What is the killer app for verifiable credentials? Daon, Dock and Youverse discuss

Industries such as financial services, healthcare, transport, government and more are increasingly adopting digital verifiable credentials connected to biometrics. Their popularity will soon reshape business models and processes and shake up the identity industry itself.

For many companies, verifiable credentials will be a disruptor. But despite areas such as the European Union inching closer to implementing the decentralized ID technology, some organizations are still hiding their head in the sand.

“There certainly are going to be some companies where it will affect the revenue model negatively,” says Paul Kenny, vice president of Customer Success for EMEA and APAC at Daon.

Kenny spoke at a recent online event organized by reusable digital identity platform Dock alongside Nick Lambert, CEO at Dock and Pedro Torres, founder and CEO of decentralized reusable identity company Youverse. Last month, Daon and Youverse struck separate deals with Dock focused on building their decentralized biometric identity verification capabilities.

Companies focused on document-centric identity verification may face the biggest disruptions, the two experts said. This includes firms that charge businesses each time a user submits their document for a Know Your Customer (KYC) process. Reusable verifiable credentials will end the need for repeated KYC.

“In four years, it’s going to be too late,” says Torres.”Lots of things are happening now.”

Decentralized identity and verifiable credentials are seeing major projects, including the European Union’s Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet, the travel industry with Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs) and the U.S. with its mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs).

Verifiable credentials are designed to enable individuals to prove their identity and qualifications in a secure and tamper-proof way. They can be used in many scenarios, from accessing medical records and verifying college degrees to showing driver’s licenses or passports. Much of the initial traction is in age assurance, according to the speakers.

Many see verifiable credentials and reusable identities as a way to eliminate physical identity documents. But it also opens other possibilities, including putting the user in control of their data and allowing them to share it.

“I’m not even sure that reusable ID is the killer app for [verifiable credentials],” says Kenny. “I think it goes well beyond identity. Being able to actually link data and attributes to an identity is, for me, where I think the killer app for this could be.”

The solution could end up with a flourishing ecosystem of innovation that we haven’t seen yet because the adoption is not there, adds Torres. Once adoption rises, there will be incentives to develop completely new apps.

Verifiable credentials, however, still face misunderstandings and misconceptions, including those connected to differences between decentralized verifiable credentials and centralized digital identities. Another misconception is that this is the perfect utopian solution that will solve all of the world’s privacy issues.

“We get carried away with ourselves,” says Kenny. “The goal is to have a better situation than the current one, and for sure, verifiable credentials and digital wallets for digital identity, which are decentralized, is a hundred times better than what we currently have.”

Companies will also have to continue working on protecting their users from being tricked into compromising their wallets by fraudsters.

“I think that makes biometric credentials so important because we have to assume that wallets will get compromised,” says Lambert.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Daon  |  decentralized ID  |  digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  Dock  |  reusable identity  |  verifiable credentials  |  Youverse