Part 2: What has changed during the last decade.

Thanks to disruptive innovation in hardware and the stellar work of A.I. and Computer Vision pioneers like Onfido, the last decade gave birth to robust digital identity verification. That led to endless benefits for us as individuals making our lives more streamlined and enabling a whole new category of financial technology (fintech) companies. Nevertheless, our official identity is no longer an untraceable, unscalable, piece of paper. The same goes for our personal preferences, wants and needs, parts of our personality that are constantly being tracked by cookies.The same technology that has simplified our lives, allowing us to access essential services remotely via a photo of our ID document is also enabling bad actors to impersonate us if they manage to gain access to our identity data. And the more our economy digitizes, the more data breaches we’re seeing, with 2023 being a record year and still not over.

What does the future hold?

The world is digitizing faster than ever and so does the way access to essential services like healthcare, insurance, and finance. As a result, we are sharing more sensitive identity data and documentation with more companies every day, and every time we do, we create another profile waiting to be exploited by fraudsters.The outcomes of data breaches widely affect businesses and people. Not only data breaches can cost irreparable damage to the brand of a business but it also costs billions to the economy to protect from it every year. The effects to individuals can be even more destructive, with people finding themselves in large debt they never created and can never repay or losing their eligibility for credit and lending products leading to widening inequalities.As technology (especially gen A.I. and deepfakes) advances rapidly, it’s inevitable that we will see more data breaches and more impersonation fraud. Static photos of a passport that expose way to much identity data and says nothing about who we really are, cannot be the answer to protecting our digital privacy in the age of A.I.

Building this future

We see a future that personal A.I. and personal, decentralized, identity work in tandem to streamline our lives while keeping us private. A future where, not only we can seamlessly access financial services but the right mortgage product, at the right rate, for the house of our dreams finds us and is accessible instantly just because we are us and without having to expose any real data about ourselves in the process. Digital identity means freedom and frankly, any compromise to that, is not a future we are prepared to accept.