SSI opportunity presented by early successes, regulatory deadlines: Procivis

The maturity of decentralized digital identity and the regulatory environment around identity and access management have combined to create an opportunity for businesses to upgrade the way they onboard, verify and authenticate their employees and customers, according to a webinar hosted this week by iC Consult, and including Procivis.

In one element of this maturation, Procivis One has been released as open-source software, with a version published to Github. The open-source version is targeted at customers in the public sector, while Procivis One is offered under an Enterprise license for private sector organizations.

The Orell Füssli subsidiary presented the “Redefining Digital Identity and Access Management: Decentralized Identities and Regulations” webinar to make the case for businesses to adopt self-sovereign identity (SSI). Presenting were Procivis Head of Business Development Robin Müller and Joachim Bacoyannis, lead consultant at iC Consult, which focusses on IAM.

Stability can be an issue among decentralized digital identity providers, Bacoyannis notes, with many companies in the space that have excellent technology “driven by the startup approach.” Their operations could be disrupted at any time by an acquisition, and he points out that they are unlikely to have the global reach of a competitor like Procivis.

Decentralized identity is maturing, and will reach the “plateau of productivity” of Gartner’s hype cycle within two to five years, Bacoyannis suggests.

He summarized the shift from federated to decentralized identity as one in which trust is established by the technological layer of the registry, and does not depend on the relationship of the issuers and verifiers that interact with it. As such, it represents a further step away from centralized IAM architectures.

Müller pitched the benefits of SSI over existing eIDs in terms of privacy and interoperability, and discussed the evolution of the eIDAS regulation. Elsewhere, while the mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) being issued in the United States are not exactly SSI, they are conceptually “aligned.”

Procivis was also selected by the U.S. DHS’ SVIP to work on open source digital wallets and verifier components for decentralized digital identities just months ago.

Regulations in Switzerland and the EU have already set the foundations for digital IDs. Switzerland is moving towards a national digital identity launch in 2026, but piloting in a regulatory sandbox is planned for next year, and Procivis is already issuing digital IDs in Zug, Switzerland. EU businesses will be required by law to accept digital IDs in 2027.

These conditions make the time right for considering the business possibilities, Müller says.

He argues that adopting SSI can improve customer experiences for onboarding, improve operational efficiency, increase security and fraud prevention and enable cross-border business opportunities.

The Zug implementation of Procivis One to replace teachers’ physical ID cards streamlined processes, Müller says, and set up the expansion of digital credentials to other use cases.

Bacoyannis presented the benefits of SSI for various IAM use cases, including avoiding the risk of data breaches and reducing the organization’s compliance burden.

The age assurance requirements coming into effect in several jurisdictions are a suitable use case for zero-knowledge proofs performed with SSI, he says.

He also reviewed opportunities like passwordless authentication with verifiable credentials and interoperability across platforms for bring-your-own-ID (BYOID), such as employees using a decentralized identity to access both internal company and external partner resources.

Bacoyannis and Müller then presented a demonstration of SSI for external employee onboarding, from an initial email through the provisioning of employee accounts, with credentials stored in the employee’s digital wallet.

Article Topics

digital identity  |  identity access management (IAM)  |  open source  |  Orell Fussli  |  Procivis  |  self-sovereign identity  |  zero knowledge