Dan Gisolfi is currently leading the delivery of innovation capabilities across Discover Financial Services (DFS), such as Hack-aaS, Patent Program, Design Thinking Services, and an Innovation Accelerator. Prior to joining DFS, he led an innovation team focused on the incubation of IBM Security’s Zero Trust Architecture in collaboration with internal labs, academic institutions and NIST.

About Podcast Episode

Some of the key topics covered during this episode with Dan are:

Where to find Dan?

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Dominik Beron is the Founder & CEO of walt.id, a leading company in the field of decentralized identity. Mr. Beron is a serial entrepreneur with executive education from the Universities of Pennsylvania, Oxford and a law degree (JD equivalent) from the University of Vienna. He worked for law firms (M&A), served as a policy advisor to the Austrian Parliament and as consultant to the UN, the EU Commission and national governments. Dominik has received numerous awards such as “30 under 30” (by Forbes US) and was named a Global Shaper (World Economic Forum).

About Podcast Episode

The question of “What is Identity?” is a very complicated one.

In this conversation, Dominik distinguishes SSI as being Who I am, whereas NFTs as being What I own.

Identity is a complicated topic. If I own a Ferrari, it says something about my identity.

This conversation contrasts NFTs and SSI, while talking about how they both are complementary in representing one’s Identity.

Some of the key topics covered during this episode with Dominik are:

Where to find Dominik?

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Imraan Bashir is a Partner & National Canadian Public Sector Cyber Leader at KPMG. Imraan is a seasoned executive with 20+ years of experience advising on cyber security and information technology matters to a wide variety of public and private sector clients. Imraan is well-versed in multiple areas of cyber security, including governance, strategy, incident management, cloud security, risk management, digital identity and more.  Prior to joining KPMG, Imraan spent time in the public sector, where he directed the policy, strategy, implementation and oversight of Government of Canada enterprise-wide cyber initiatives, including leadership of key programs such as cloud security and digital identity.

This conversation is meant to generate some suggestions on how to avoid the big brother rhetoric when it comes to digital ID programs.

Some of the key topics covered during this episode with Imraan are:

Where to find Imraan?

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Karla McKenna is an international standards specialist in the area of financial services. Ms. McKenna is the Head of Standards for the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) for which she is responsible for facilitating the development and implementation of GLEIF standards and leveraging international standards from organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to maximize data quality and the operational integrity of the Global LEI System. Ms. McKenna also is Managing Director, GLEIF Americas.

About Episode

Read more about episode here: https://northernblock.io/gleif-standardizing-legal-entity-verification-with-karla-mckenna/

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Joachim Lohkamp is the Founder & CEO of Jolocom, a Berlin-based company building decentralized digital identity and access right management solutions aimed to be universal, lightweight and based on open source protocols.

One of the desired outcomes of using standards-driven open source code projects is to avoid vendor lock-in. If your digital identity is a public good, then you shouldn’t be locked in to one specific company. If a company goes out of business, I may lose my identity data. If I find a better alternative, I'm unable to port my identity. Therefore, interoperability is a vital aspect of being able to provide sovereignty to individuals but also to governments.

Some of the key questions answered during this episode with Joachim are:

And more!

Where to find Joachim?

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Eugenio (Gene) is an industry go-to person in the fight against proceeds of crime, corruption and terrorism (AML/ATF/ABC) within the investments, banking and insurance industries.

Laws against money laundering were created to use against organized crime during the period of Prohibition in the United States during the 1930s. Organized crime received a major boost from Prohibition and a large source of new funds that were obtained from illegal sales of alcohol. The successful prosecution of Al Capone on tax evasion brought in a new emphasis by the state and law enforcement agencies to track and confiscate money, but existing laws against tax evasion could not be used once gangsters started paying their taxes.

“Always follow the money” has been sound advice in law enforcement and political circles for decades. Nevertheless, tracking the flows of illicit funds generated by drug trafficking and organized crime and analyzing the magnitude and the extent to which these are laundered through the world’s financial systems remain daunting tasks.

Can Digital ID come to the rescue?

This episode covers the intersections of Digital ID, AML and Open Banking.

Some of the key questions answered are:

And more!

Where to find Eugenio?

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Andy Best is the CEO of the Civic Digital Network (CDN), a non-profit organization working to create national data infrastructure.

CDN’s mission is to give the public sector the tools to meet the challenges of the coming century. How do you enable responsible economic activity in the current digital era? What is the government's proper role to facilitate, regulate and legislate to create the maximum social and economic public and private good.

During this conversation, we discuss:

And more!

Note that although this conversation is mostly framed around Canadian context, the key fundamental frameworks discussed are applicable across various democratic systems.

Where to find Andy?

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Antti Kettunen is a digital identity and digital trust expert and advisor. He designs ecosystem solutions, actively participates in standards and industry groups (e.g. CEN, Trust over IP, Mobey), and helps customers deliver value in their digital identity projects. He also writes and speaks about digital identity and the ongoing paradigm shift in his blog Identifinity. Antti is also one of the co-founders and advocates of the FindyNet cooperative, a digital identity network for Finland.

About Episode

During this conversation, we discuss:

And more!

For those interested, this is the book that Antti refers to during the conversation: https://www.amazon.com/Wide-Lens-Successful-Innovators-Others/dp/1591846293

Where to find Antti?

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Stepan Gershuni is working towards making it easier for DAOs to onboard talent through Professional ID credentials. There is an oversupply of talent looking to join DAOs and Stepan is trying to help them manage their excess talent pools and onboard people faster. 

About Episode

During this conversation, we discuss:

And more!

About Guest

Stepan Gershuni is the Lead Product Manager at Affinidi, Founder of Credentia and Deep Skills. 

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- Governance Orchestrators -

The orchestrating required to bring together decentralized identity ecosystems is today's biggest gap for Commercial SSI. By this I mean the Trust over IP Level 4 governance authorities that are required to make something commercially real.

We have the approaches, the principles, the technologies and the standards down. There is also clear market demand for data ownership and privacy-preserving digital interactions. We've have also seen great enhancements on mobile devices for authentication methods such as biometrics and continuous authentication.

So the question is: how we make decentralized identity more of a reality in our day-to-day lives?

How can we create a place in which a bank, a gig economy company or a start-up can all simply plug-in and begin using verifiable credentials?

There is a glaring need for Commercial SSI Governance Authorities.

As we know, half of the battle in decentralized identity, especially in government regulated industries, is governance. We require governance entities to help in the formation of ecosystems, the setting of rules, the making of markets, the monetization strategies, the dispute strategies, etc.

More entities are required to manage the bits of a trust framework that are commercial decisions.

About Episode

During this conversation, we discuss:

About Guest

Charlie has been a thought leader in the digital identity space for many years now, having spent time across organizations such as:

Now with Avast, Charlie is responsible for developing their identity services strategy as the company expands its expertise and innovation in privacy and identity products.

You can find Charlie on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleswalton2020/.

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