MEFTV speaks to Andrew Bud, MEF Global Chair and Founder and CEO of iProov, during EEMA‘s recent London event about the challenges of digital identity and how the industry is going about resolving the issue of reliably establishing online identity for transactions and interactions.

“We found it helpful to break the role of digital identity into three big functions; one is the collection and storage of attributes about a person, the bits and pieces of information that make a person’s identity. The second function is getting it from the store to the relying party in a way that is secure, can’t be corrupted and is authorised. And the third problem is authenticating the user’s right to assert that particular set of attributes – that’s authentication – that’s what we do.”

“Its a fascinating political and social issue because you do have this dichotomy, people worry about governments having your attributes – in reality, they have got them already! Every time they issue you with a passport, they are basing that on things they know about you.. when they issue you with a driving license, they need to know these things about you. In some cases the idea of centralised identity systems run by governments is terribly obvious. And also because governments will have to do this in order to provide access to government services like social security, health or tax for example.”

“There is a strong political resistance to this in many countries. The idea of so called “self sovereign identity” – where I actually control my store of attributes and I then authorise access to that identity according to my wishes – there’s a strong political-technical movement around that and there are some big players now beginning to arise to support that model. It will be interesting to see whether the business models around that work or not.”

Watch the full video below.