Let's talk about digital identity with Drummond Reed, Director of Trust Services at Gen and Andy Tobin, Commercial Director, Europe at Gen.

In this series opener of Season 5, Drummond Reed and Andy Tobin join Oscar to explore vLEIs and Self Sovereign Identity (SSI). They explore what LEIs and vLEIs are, how SSI principles are used within vLEIs, the benefits of vLEIs, which sectors and industries will benefit the most, and some use cases of where the vLEI has been leveraged.

[Transcript below]

“If LEIs were digitised in a way that could be instantly verifiable, it could transform company onboarding.”

Drummond has spent a quarter-century in Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust infrastructure. He is Director, Trust Services at Gen, previous Avast after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was Chief Trust Officer. He is co-author of the book, ‘Self-Sovereign Identity’ (Manning Publications, 2021) and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification. At the Trust Over IP Foundation, Drummond is a member of the Steering Committee and co-chair of the Governance Stack Working Group and the Concepts and Terminology Working Group. At the Sovrin Foundation, he served as co-chair of the Sovrin Governance Framework Working Group for five years.

From 2005-2015 he was co-chair of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee, a semantic data interchange protocol that implements Privacy by Design. Drummond also served as Executive Director for two industry foundations: the Information Card Foundation and the Open Identity Exchange, and as a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation, ISTPA, XDI.org, and Identity Commons. In 2002 he received the Digital Identity Pioneer Award from Digital ID World, and in 2013 he was cited as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor.

Connect with Drummond on LinkedIn.

Andy Tobin leads European and eIDAS strategy for Gen's Digital Trust Services business. He is one of the pioneers of self-sovereign identity and helped to establish Evernym as the world leader in this field. He is a well-known public speaker and writer on the topic of digital identity and has delivered some of the largest SSI projects to date.

His career has spanned the three rapidly converging sectors of identity, mobile and payments. He has written code to control cash machines, built the world’s first mCommerce server, run a £1.2bn mobile messaging network and been CTO for Europe’s first fully mobile bank. He is a passionate technology strategist who believes that the identity ecosystem and the personal information economy is poised for massive change, enabled by the capabilities being built right now by Avast.

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn.

We’ll be continuing this conversation on Twitter using #LTADI – join us @ubisecure!

Go to @Ubisecure on YouTube to watch the video transcript for episode 96.

Podcast transcript

Oscar Santolalla: Welcome back to Season 5 of the Let’s Talk about Digital Identity podcast. In this series opener I am joined by Drummond Reed and Andy Tobin, from Gen Digital, joining us to delve into vLEIs and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Stay tuned to find out more.

Let’s Talk About Digital Identity, the podcast connecting identity and business. I am your host, Oscar Santolalla.

 Oscar: Today, we are very happy to have two expert guests, Drummond and Andy. And today, we are going to discuss vLEIs and what is the connection with self-sovereign identity.

First of all, we have Drummond Reed. He is Director of Trust Services at Gen, previously Avast after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was the Chief Trust Officer. He is co-author of the book Self-Sovereign Identity, published by Manning Publication in 2021. And he’s co-editor of the W3C Decentralised Identifiers, DID 1.0 Specification. At the Trust Over IP Foundation, Drummond is a member of the steering committee and co-chair of the Governance Stack Working Group and the Concepts and Terminology Working Group. At the Sovrin Foundation, he serves as a co- chair of the Sovrin Governance Framework Working Group for five years. Hello, Drummond.

Drummond Reed: Hello, Oscar. It's very good to be here.

Oscar: Welcome Drummond. Our second guest is Andy Tobin. Andy Tobin leads European and eIDAS strategy for Gen Digital’s Trust Services Business. He is one of the pioneers of self-sovereign identity and helped to establish Evernym, as a world leader in this field. He is a well-known public speaker and writer on the topic of digital identity and has delivered some of the largest SSI projects to date. His career has spanned the three rapidly converging sectors of identity, mobile, and payments. He has written code to control cash machines, built the world's first mCommerce server, run a £1.2 billion mobile messaging network, and been the CTO for Europe's first fully mobile bank. Hello, Andy.

Andy Tobin: Hi, Oscar. Nice to be here.

Oscar: Welcome as well. I'm very happy to have both of you, Drummond and Andy.

So, let's talk about digital identity, and as usual in this show we want to hear a bit more about our guests. So please, both of you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to this world of identity.

Drummond: Oh, the journey. I don't think we have long enough in this podcast to cover the whole journey. Yes, I'll just say, originally, I was very interested and focused on solving problems of what we'd now call decentralised data exchange, and how people can share data, sort of directly peer to peer over wide area networks, like the internet, when it was first getting going. And I had no idea that to do that you actually had to solve the problem of digital identity and trust. And so, working on that led me over into this area.

We didn't even call it identity when first working on it, we just said, “Hey, there's this challenge that you have to be able to establish a trust network.” And turned out that the problem there was identity. And doing that on a decentralised basis. And at that time, I was working on it was really centralised identity. Where you have an account with every different system you were interacting with. That was the norm, and it was – the pain was such that we had to have some solution to that. And so we thought it was federated identity, where you could take one account and reuse it in a whole bunch of other places. And in the end that's what most people, encounter with social login. The login with Facebook, or Google or Twitter now X, whatever.

And so, we spent 15 years and three generations of standards developing a federated identity. And it seemed like we could get there and then it just – we hit the ceiling. It just – federated identity by putting an intermediary in there made it – you could solve certain problems, but you couldn't solve others. And then blockchain came along and sort of taught us, “Oh, there's a way to make this fully decentralised that actually simplifies things tremendously.” And so that era, I really, market starting in 2015, 2016 that's when Evernym came together, which is where Andy and I met. And we've been working on decentralised ever since. Over to Andy to talk about his journey.

Andy: Yeah. Thanks, Drummond. I think the thing I like to look at most frequently, and that gets me most engaged is - seeing how megatrends that emerge affect existing businesses and capabilities. So, I've seen, for example, the digitisation of payments happening. And then digitisation of telephony happening and the emergence of mobile phones. And then the digitisation of commerce through the internet.

And with the digitalisation of identity, we're seeing really something a little bit different, which is – we need to have the ability as people to identify ourselves or prove things about ourselves - it doesn't need to be identity, it could be anything - without having to rely on anyone else to help us really to do that. So really, we're looking at a return, if you like, to the world we used to inhabit where you could go along with a piece of paper and show it to someone, like a passport, for example, and say, “Hey, look, this is me.” We don't have a digital way of doing that.

And so, there's lots of, what I call, work around solutions in place and Drummond’s just talked about a bunch of them that fudge the problem. The problem is solved properly by giving people digital versions of the paper documents they've got and giving them to those people in a way that enhances their privacy and security online. And when you have that capability, you can apply equally to companies who find it very difficult to prove who they are online, and also to things as well.

And as we move into the next megatrend of artificial intelligence. Underpinning artificial intelligence is - how do you know who or what is at the other end. And as it gets much easier to fake everything, there's going to be an explosion of trust issues. And if we can solve that with some of the techniques that we're working on, which we can, artificial intelligence gets a lot less scary.

Oscar: Yeah, indeed, through your life, I could see the reasons why this topic of self-sovereign entity had to happen. But just a few years ago it is getting, mainstream finally in these very recent years. And now we talk also about the future, there's a lot, a lot of problems to solve still.

In this conversation, let's go into much more specific topic related to self-sovereign identity. This is going to be about vLEIs. But to give a bit of concept, if one of you could throw a simple definition. What is an LEI?

Drummond: The LEI, that's pretty straightforward. In fact, what's ironic, is an LEI is really a classic, what we would call federated identifier, it fits into that second category. And that's because - so it's, to be very, very concrete, it's a 20-digit identifier of a legal entity. And it's important to clarify that term legal entity, because it can - in some legal jurisdictions,