built, and a lot of respect to you and the team.

Robin Tombs: That’s very kind. It’s been a long journey and a tough journey at points, but we persevered, and we’re hopefully making some good progress in this area with lots of other people who want to see digital identity become something that empowers people and makes life easier for them and keeps them safer.

Riley Hughes: Well, I thought maybe we could start just by going through the journey a little bit. I think many people probably know what you are now, but I think it’s maybe interesting to dive into kind of what brought you here, the sort of last company that you founded, and then what caused you to notice this problem and set out to solve it specifically with reusable ID way before it was really a thing, right? But way before that word was even broadly used.

Robin Tombs: Sure. I met my co-founder, Noel Hayden, back in 1997 when I was a young guy, and we started a business called Internet Digital Media, which was a web kind of development business, and that was actually quite hard work trying to persuade clients that we were doing good work and deserved to be paid a few pounds for doing it well, because lots of other people were doing it and suggesting it could be done very cheaply. So we pivoted and we became a free-to-play games business, and we sold that business a couple of years later, and the people we worked for… was a kind of free-to-play box games seller, and they effectively wanted us to help market their games. But we had noticed that lots and lots of people wanted to advertise their gambling sites, their pay-to-play games sites on our free-to-play games site. And they weren’t keen on that business model. And they said, Look, if you want to do that, you should go off and do that yourself. So we set up in 2001 a business called GameSys, and GameSys became the world’s largest online bingo business.

Robin Tombs: And a lot of people kind of thought it was very odd that we were doing it. We did free-to-play bingo. We had chat rooms back in 2001, so all of the ladies playing the games could chat to each other. We had an auto dabber that would mark off all of the bingo numbers because they really wanted to chat. They weren’t really there to try and win the bingo, although sometimes they won. But they told us, We love the games because we can chat to each other, and we thought that’s really cool. But what we also noticed was a few bad people would come in with a false name or a real name, but it wasn’t their name, and somebody else’s credit card, and they would use that to basically play and try and win and then withdraw the winnings. And we did ID verification back in 2002 when we launched, but we realized, hang on, this system really doesn’t work at all well because we would basically send to somebody like Experian or Equifax the name and the date of birth and address of the customer. And they would say, yes, it’s a match, and we would go, fantastic.

Robin Tombs: And then we would find sometimes, not very often, luckily at the time, that was actually a fraudulent person with a fraudulent credit card. And when we then contacted the real person at that address or email address, they would say, I’ve never heard of you. I didn’t know that somebody had used my information to do this. So we thought online ID is not going to work well in the future if it relies just on knowledge, because people have their knowledge hacked and breached, and you can’t control what other people might put into websites, even if it is your information. So we, in 2014, quite a lot later, we didn’t think this problem had been solved, and we thought you really need to use biometrics, and you need to use passports and driving licenses and pictures in those documents to check that people genuinely are the owner of that information on their driving license or passport. And if we do that, and we actually make the owner of that information the genuine kind of person in control of their identity app, we will hopefully find that that’s quite a popular thing to do.

Robin Tombs: and it will allow them to prove their ID and prove their age. And that’s why we set Yoti up in 2014.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. Appreciate the background. I had a chuckle internally when you said that in 2014, this problem had not been solved yet. I guess I’m curious, what do you think now, looking back, what is this now, 12 years later or something?

Robin Tombs: I’m a lot older, a lot wiser, and realise the problem still hasn’t been fully solved. But I guess you actually need sometimes a little bit of naivety to start a business. They’re hard things. If you knew all of the trials and tribulations you were going to go along the journey, you might not be so brave to do it. So we rather foolishly, in some respects, thought the world needs a personal digital identity app, and hopefully we’ll have tens of millions of people using it in a few years’ time. That didn’t happen, but now we’ve got lots more people using it, and the logic of people owning their own data makes a lot more sense to a lot more people now than it did back in 2014. We did actually have one other reason why we started it in 2014. We also went to a Spartan race, which is one of these wonderful races, like a Tough Mudder race, where people turn up and they jump about in the mud and kind of race around and have a very good day out.

Robin Tombs: But we noticed that there were massive queues because people had to register online to get their tickets, but then they had to register at the event, and then they had to go to another queue to sign a liability waiver in case they injured themselves, and then they had to put their passports and driving licences and any of their stuff that they didn’t want to get wet in the mud in a bag drop. And the amount of queuing and trying to link bits of tickets to bags, we thought, hang on. This hasn’t got anything to do with fraud. This is just really painful for people to do. And of course, we watched another race back in England, which it was raining that day, typically in England, and we thought not only is this inefficient, but it’s not a very pleasant experience. Whereas if you could have an app which proved each time with a QR code that you are the right person, and the whole thing could be sped up massively. So that was the other reason why we decided in 2014. But the world was right and ripe for us doing what we did. We were probably at least five, maybe ten years too early, Riley.

Riley Hughes: You know what they say, it’s like when you’re, if you’re out surfing or something and there’s a wave coming, right? You’ve got to be in the water.

Robin Tombs: Yeah, you’ve got to be in the water to be on time.

Riley Hughes: And certainly it’s not obvious what the timing was going to be, at least not to those of us who were optimistic about this space ten years ago or whatever. But yeah, that’s a great background. I wanted to dig into, you mentioned you maybe naively thought there’d be tens of millions of people in the first couple of years or whatever of this wallet. And I guess I’m curious how one of the big challenges for wallet apps generally, or these types of products, is that why would anybody download this wallet app if there’s nobody, no businesses that accept it or something, right? So you of course need the acceptance side in order to get the users, and then of course you need to get the users in order to get the acceptors interested. And so there’s this cold start problem. How did you think about that in the early days? And if you think about the J curve, so to speak, that Yoti went on, how long did it take before you felt like the boulder started rolling down the hill, opposed to you were pushing the boulder up the hill?

Robin Tombs: Yeah, trying to solve a two-sided market and that cold start is horrifically challenging. It kind of helps if you’re a WhatsApp-type app and you invite all of your friends to the app, then you can solve it fairly quickly. But for us, it was a nightmare. What was interesting was when we launched the app, we spent a couple of years working out how to make a super secure app because we thought if it ever gets breached, we’re dead. It’s not like we’ll just be able to apologise and say, look, we thought it was secure, but it wasn’t. Hopefully this next time it is secure. We thought, no, that won’t fly. So we spent two years literally just on the technology and spending time thinking, when we’ve solved that, we’ve got the even harder problem at the cold start. We actually found that when we put it out there in the UK market back in late November 2016, it immediately got quite a lot of uptake from 18, 19, 20-year-olds who in the UK have to prove their age lots, and they immediately got it. This is back in 2016, 2017. They all were using phones.

Robin Tombs: They all thought, yes, I would like my ID on my phone to prove my age, and lots of them downloaded it, even though they probably didn’t know who the heck Yoti was. We obviously tried to reassure them that we were a respectable business, but most of them just went, that makes a lot of sense, and they got it. What we then found was lots of businesses weren’t prepared to accept it because they didn’t think the compliance was yet in place, the regulations hadn’t been updated, all sorts of very sensible reasons. And sadly, that meant we literally had the first kind of million users, all aged 18 or 19, feeding back to us that it’s a great idea, but we can’t actually use it anywhere. So that was a big problem. But we said, be patient. Hopefully, as more people get one, more businesses will think it’s a good idea to accept. Accept it. And that did happen to some extent. We actually also worked out that if people wanted to prove their age or their ID to each other, if they were on a marketplace like buyers and sellers, we could enable the app to do that for them.

Robin Tombs: And that actually was quite popular, which we hadn’t realized initially, that people sometimes in life want to do that just to get more confidence that somebody’s unlikely to scam them, because scammers don’t want to put their real face into an app and then try and scam. someone. But it was a bit of a nightmare, Riley. We were at least five years too early. I remember the alcohol licensing guy coming to see me in 2017 and saying, There’s some laws which will have to be changed before all of your UK people are going to be able to use that for alcohol. And although we knew that, we thought, well, hopefully you’ll look at the science of this, the innovation, and you’ll change the law. They are likely to change that law this year, but that is seven, eight years later than I hoped that they might change that law. So it did take a long time. It’s been sometimes regulatory that has helped us. So we have, in the UK, we have something called right to work checks, where you have to prove your nationality and your verified name on your passport.

Robin Tombs: And about seven, ten million people do that a year. And the law changed in 2022 to allow people to use a certified digital ID like Yoti to do that, and that became very popular. So we had young people who were beginning to use it for non-alcohol proof of age, and there’s quite a lot of other products which you can use it to prove age without it being alcohol. It was alcohol online you could, but licensed premises you couldn’t. So you could actually bizarrely use it for alcohol, but only online. And then you could use it for right to work and right to rent and something called DBS, which is criminal record checking. And slowly, more and more of those utilities have come on board. And then some businesses have just said, Look, we’re not regulated, but we do like to verify the people who join our website or want to buy a product or whatever, and they began to use it as well. So we’re still a long way away from having lots and lots of people in the UK and elsewhere using the app. But I think, along with lots of others in this sector, the cold start problem is being solved as…

Robin Tombs: Governments begin to recognise having digital identities as they begin to introduce their own versions, whether that be mobile driving licences or passport chips, where they allow people to scan or to check the government credentials. So it’s not a problem we can solve ourselves. But over time, the industry and governments are making it easier for people to gain the utility they need.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, as I was coming into this conversation, I was thinking about how to frame this conversation, right? And one of the big areas I wanted to talk to you about is this regulatory or governmental influence that has an impact on acceptance of digital IDs, as well as provisioning and things like that. But maybe before I jump in with my next question there, though, just for listeners who maybe haven’t been following your LinkedIn, where you share a lot, give us a sense of whatever metrics you want to share about how big is Yoti now, right? How is it being used now? What do you typically publicly share?

Robin Tombs: So there’s now just under 23 million people who’ve downloaded the Yoti app across the globe over the last effectively nine and a half years, and about 5 million of those were in the last year. So obviously it is, as you say, a bit of a J curve. We’re not right on the vertical side of that J curve. We’re just probably beginning to head up that part, and I think over the years to come that will get a lot quicker. But about 7.8 million of those 23 million people are UK people who’ve downloaded it. Lots of those people downloaded it as young people back in 2017, 2018, 2019. Some of them have gone, Well, I thought it would be very useful immediately, and it isn’t. And they may have uninstalled the app or deleted their account even. But we kind of always thought that might well happen. And as long as we’ve treated them well and shown them that it’s quite easy to use, when the laws change or the utility flourishes, those people are likely to come back.

Robin Tombs: Yeah, they might pick a different one, but they might well go, Oh, I know that Yoti thing, or I’ve still got that Yoti thing, and I’m going to hit the button and use my face and start using it again. So we thought the cold start problem isn’t a complete disaster. If we have people who like the idea of it and think that our approach is good and privacy preserving, when there’s more utility, we will be able to get more people to use it. So we’ve got a lot more people using it. Using it today, even in the past, we have a lot more young people on the Yoti app than older people. I think that’s fairly obvious. Young people need to prove age as well as ID. Young people are more comfortable with downloading apps, and they really prize convenience. So about 30% of all 18 to 24 year olds have downloaded Yoti. But as I say, they don’t all use it because they may feel that at the moment they’d like to use it in bars and supermarkets self-checkouts in the UK, and below needs to change for that. Others are using it for right to work.

Robin Tombs: They may only need to do that once every six or 12 months if they’re a young person changing jobs. So we think in a few years’ time, like in Sweden and Norway and some other countries, it will just be much more obvious that you’ll use your digital identity to do quite a lot of things. You may well use it every week, but we’re not there in the UK, and probably in the US and Canada and other Anglo-Saxon places where national identity is a bit more of a hot topic and a bit more divisive. It’s probably going to take a while for those countries to get mass adoption, whereas in some other countries either the government requires it or people say, Well, I’ve got a national ID number and card, and I’m able to basically use that online. So they’re a bit further ahead than some of the other countries.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that makes sense, and it’s a pretty common pattern, right? for somebody to have to go through a flow once they get the app, they jump through the hoops from their perspective, right, and then maybe want to clean up some storage on their phone or something, and then next time they have to jump through the hoop again, they think, Oh, that’s annoying to have to re-download it. Might as well keep it this time, or something, right? So I’m sure that dynamic will persist. And I’m surprised at the proportion of downloads of Yoti that are not in the UK. It’s like majority outside of the UK.

Robin Tombs: You know, the world’s a big place. We have about four or five countries where it’s gaining traction. So it’s popular in the UK because we’ve always focused on the UK. We’re a UK-founded business. It’s become very popular in France and Italy, literally in the last 12, 15 months, because of the desire of many people there, particularly, again, quite a lot of younger people, to basically prove age anonymously for adult content, so pornography content. The laws have been changing in some countries, and quite a lot of people think, I might need to do this quite often, and I want it to be as private as possible. And this Yoti app, which is often promoted by some of the pornography companies, allows me to download, prove it once, either with an ID doc or just with my face, and then I don’t have to do that again. I can just share an 18 plus with a business, regardless of what type of business it is, and that’s very popular. That’s also why it’s quite popular in the US, because 20, 25 states in the US are now requiring people to do age for either pornography or sometimes some other products.

Robin Tombs: And then it’s also popular in India. Those are the top five countries. It is popular in some other… Tiered trees with certain profiles of people. So we do a lot of business with vaping companies. And again, if you’re trying to prove age and you’re trying to buy vapes often, then using a reusable makes a lot of sense. So wherever you’re having to do things regularly, or it’s very sensitive and you really want to just share the bare minimum, then you’re more likely to use a reusable digital identity than want to keep on proving age to lots of different sites with your passport and driving license in your face.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Like I said, I wanted to talk about the impact of policy and regulatory factors on the adoption and acceptance of digital IDs and your experience, like Yoti in particular. And you’ve obviously been at this longer than the government has had a framework, right? The DIATF, am I saying this right? The Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework.

Robin Tombs: They just recognise that didn’t roll off the tongue, so they’ve renamed it the Digital Verification Trust Framework, which is a bit better.

Riley Hughes: Yes. So now the DVTF then. Anyway, you’ve been around longer than this framework has been around, right? You’ve been at this a while, but you have mentioned several times about the impact of regulatory kind of requirements for age in particular, but then other things as well. Do you think that’s really just the crux of it? It’s almost like without such a driver, it’d just be too challenging to get a digital ID up off the ground because of the cold start, or do you think that these are just helping something that’s already bound to happen, or what’s your take on that?

Robin Tombs: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I genuinely think it isn’t a question just of regulation. I think there are some regulatory things, particularly for a regular proof of age or ID, where there’s no doubt that people, if they can’t use it for that— That prohibits or discourages adoption, even amongst people who would really like to use it. But when those change, then you see quite a significant number of people using it. The best example would be Right to Work. So Right to Work is, in the UK, something you don’t have to do too often. As a young person, you might do temporary work and summer jobs, so you may be changing work once or twice a year. Whereas if you’re my age, you’re probably only changing work every five years or so. So it’s not a regular need, and a lot of people would think, if I don’t need to do this regularly, I’m happy just to do a one-off check with my face and driving license.

Robin Tombs: But actually, about a third of people, as soon as we put it live and said, Do you want to do a one-time check, and later you can do a one-time check again, or do you want to do a check with the same document and face but store it so that you can then easily do that later without? And about a third of people immediately thought, Yeah, that makes sense to do it that way. So the regulation can have a dramatic effect. But we also thought there’s a big trust issue here. It’s very obvious if you talk to somebody that if you say to somebody, Would you like to fill in a visa to every country that you go on holiday or business with, or would you like to have a passport which would allow you to get into most of those countries without filling in a visa? Everybody would go, Well, I’d like the reusable passport, please. I don’t want to have to keep on doing a visa every time I go to France or go to Disneyland in America.

Robin Tombs: But in this instance, although lots of people would recognise the value of a reusable ID and the preciousness of owning their unique ID, you’ve got the trust issue, yeah, and that trust issue is a big challenge. You’ve got to reassure people. You can’t promise. to the world that they would never ever have any risk at all of you being breached. Even if you think you’ve done everything possible to make it as secure as possible, which we believe we’ve tried to do within practical budgetary limits, we can never promise somebody that. So we have the challenge of trying to reassure people that your information will be safe with us. Your most precious information is going to be safe with us, and it’s safer to have it with Yoti than to put it into tens and tens of other sites who may, for regulatory reasons, need that information. But it’s still a big challenge for quite a lot of people. As I said, young people weigh up the convenience. Maybe think they understand technology better and company can do security well if they specialise in it.

Robin Tombs: Older people would be maybe less confident that a company that claims to be secure will be secure. There’s lots and lots of press articles we all read about people who’ve lost data, and some of them are pretty high-credibility businesses. So I think that makes it really tough as well. But there’s no doubt the more you look at and talk to people, the more people say, Hey, I live a lot of my life online, and I want trusted interactions with businesses, with other people. I want to protect my identity information. I want to protect my older parents’ identity information. I don’t want people scanning them using their data. But there’s reasons why the cold start is very difficult to solve, particularly when only one or two companies like yourselves and I were trying to do so five, six years ago. But actually, I think the next few years is much, much brighter. Like, more and more people understand the benefits. More and more companies are thinking, How do we do this? And there’s more businesses who want to accept reusable ID.

Robin Tombs: In the old days, they said to me, Come back when you’ve got 10 million users in the UK, then I’ll be super interested. And now we’re getting up towards that figure, and more and more people are saying, Okay, it is much more useful to accept this, particularly if I can spot somebody’s got one without inconveniencing lots of other people who haven’t got one.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, on this question of how the regulatory factors impact the adoption, you mostly spoke about the consumer, right, and their decision on whether or not to save this reusable ID and choose to reuse it, choose to keep it, et cetera. There’s also the other side of it, though, which is the relying party. How does the relying party trust Yoti? And I’ve seen you even comment about reusable age and these reusable age verification network and age tokens and things like that. But then the question is, is that vendor’s age assurance check as good as this other vendor’s age assurance check? But here I am just accepting them both as if they’re the same thing when there’s a different level of trust there. But then we get into what, like, every relying party need to deeply diligence every issuer, right, at a level of detail that’s just… So I wonder how you think the regulatory angle and including the digital verification trust framework or whatever, right, things like this can assist in that relying party pain point there.

Robin Tombs: Yeah, so I think whether it’s a government-recognised trust framework, which is effectively a set of rules which ensure that whoever is trying to trust that framework, a relying party or somebody creating a digital ID, know that anybody who’s doing the same is playing by the same rules, yeah, or they get thrown out of the framework. That is hugely valuable because it allows businesses, as you say, not to have to do due diligence every one of, you know, there’s 51, I think, DVS-certified providers in the UK market, and then you’ve got a lot of businesses are global. So you want to also trust a business in the US and a business in Brazil who are providing digital identity services. So government frameworks and international standards where people understand, okay, if a business is saying that they’ve been audited to this standard and that they only use age tokens or identity… For that standard and above, then you can begin to create a market where businesses say, okay, I understand the liability issues here.

Robin Tombs: I understand the performance level that I’m going to get from providers in this ecosystem, and I also understand that I can avoid people who are not in that ecosystem, who might say that they’re good levels of assurance, but they haven’t actually bothered going through the audits or the independent testing to actually prove it. So I think those are massively helpful. There’s lots more countries who are working on those kind of standards. There’s obviously some countries where the government thinks this is national infrastructure, and we think we should do it for people just as we, the government, issue passports and we don’t let anybody else issue them. But, you know, that isn’t as much choice for users. In some countries, people will say, well, you know, I don’t trust my government to basically not snoop on me if they’re the only people who are providing a digital identity. I’d rather use one where I think I’ve done my homework and they are not snooping on me.

Robin Tombs: Or I just sometimes feel I don’t want to use a government one to create my gambling account or prove my age for pornography or whatever it might be. So I do think the government has a big part to play, even if they don’t necessarily provide, they can provide the credentials which digital identity wallets need to use to make sure that Riley is who he claims to be and that nobody else tries to use that credential to pretend that they’re Riley. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the government needs to actually provide all of the other services around the wallet and inside the wallet that people like ourselves provide.

Riley Hughes: So then I guess, and bear with me for this question for a moment here, but you painted the picture of two different kinds of governments, right, or countries or social contracts, right? One in which the government’s, hey, we’re going to do this. The other one in which they maybe empower the private sector a little bit more. In one of those, maybe consumers tend to be less trusting of the government, and the other one they tend to be more. And as you’re talking through this, I’m thinking about the UK, and I’m thinking, which one is the UK? And I’m thinking, oh geez, it’s both. It seems like it’s both, right? Like depending on where you look, it’s like I see a lot of the distrust vibe there. When I was there last year, I saw people with signs in the street said, say no to digital ID. This was about a week after Keir Starmer did his announcement about the Brit card or whatever, and said it was going to be compulsory, and it was going to be this big thing that was going to be done before the end of the parliamentary term or whatever.

Riley Hughes: And then at the same time, I see the 51 or 41 or whatever you said DVS providers and this whole private sector ecosystem that’s driven by this government framework. So I guess what’s your take on, here we are in March or whatever, what’s happening in the UK right now for those of us who are not living it and breathing it day to day like you are? And I guess how do you see Yoti and other digital ID wallets such as yourselves fitting into where the UK is going over the next five years?

Robin Tombs: Yeah, interesting. So I think where we are today is a bit suboptimal. I think the UK has always had a bit of a sensitivity around identity, and they like the concept that the government can’t over-survey you. They can ask you to turn up at a police station and provide your driving license or give some evidence of who you are, but they don’t have the right just to stop you in the street for no good reason and say, who are you? And you don’t have to carry identity on you. And I think a lot of people like that. They wouldn’t necessarily go to war over it. But they like the idea that they don’t have to necessarily walk around and provide that information. It, I think, sadly sometimes means people get very heated very quickly on the topic of something like digital identity because they look at it and say, well, hang on, we haven’t got a national ID. You don’t have to carry around your identity papers, and now we’re going to have to be forced to do this online.

Robin Tombs: So it’s quite a tough one for government to get the message across that actually there might be a lot of people who would like an easier way and potentially a more secure way to prove who they are and stop other people. Pretending to be them. It’s very difficult to stop somebody putting your information into a web form and trying to apply for a loan. Hopefully the company does enough DD to not give the loan to that bad actor and then come after you for the money. But ideally, lots of people would probably like to minimise that kind of problem happening and to make it easier for themselves. So I think the government was not wise to say, look, we’re going to do a digital identity and we’re going to mandate it for right to work. Like, when you’re introducing new things, it kind of makes sense to talk about the positives, and a lot of people would say you’ll get more adoption if you offer it voluntary and talk about the benefits than if you immediately force it on people and use it as a bit of a negative that if you don’t do this, you won’t be able to get work.

Robin Tombs: So I think that, sadly, wasn’t good news. It’s certainly made it difficult for all of the companies in the UK who were trying to market the benefits of digital identity and reusable digital identity. But there are still lots and lots of people. If you look at the surveys, it’s kind of half of people think it makes a lot of sense and the other half don’t think it makes as much sense, or more nuanced. They’re concerned about, one, where it’s mandated, or it’s only government, or possibly it’s only private sector. You know, some people trust the private sector a lot in some countries. Other people trust their government a lot, and Britain’s probably got both types of people. So when you’ve got that, you probably need to offer choice. You definitely need to make it voluntary, and you need to maximise the kind of convenience factor that people would like, but also obviously ensure that the rules insist that you have to have secure digital identities.

Robin Tombs: Otherwise, you’re going to have a mess on your hands if you basically have You have lots of digital identities where people then lose all of the data. Then everybody in the network loses because businesses then can’t rely on the whole concept, and lots of citizens think they’re wasting their time if they’ve got one, but they keep on getting hacked.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a big topic that we could probably spend a lot of time on. I think, as far as I’ve seen, it seems like there’s still uncertainty around whether that choice will exist and to what extent. And maybe there’s one type of credential that is only available in the government wallet, and another type of credential that could be available in a multitude of wallets. It seems like there’s a lot of uncertainty, and there’s still new things coming out all the time seem to be in flux. Is that about right?

Robin Tombs: I think the deeper they go into it, the more they recognise this is a challenging thing to communicate well. We should have probably consulted with people up front, but they’re now hastily doing a consultation because effectively so many people are opposed to the mandated right-to-work digital identities.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, and right to work is already mandated, right? And digital ID is already eligible to be used in right-to-work checks.

Robin Tombs: Correct, which they didn’t really market. But obviously millions of people have been doing that with both Yoti and some other great companies in the sector. So most of what they did wasn’t very smart in the last six months. They’re now realising, okay, this is a challenge and we have to really get this better. So they’re now consulting. I think they’re now going to realise, okay, we have to listen more carefully to people. They want choice. I do think for inclusion that they are likely to say the government needs to provide one of these. We’re not just going to force people to pick only from the private sector. I think some people may not like that, but I can see why a government would say, look, we have to be the provider of last resort, or we have to be the provider for people who don’t trust the private sector with their precious data. I think they’ve also got the problem that if they just left it to the private sector, you have great companies, we all use them, but people do worry about Google and Apple being dominant in their sectors.

Robin Tombs: They obviously have huge reach with their phone operating systems, and countries are thinking, do we want two companies to dominate in payment, identity, age, and credentials? Is that a healthy thing? Normally you want several companies to be providing a service to ensure there’s choice and there’s competition and innovation. You don’t tend to get that with one or two companies, and government’s probably thinking, how do we square all of those circles? And we’ve got to take people along with us and reassure them it’s going to be secure, healthy ecosystem, choice, and won’t be dominated by any one or two companies. So it’s a massive challenge, but the benefits are huge. I think any country that doesn’t take advantage of digital identity over the next few years is going to look like they have underserved their citizens, because a lot of citizens, I believe, want to have an easier way of proving who they are and protecting themselves from fraud.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, certainly. And I would argue a similar thing applies to government, right? If it’s only government doing something, then, you know, the government is then the monopoly, and that’s not much better than having a duopoly in the private sector or something, right?

Robin Tombs: Sure.

Riley Hughes: I do think your point on choice is a good one. One thing we also haven’t said here, but I just wanted to call it out, is that the digital ID that was proposed was for a net new credential, right? A net new identifier or net new credential type that was going to be universal or at the highest level there, as opposed to a driver’s license or something, which is more jurisdictional, and which is still planning on rolling out, right? Like the Gov.UK wallet is still intending on releasing a mobile driver’s license, as far as I know, which is unrelated to the timelines and plans around this.

Robin Tombs: Yeah, it’s funny that there’s lots of things going on, even though the… Though the consultation is consulting on whether to do digital identity, a lot of the practicalities are already playing out. So, for instance, up to seven million, mainly British individuals who are company directors or significant shareholders in businesses are effectively being encouraged or being required by the end of this year to verify themselves for their company directorships, and they’re effectively using the government’s initial kind of ID process wallet for that job. The driving licence is to prove you have the right to drive, but everyone in the UK uses it to prove their identity and their age. And when that gets issued into a government wallet, lots and lots of people will get it, because for young people it will mean they can do things. Now, we’re hoping they’ll also use Yoti, and we might have a slicker or possibly a cooler experience for those people. But my gut says they’ll end up with a government one, and they’ll end up with maybe a Yoti one or an Apple one or a 1ID one or another one.

Robin Tombs: But that choice is good. It’s just, as you say, we’re not standing still. The government is basically already getting lots of people into its ID system, even though they’re consulting on whether we end up with a national system, whereas, as you say, they mint a new credential which anyone in the country over the age of 16, or possibly 13, can get if they wish.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I wanted to talk about how you see network strategy factoring into Yoti’s future and present, right? Both from the acceptance networks, right, Trinsic and others that now exist, but also the digital ID Connect kind of ecosystem that you’ve been building in partnership with the postal service and with Lloyds, and recently announced with Luciditi as well, which is a pretty interesting thing. So maybe speak to what is that, and how should people think about that, and how do you see that evolving over time, as well as just the rest of the marketplace?

Robin Tombs: Yeah, I think that’s a really cool, exciting area. So I think the acceptance networks, both the work you’re doing at Trinsic and other companies are doing, that’s going to be a really, really big… Area, because most businesses, whether they’re working in one country or a few countries or they’re a big global company, if they need to accept digital identity or they need to verify people for regulatory reasons in some countries or for anti-fraud reasons in, you know, their kind of policy in certain countries, you’ve got a massive job if you’re a business to work out how to glue all of that together and work it all out and have contracts with all of those ID companies. That doesn’t make sense. So for a company like Yoti and for others, it makes a massive amount of sense for our users to be plugged into businesses through an acceptance network like Trinsic. We are not going to survive if all of our users in Yoti go, Well, I can use it a little bit, but I can’t use it much.

Robin Tombs: And my friend has got one which is plugged into some other acceptance networks, and he just tells me, Hey, I can use it almost everywhere. And what’s going to happen? I’m going to stop using the Yoti one, and I’m going to go and get the one which is plugged into a wider network. So networks are going to be super important, and acceptance networks doing all of that due diligence on, okay, is it a government ID? Is it an ID which has some clear evidence of how it’s put together, and we can give it a level… of confidence, and we can tell relying parties these are done to a certain level. That’s massively efficient for businesses, and it’s super valuable to an individual if they can therefore use their reusable ID at a wide number of places. And it’s a virtuous circle as well, that the more businesses who see those acceptance networks working well are going to apply to join, and that network gets bigger, and that’s all cool. We’re definitely going to need to do that, and we’re talking to you about plugging in to do more of that.

Robin Tombs: We also recognize there are companies who’ve come to us and said, Hey, look, you work with supermarket self-checkouts in certain countries, and they can use a Yoti, but we’d like them to be able to use our reusable ID as well. And we look at those people and think, okay, well, it’s clearly in the interests of the supermarket to be able to accept more reusable ID for proof of age at a self-checkout. So if we’re going to keep those supermarkets happy, we need to be thinking hard about how to do that. So increasing the coverage is important. We can’t just hope that everyone’s going to use a Yoti if they go to a supermarket in a particular country. That’s not a healthy solution. So we effectively, where another reusable ID says, Look, we are certified to country kind of level, then we can go to the supermarket and say, Well, look, we can plug in that company and do some cryptographic stuff behind the scenes to mean that the end user can come to your self-checkout and use their reusable.

Robin Tombs: It might not be a very popular one, but if actually that user really likes that one, then for them and that supermarket. Happy days. But to do that, like with you, we’ve got to become an acceptance network where we become part of the glue to ensure that the end user gets the delightful experience and the business ends up getting somebody able to buy an age-restricted good in an automated process. So I’m a massive fan. I think without acceptance networks, it won’t work. And I think they’re going to have a very good future, and reusable IDs which don’t get into those networks are going to not survive. Think about it. If I’ve got 60% of a market in a country, but I haven’t got the other 40% of reusable IDs, and that might be a lot of people, if an ID company who’s working with a relying party says, Well, I can get you into the 60%, but I can’t get you into the other 40%, then that business is going to go, That’s no good. I need somebody who can get me into all of the reusable ID markets. So people are going to need to join the acceptance networks.

Robin Tombs: Otherwise, they’re not going to serve their end users well, and those end users will move because people get it. If they go to somewhere and see their friend flying through the process and they get rejected, they’re not just going to go, Oh, well, never mind. They’re going to go and download that one instead.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s a great insight. And I think it certainly is a virtuous cycle across the board, right? The acceptance networks driving more relying party adoption for the issuers or the wallets, and vice versa, right? When you have an acceptance network where you’re plugged into a relying party, then the issuer or wallet doesn’t need to maybe have a critical mass necessarily, like you mentioned. And I do think there are important reasons why, if we look at the U.S. market, for example, there’s a reason why Clear has a clear right to win in the travel space, and maybe Plaid or something has a clear right to win in the fintech space. And not to say that these are mutually exclusive and that’s oversimplifying, but just it is the fact that different segments of people will end up with different… Digital IDs. And as a relying party, ideally you want just to maximize convenience and coverage and accessibility for people. And so I agree. I don’t know why it took me so long to end up here, right? Looking back, I’m like, this is an obvious idea or whatever. What was I doing before?

Riley Hughes: Why did it take us so long to pivot toward this idea? But I’m glad that we’ve ended up here, and we’re certainly seeing the fruits of that virtuous cycle playing out.

Robin Tombs: Yeah, it’s really interesting that having people able to accept Yoti through the Trinsic network is a big benefit for us. And the second part of the acceptance network is we have companies we work with who say, Look, we like Yoti, but you’re not going to be the only reusable ID, and we need to get into government once and whatever. Either we’ve got to do all of that plumbing ourselves, or we’ve got to go and find acceptance networks like yourself to do that second part of it, which is, hey, we want to provide for our businesses the best coverage, and that isn’t just Yoti. Therefore, we need to be plugged into those acceptance networks not just because we want Yoti to be accepted, but we need all the other reusable IDs to be covered for our businesses.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, makes sense. Well, Robin, I really appreciate the time. Is there anything that you wish we would have covered that we didn’t, or is there anything that you would like to plug or point people to if they want to get in touch with you or work with you?

Robin Tombs: I think that was great. I’m excited that so many companies are, you know, it’s been a long journey, but it does feel now like the next five years is all about businesses in our sector working out how to solve these particular issues and making sure these networks work really well. The last 10 years has been mainly about, okay, a business needs to get somebody through a process. We need to capture their details or their face and their ID and the fact they’re going to need to do that again and again with other businesses isn’t today’s problem that we’re going to solve. But for the end user, and we’re all end users in the end, you really want this problem solved. So I’m excited that so many companies are now thinking, Hey, we’ve got to solve it, and companies like yourself are right at the forefront of that.

Riley Hughes: Great. Thanks a lot, Robin, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Robin Tombs: Thanks very much, Riley. Bye.

Riley Hughes: Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this content, the best way to signal to us that the content is valuable is to share it with others who will benefit from it. Meanwhile, if your organization is interested in accepting digital IDs, you can find me or Trinsic on LinkedIn or X, or on our website at trinsic.id. And if you haven’t already, visit trinsic.id/podcast to subscribe to the Future of Identity newsletter and listen to any of our prior episodes. Thanks so much for listening.