We're biased, but we think that ID.me and federated identity is a massive innovation
that can drive change.
But we're still fairly nascent even in the public sector.
I think Amazon's Alexa product and the notion of voice-based operating systems for commerce
and the home has seen massive adoption over this last year.
That's a really exciting development for the industry.
I'm still surprised that digital wallets haven't been adopted by consumers more broadly.
It seems that nobody's really cracked the case on finding a killer use case or app that
leads to widespread consumer adoption.
There's a broad awareness, and people kind of know that it's important in what the future
will look like.
But no one has really figured out the market strategy to nail adoption.
You know, I think some of the headwinds deal with convergence.
You see a lot of convergence between loyalty, payments, identity.
As people are jockeying for a position to become the dominant platforms in these new
markets that are now combined, it creates uncertainty about who's gonna win and what
the standards will be.
That will always inhibit innovation when people don't know what the future looks like.
I think as some of those things shake out, then the industry will see more rapid innovation
as people understand what the platforms for the next five or ten years are going to be.
I think the most growth is going to come from identity federation and biometrics.
One of the reasons why we attacked the identity problem is that identity is often a prerequisite
for delivering trusted services online.
Not just for payments but also for healthcare, for interacting with the federal government,
notarization of documents, and so on and so forth.
If you can solve for identity, you take a massive amount of friction out of the market.
Biometrics is one niche component of identity and you see a lot of innovation happening
with MasterCard, pay with selfie which got a lot of press and USAA's login with selfie
as well.
I think that that trend is only gonna accelerate pretty rapidly as some of those pioneers are
proving use cases that consumers really like.
I can only speak for ID.me, as an entrepreneur that's a massive amount of money, although
when you're kind of in the moment you do the budget and it makes sense.
For us, it's just a validation point.
It's easier than ever to start a company, but it's really hard to find product market
fit, and it's even harder to scale into a large user base once you've found product
market fit.
So for us, the $19 million is one validation point among many that we're really onto something
that's a big idea, and we're really excited to have FTV Capital along for the ride given
their expertise scaling companies that are focused on enterprise technology and financial
services.
I want to start by saying it's important not to conflate identity with a password.
A password is just one thing that can log you into an account.
There's this thing called multifactor authentication that can be something you know, something
you have, something you are.
We believe in a future where people have choice about logging in through wearables or through
selfies or through touch ID or passwords.
For high risk services we always administer multifactor authentication so the only way
to get into somebody's credentials is to not only compromise a password, but something
else like your device or biometric, which is really hard to do at scale.
The second thing that we built into our identity gateway is that we can actually federate third
party identity providers.
So our platform is built more like Visa where people have choice between many identity providers,
and we are the central...like the citizen-facing version of the NSA, that would be awful.
What we are is like Visa in that if somebody wanted to pick a credential for the United
States Postal Service or from Citibank or from Bank of America, if they wanted to federate
in our system, then the data is centralized across many different identity providers so
that there is no one kind of ID to rule them all.
We think that that partitioning is really really important.
You know, I would say, to start off with that Facebook and Google have contributed important
things to the identity ecosystem.
Facebook pioneered the oAuth 2.0 protocol which is broadly used across websites as federated
identity.Google has contributed a massive body of research to data breached and multifactor
authentication, weaknesses in SMS authentication being just like one example of how Google's
contributed.
But fundamentally, there is something really wrong with two advertising companies that
are the defacto owners and managers of our digital identity.
I think most people realize that.
You probably don't feel comfortable letting Facebook log you into your healthcare given
the fact that they profile you constantly.
A lot of their changes when it comes to privacy are opt out inside of opt in.
You're automatically opted into a whole suite of things, and then you gotta read an instruction
manual to figure out how to take back control.
We really want to create more of a network where there's choice, again like Visa, you
could bank with Chase or you could bank with the city or you could bank your community
bank.
We think that's how it should work with logins as well.
If you essentially replicate the digital driver's license ecosystem where state DMVs are replaced
with government agencies, with tech companies that all align to common standards, you'll
see a digital ecosystem where you can pick whichever identity provider you trust the
most and then take it with you across the web.
You are only managing one login, but there are many login providers.
We think that that has to happen because an advertising company or a market dominated
by an advertising company isn't going to innovate in the way consumers want or expect when it
comes to important services like payments and healthcare.