As the tech giants fight for the moral high ground in the privacy debate, users grapple with increasingly complex demands for multi-factor authentication and greater levels of personal accountability for being victimized in scams, and at the same time are offered convenient shortcuts through ID Federation services. Use your Facebook or Google or Apple account to log in to this new service and you don’t have to bother with a new username and password — while you offer up a new ongoing data flow for your vast user profile, that you leak daily across every service you frictionlessly log in to.

Other times we are far more consciously aware of how our identity credentials are being used — while still being helpless to do anything other than comply. A new utility provider requires copies of our primary ID, a landlord demands proof of income, the offerer of a discount needs to confirm our status as a retiree — so we provide this information, which often contains far more data than the specific request actually mandates, in order to access the service we need. We have no idea what is done with those credential proofs — such as the photocopy of our driver’s license filed in the phone shop — in terms of how they are retained and used in the future.

In other words, every time a particular identifier is required — such as proof of qualification, employment status, or legal age — you end up providing a complete identity instead, surrendering far more personal data than is actually needed for that particular purpose.

The cryptographic qualities of the blockchain enable zero-knowledge proofs, which make the inspection of data highly asymmetric and distinct, ensuring minimal required disclosure. Adding the proof of a legally recognized driver’s license to the user’s wallet is a completely separate process from providing the credential to a rental company that the hirer is presently in possession of a valid license, so only that specific data point needs be disclosed. The rental company has no need to know the date the license was obtained or in which state, only that it is valid and current.

Storing data on a distributed ledger in this way also ensures there is no centralized point of failure or trusted institution responsible for it, so it is resilient and persistent, as a peer-to-peer network with no hierarchy. Every user on the network interacts with it according to equally applied rules.

Each identifier is written to this ledger and stored in the user’s wallet, where they can control and release it at will, to interact with the services they choose. This interaction then no longer requires release of the identifier, but the exchange of verifiable credentials, limited and specific to the individual need.

Those identifiers persist for the owner indefinitely, or as long as they were relevant — such as the results of a public examination taken and passed at a given institution, which the student can refer to and use throughout the rest of their life whenever they need it. However, the verifiable credential of their student status is timestamped in the blockchain at the point of reference, and has no long-term validity or persistence beyond its immediate required use.

Verified at need, as often as required

Because this credential is verified in the moment, it protects the verifier too as much as the data subject:

• • Confirming that eligibility for a student discount is done digitally at the point of purchase, through a verified credential enabled proof which confirms that they are presently studying, not by inspecting a potentially out-of-date ID card.

• • The same student may exchange verified credentials when entering a new campus, to confirm they have a right to be on the premises — a credential which will no longer function, on termination of the course, or non-payment of a subscription or fee.

• • When they hire a car, the rental firm can verify their present insured status, with no risk that a policy has expired or become outdated…

The benefits to all parties of self-sovereign identity are multiple, evident, and easy to understand. All that is needed is the right solution to bring it into everyday use.

Many previous solutions for SSI have been highly technical, and inaccessible to users, thus structurally creating their own impediment to mass adoption. To penetrate the diffusion curve beyond the innovators and early adopters, it’s essential that using the digital wallet is as easy as flashing a driver’s license, or using Facebook to log in to a retail site — because this is the UX with which the technology is competing, on a consumer level, for majority attention.

Those consumers require ongoing education about the tangible and less tangible benefits — and every user can appreciate not having to travel from one place to another to obtain copies of a public exam they passed decades ago, the registry documents of their property, or the service record of their car. The sheer convenience of having it all stored on their SSI wallet, secure yet accessible, is immediately obvious.

More sophisticated users will appreciate the value in limiting disclosure, and in their ‘right to be forgotten’ once that bank loan is paid back. In not having to generate and store unique strong passwords for every merchant and provider, just to create some silos within their digital footprint, and stop being haunted on every website by ads for that obscure thing they just asked Siri about.

The more each individual uses verified credentials, the more they will see the value — in owning and controlling their identity and identifiers.

In addition to pioneering new personal identity standards and user-centered customer experience, businesses who pave the way in SSI will benefit directly, through streamlined processes and improved data and analytics.

Converting and onboarding

By re-imagining workflows to truly be focused on the user, businesses will enhance their customer experience, and create meaningful competitive differentiation in challenging economic times. It will remove the disconnect between marketing and design considerations wholly focused on the customer, and onboarding formalities which present jarring friction and delays: here is your utterly personalized coverage quotation, generated via our portal in seconds, Ms Unique User — to accept the contract, please upload your bank details, including proof of address and notarized ID…

With integrated document management and secure communications customers can self-create credentials from leading providers to provide all the verification you need, to create a slick and rapid user journey, from first marketing touchpoint to contracting of business. The customer themselves will do the work — exponentially expediting your sales cycle and operational procedures.

“Know your customer” — so you can market to them better

Once a customer is engaged with you through verifiable credentials in a digital wallet, you can easily automate your interactions and integrate with backend data sources such as your CRM — ensuring a deep understanding of their needs as a consumer. Not by deceptively tracking their behavioural surplus across the internet via cookies and opaque EULAs, but by verified credentials they deliberately provide. This interactive process of building a user profile can truly build trust with the user.

For example, if you are a bank and a customer inquires about a new line of business credit with you, they can in moments provide you with a range of credentials such as long-term customer contracts for services, confirmation of leased premises, and external credit history — so that you can give them a decision in moments, and an individually risk-adjusted interest rate determined by indicators they’ll be glad to provide.

Research indicates that over 65% of revenues typically come from upselling⁴, and SSI implementation will help you to do this in a way which makes life easier for you and for them.

Increased customer retention means increased ROI

SSI and verifiable credentials put the power in customers’ hands, to take their identifiers anywhere they choose, instead of being at the mercy of poor customer service and noncompetitive business practices.

However, if your business is an early adopter of SSI interaction, you enhance the speed and quality of each interaction you have with them. You’ll never ask them for a piece of information twice, or that you don’t need. They’ll know you cannot sell, lose, or otherwise misuse, their personal information. And they don’t actually need to trust you as an institution — they only need to trust whatever they are specifically contracting you to provide, by way of product or service, on which you are free to focus your workflow and attention completely. So, why would they go anywhere else?

Recent data from Gartner⁵ confirms that “More than 90% of customer service and support leaders identify consistently delivering a high-quality customer service experience as their most important challenge.” Offering your customers the advantage of SSI and verified credential identification increases the quality of that relationship, and their overall satisfaction with your provision.

Off-boarding and personal information management

With global regulatory frameworks from the EU’s GDPR to the California Consumer Privacy Act to Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information increasingly layering growing responsibilities on data controllers of all sizes, the ability for businesses to responsibly manage the identifying data they are required to collect becomes increasingly onerous. This is even before additional industry-specific compliance demands, from HIPAA to FinCEN, and all of which may apply to the most intangible of prospects — such as visitors to your website, as well as confirmed customers.

Even while SSI adoption is in its infancy, consumers are becoming increasingly savvy to the risks, as well as their rights, for data subject access and confirmation. Amongst a number of surveys, PWC found that just 10% of consumers feeling that they have complete control over their private data⁶ . Just because your vast honeypot of data hasn’t (yet, or to your knowledge) been the subject of a breach or hack, does not mean you are not in breach of the law or regulatory compliance. If a data subject demanded copies of all information that you hold about them, or for proof that everything you know about them has been securely and permanently deleted under their ‘right to be forgotten’, how quickly and easily could you comply with that request?

If you operate with verifiable credentials, it’s easy. All you need to do is confirm that Customer X has ceased to be a user of your service since a given date, and access to the minimally necessary credentials were revoked at that instant. With the SSI platform and wallet in use by both parties respectively not only are the requirements met automatically, a clear audit trail can be provided to any valid authority — again by way of verifiable credentials, which breach the privacy of nobody involved.