Dr. Sarah Walton has been at the forefront of the digital identity space, advocating for inclusivity and innovation.
In this interview, we explore her journey, her role at Women in Identity, and the evolving role of digital identity in payments.
Absolutely! I started out setting up a dot.com with a friend in the early 90s. It was an email and blog environment, and from the outset, we were concerned about some imaginary time in the future when people made payments online and were very concerned about email becoming part of that process of identity verification, as email platforms were and still are insecure platforms. My other keen passion was expanding our pool of user testers to include people who came from different backgrounds (at that time, some tech companies did no testing at all). We started to engage older people with little or no digital experience and people with disabilities in our user pools to help us understand what the limitations of our service were for people with different needs. Here began my passion for inclusion as I observed how they struggled to use our service, which we had thought was well-designed (for people like us!) The big lesson was – never assume you know the user needs. Let the user tell you their needs, then listen and adjust the design.
Women in Identity is an international non-profit charity run primarily by volunteers. There are over 1 billion people who cannot prove their identity, and over 3 billion people worldwide without a digital identity. Women in Identity’s mission is to drive the digital identity industry to build solutions with diverse teams to promote universal access, which enables civic, social, and economic empowerment around the world. We do that through thought-leadership, education, best practices, and research. Our current programme of research is the ID Code of Conduct. Women in Identity strongly believe there is a need for a global Identity Code of Conduct to address identity exclusion—being excluded from access to identification credentials — subsequently leading to exclusion from financial services and products.
Regulations and standards benefit economies and societies if they include everyone. A staggering 3.3 billion (Worldbank) people internationally lack a digital identity. A large proportion of those are financially excluded. Women in Identity’s Human Impact report interviewed some of these people. All of our interviewees were in the poverty trap due to being in the identity trap. Solve ID Exclusion and many of these people will become integral to the overall economic growth of the nation. These are the most vulnerable people in society. They are overlooked and forgotten as companies and governments are focused on the impossible: constant growth. Growth moves in peaks and troughs. When nations begin to include the social, psychological and financial wellbeing of their people in their KPIs for growth, we will see not only happier, healthier, and financially stable people, but also there may be more sustainable economic growth overall.
Identity Exclusion is the elephant in the room. Identity is at the core of all payments and transactions; however, it is not fully understood what is needed to achieve inclusion. Our latest research (due to launch on 12 June – sign up for the launch webinar here) demonstrates that even organisations that aspire to be identity inclusive lack the understanding of the hidden costs and opportunity cost of not building identity inclusion into their design phase for new services and re-design of existing services. It’s clear that it costs more to be on the unhappy path for identity verification, still, some companies lack awareness of what it’s costing them and what tasks are required to build in identity by design. Our report, due out on 12 June, aims to help companies and governments identify their costs and design with inclusion in mind. And highlights the economic benefits of taking an identity inclusion by default approach.
Two important tips.
Be inclusive from the design phase. If you are an older, larger organisation on legacy systems, phase in identity inclusion by design approaches.
Understand your cost buckets and the hidden costs associated with supporting those customers on the unhappy path.
By widening the happy path you may find you also widen your customer base.
You attended the European Identity & Cloud Conference in Berlin. What did your session focus on, and what excites you most about this event?
Our Women in Identity session focused on the ID Code of Conduct. We’d love your readers to join us for the launch of the Economic Impact of ID Exclusion report with our research partner – the London School of Economics - on 12 June.
Sign up here
About Dr. Sarah Walton
A digital consultant with nearly 30 years of experience working in digital. She’s researched and authored identity white papers and supported the digital transformation in health, finance, entertainment, government, travel, start-ups, and fintechs. She’s an agile coach and has 20 years' experience advising organisations about digital and identity inclusion. She founded a digital agency in 2003 to help organisations transform, innovate, and grow.
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