Matt Thompson from Socure brings a wealth of experience to the topic of federal identity management. After a successful career in the military, he noticed that there was a lot of friction for veterans to get benefits from the federal government. He has been working with that issue of identification for his entire career. The company, Socure, has a similar origin story. The founder had a tough time establishing credit as a young man and noticed that there must be a better way to validate one’s credentials. Johnny Ayers launched Socure in 2012 intending to make it easier to establish identity. His goal was to verify 100% good IDs and eliminate fraud across the Internet.

Socure has been a ridiculously successful company. This was a challenge that banks faced, too fast and they may not have valid identification, too slow and they may lose a customer. If an identification system holds up the process, it can be described as “friction.”