Special Episode - Trinsic Update

One of the most frequent requests that we get is to record an episode about Trinsic. So this week we’re doing just that because we recently announced the launch of our identity acceptance network in partnership with CLEAR, Yoti, IDVerse, Airside, Dentity, and more than a dozen others.

This episode will outline what identity acceptance is, how Trinsic landed on this approach, and how this might be relevant to you.

If this is interesting to you, we’re hosting a webinar next week which you can learn more about and register at trinsic.id/webinar.

To read more about our identity acceptance network check out the announcement: https://trinsic.id/first-identity-acceptance-network/

Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out on Twitter at rileyphughes, and visit trinsic.id if you’re interested in participating in our identity acceptance network.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast. I’m Riley Hughes, the co-founder of Trinsic, and I’m here with a special episode about Trinsic. One of the most frequent requests that I get is to record an episode about Trinsic, and timing is good because last week we launched the first Identity Acceptance Network with partners like CLEAR, Yoti, IDVerse, Airside, and Dentity, and more than a dozen others. I wanted to record a brief episode outlining what identity acceptance is, how Trinsic landed on this as a strategy, and how this might be relevant to you. For the last five years, our tagline on investor presentations and our mission internally was to create a universally accepted digital ID. That is the most concise way that I have of describing our vision of portable or reusable identity. We wanted to do for identity what Visa did for payments. Basically, no matter where I go, online or in person or abroad, I just use this plastic card with any merchant, and I can walk out with stuff. It’s the closest approximation to a universal payment instrument that I’m aware of.

Riley Hughes: So doing that for identity, getting to the point of universally accepted digital ID, our focus has historically been on the digital ID part. We’ve had a leading platform for creating ID tech products, which put digital IDs in the hands of consumers. Through dozens of companies building on Trinsic, we saw that the most common use case among them is that each of these domain-specific ID wallets went out and found an identity verification partner to help users onboard into wallets. You can imagine if your doctor has a physician’s license in their wallet, you want to make sure that that physician’s license got to the right doctor. So that’s the purpose of an identity verification: to get into a wallet. And we thought, well, we could solve this problem for them. We made partnerships with some identity verification companies. We also landed a couple of identity verification companies as customers using our ID Tech platform to power their reusable ID initiatives. And people liked it.

Riley Hughes: Our customers of our wallet infrastructure started using this identity verification technology that we were reselling to them. I remember there was a moment, though. This was last year, where I was using a customer’s app, and I was testing their onboarding flow to see what it ended up looking like. And I onboarded into the app with an ID document scan and a selfie. And I realized I had just done an ID verification in a very similar way with another app on my phone, which is also a self-sovereign identity wallet. And I realized, wait a minute, both of these apps are using Trinsic. Both of them are using verifiable credentials. And yet I need to re-verify into each one. Of all the companies on planet Earth, these wallet apps have got to be the earliest adopters of this reusable identity technology. I mean, that’s the whole premise of these apps existing. And yet there was no way for me to share my verifiable credential from one app to another.

Riley Hughes: So I thought, well, if it’s not possible for people to do that, even within the Trinsic ecosystem, of course verifiable credentials are not widely adopted broadly, because it’s not easy for people to share their verified identities or any other credentials beyond those initial applications and ecosystems where they’ve originated. People do this identity verification not just to onboard into identity wallets, but they do it all the time. For example, I’m verified on LinkedIn. That was done by CLEAR. But then as soon as I go to Twitter, I need to get re-verified again by Authentix. There’s no way to port or reuse my verification from one place to another. So for every new platform, they have to re-verify every new user. And while somebody verified by CLEAR, which is an identity verification company that supports a reusable identity, can skip the verification process for another CLEAR customer. So within the CLEAR ecosystem, CLEAR customers can reuse their identity, but that’s not true across platforms. There’s no way to get it outside of those boundaries.

Riley Hughes: So in other words, everybody has already been verified before by some identity verification company probably dozens of times. And yet there’s no way for people to reuse their identities, meaning they’re just going to have to get re-verified again another dozen times. Initially, when we started Trinsic, we thought that the verifiable credential standard represented the highest probability path of accomplishing the universally accepted digital ID vision, because it represented a way that the whole world could collectively drive forward and move in that direction rather than relying on one company to do it all. But I realized I think our focus was all wrong. I mean, obviously you can’t get to the universally accepted part of that sentence without getting the digital ID part into people’s hands. And we were trying to get the digital ID part into people’s hands by being an infrastructure provider. But it turns out that adoption of digital IDs was already happening, just outside of the ecosystem that we were originally playing in.

Riley Hughes: So we shifted away from focusing on a single standard to come in, everybody agree on and use to save the day and usher in the identity utopia that we had hoped for. And we started focusing on going to where people already have digital IDs. So this is where identity acceptance enters the picture. Identity acceptance means accepting a user’s existing digital ID, regardless of where it comes from. Instead of verifying that user from scratch. Just like a merchant will accept a credit card from Visa, American Express, Mastercard, Discover, and a bunch more payment methods in a single terminal, Identity Acceptance allows businesses to accept verifications from a variety of sources through one easy integration. For businesses, this reduces the friction of your identity verification process dramatically. For identity companies, this means you capture revenue from companies that aren’t even your customers. It’s a new channel that you can earn new revenue from through your existing user base of reusable IDs.

Riley Hughes: And it’s a meaningful first step toward that eventual interoperable future that is obviously coming. But the real reason this is exciting is because the world needs this right now, badly. There are so many places that would love to be verifying users, but just aren’t because the friction is far too high. In the last 12 months, for example, Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, LinkedIn, and others announced that they are going to start verifying everybody. Take Uber and Airbnb, for example. They’ve always verified drivers and hosts, but why haven’t they enabled rider or traveler verification until now? Well, you probably have to ask them, but spitballing here, it’s probably because it’s a lot of friction to verify users. If Uber requires every rider to get verified before they can hop in a cab, well, those riders are just going to download the Lyft app, right? So it seems pretty obvious to me that verifying users is just a pain, and if it were a lot easier, a lot more companies would be doing it.

Riley Hughes: Especially in today’s world of accessible AI, where it’s easier than ever to create synthetic identities and commit fraud, there’s really no choice. Fraud is forcing the hand. Companies are now requiring identity verification more than ever, and that’s only going to grow. Now, while identity verification is good for reducing fraud, think about what a nightmare this is going to be for consumers. Photographing your driver’s license on every website and app that you want to engage with, it’s going to be like GDPR banners to accept all cookies, only a hundred times worse because, you know. It takes minutes to do it instead of one click, right? So this is where identity acceptance saves the day. The reality is all of your users have been verified before, probably dozens of times. And identity acceptance means you just allow people to use those verifications from other places to prove themselves with you. In other words, people can use their ID from any source that they’ve chosen or that they already have to verify. It takes 10 seconds, and you get more onboarded good users than before.

Riley Hughes: And for identity companies, reusable ID through an acceptance network like this will expand the market for verifications dramatically. The pie is going to be so much bigger when it’s that much easier for a user to prove who they are. So in layman’s terms, Trinsic is an aggregator for the fragmented reusable identity landscape. We represent a way for businesses to streamline verification and a way for identity companies to make more money from their existing reusable identity networks. So we launched last week with a few dozen partners representing over 60 million identities, and we’re onboarding more partners as we speak. So if you’re interested in accepting verifications people have already done in your onboarding flow to improve your verification user experience, you can augment your existing verification process by adding identity acceptance alongside. Reach out to Trinsic if you’re interested in learning more or in partnering. Links are in the show notes, and you can feel free to visit our website at trinsic.id.

Riley Hughes: And you can always reach out to me directly on Twitter or LinkedIn at Riley P. Hughes. I love hearing from people who listen to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed this special episode with just me. If you like it, let me know. Maybe I’ll do more of these, or I’ll have my co-founder on or something in a future episode. But in the meantime, we have a handful of amazing guests coming up, so you won’t want to miss the upcoming episodes. As always, it means a lot when you share the podcast with people who you think will get value from it. Thanks a lot for listening.