Jaap Kuipers, eID Network: Identity has become critical for further e-business growth

Jaap Kuipers has a broad overview of the identity ecosystem. He has been working for more than 10 years in the digital identities space. He started in the realm of e-business for higher education and e-government and in the meantime, he broadened the scope of his expertise to include the marketing, social media and commercial attribute validation of electronic identities. All of this with the aim of enabling electronic services for consumers and companies. He has just started eID Network, a community for all eID practitioners in the field of e-business and online services. The first meeting of eID Network will be held on the 20th of March in Brussels, just prior to the EPCA Summit.

Why is eID important?
People are used to dealing with identity information all the time. Unconsciously, we continuously evaluate if we can trust persons and companies we want to do business with. Trust helps us keep transaction costs low. Without our natural identity skills, we would put a lot of effort in evaluating partners and drawing up contracts.

Now that an important part of our daily life and interactions take place on the internet, we have to find ways to build the same natural trust we are used to offline. A good eID ecosystem helps companies and customers move freely over the global internet with an optimal level of trust and a low level of transaction costs.

Why do you use the word ecosystem?
The word ‘ecosystem’ leaves enough room for development in the way electronic identities should be used. An eID ecosystem is like a living organism: it has many aspects and no strict borders. In the eID ecosystem you will find a great variety of stakeholders: banks, telcos, governments, credit raters, marketeers, lawyers, software vendors, consumer interest groups, very small players, huge organisations etc. Having an open mind in the development of eIDs helps companies understand which stakeholders can or will play a role. If you want to do business on the internet in most cases you cannot spend any effort developing the eID infrastructure for your customers. At the same time this does not work for your customers, since they are getting more and more eIDs (passwords, tokens, cards etc.), leading to low usability and higher security risks.

Therefore, companies want to understand the ecosystem of parties offering eID building blocks they can use. After all, eID is a two-sided market and successful strategies require cooperation, just like in any other ecosystem.

What is an e-business transaction?
E-business is the world of online services: public and private sector companies offering digital services to their customers. The issue of mutual trust between customer and organization is key for further adoption of these digital services.

What is the network aspect of eID?
Electronic identities are highly network-related. To start with, eIDs are used on the internet. They are built out of much more than a name, address and date of birth. eIDs are no longer static records in the database of one company, government or bank. We need networks of organizations if we want to develop electronic identities that people are confident to use and that others can trust.
Identities are more about interactions and reputations than traditional CRM systems can currently handle. An address in a database is nice, but knowing for example how often the address has been used in the past year tells us much more about the reliability of this address. The reputation of an eID becomes a strong predictor of trust in a transaction.

You see a more risk-based approach in the use of eID.
The internet was not developed from the start with a layer for identification to support secure electronic transactions. The tools we use to identify customers on the internet depend on what people know (password), have (token) and are (biometrics). And once a customer has access to a service the trust was assumed to be in place, which was fine for the time. For the next level of growth a usable eID ecosystem is needed, because lack of trust is increasingly becoming an inhibitor.

Transactions get compromised – this is a fact of life. To prevent this, we are finding better identification and security based on the context in which transactions take place. Systems try to understand their customers better by learning what is normal and secure and what could become a business risk. eID systems start to look for the reputation of eIDs.

What can delegates learn on this first eID Network meeting?
In the course of a day we show the latest developments on transactional eIDs and present international cases we know, which are relevant to the future of the ecosystem. People can test their opinion against authoritative experts and in doing so, they will understand where to put their efforts. The network aspect is what attracts delegates and speakers that do matter.