Monthly Archives: May 2018

Setting Flexible Industry Standards for Canadian Leadership and Development

Demystifying Industry Standards

One of the DIACC’s mandates is to identify and develop industry standards around digital identity that prioritize Canadian values through frameworks that are easy to reproduce, export, and apply across a large variety of industries and use cases.

In this post, we explore what the DIACC means by industry standards, why they matter to every Canadian, and how our collaborative approach is designed to unlock strategic insights that drive the delivery of robust and impactful standards.

What is an Industry Standard?

Industry standards are understood as a set of criteria relating to the standard functioning and executing of operations in a respective field of production. Industry standards establish a generally accepted framework to be adopted and followed by members of any given industry.  

“Industry” refers to the field of practice not the sector. In any given industry people and organisations intersect with each other and share interdependencies. This is especially true when it comes to the digital world.

Examples of Industry Standards:

DIACC members work to identify and develop multi-sector and community-driven industry standards for digital identity practitioners that offer broad value to all Canadians, from the private and public sector and around the world. In order to deliver value, industry standards must prioritize flexibility and security to ensure continued effectiveness.

Why do they Matter?

Industry standards establish a framework to ensure a repeatable level of expectation and certainty that benefits everyone involved. This is especially important in the digital world, when it comes to a concept as impactful and wide-reaching as digital identity.

Industry standards allow widespread technology and services adoption, improve user experience through interoperability, and ensure that safety and security are entrenched in solutions by design.

Industry standards for digital identity help:

  • Build customer confidence over time through consistent user experiences
  • Remove risk from a hardware perspective, as standards establish what needs to go into each element of a product, from design to delivery  
  • Ensure interoperability
  • Improve the customer experience and provide more strategic insight into consumer needs
  • Businesses and government understand what’s needed to ensure user confidence and interoperability of products
  • Establish design standards to ensure privacy and security of data
  • Develop a competitive edge through security, predictability, and confidence, resulting in a larger user base

Design standards to maintain the security and privacy of personal identifiable information have a  critical role in building public confidence for adoption of identity innovations. Digital identity industry standards are evolving, yet an inconsistent user experience remains, resulting in less confidence and slower progress.

Through industry standards development, there is an exciting opportunity for leaders of innovating organisations to collaborate and shape our digital lives. Collaboration across sectors and verticals provides key learnings, opportunities for new partnerships, business growth and development, and strategic insights that can’t be gained in isolation.

DIACC’s vision for digital identity is to make Canadians’ lives better. The time, energy, and effort it takes to remove complexity from users is not something Canadians should have to think about. If implemented properly, digital identity will be a simple, trusted and reliable part of how Canadians interact and conduct transactions everyday. 

After all, the hard work of good design is often invisible. Consider something as simple as this lamp:

Industry Standards Development: Why DIACC Uses a Call for Comments

The DIACC’s goal is to unlock public and private sector capabilities through impactful cross-industry collaboration to make the complex systems that underpin digital identity simple,  secure, and more trustworthy for both users and suppliers. One way we will accomplish this vision is through far-reaching and useful frameworks.

Digital identity that delivers impact to grow an economy requires broad collaboration and ultimately, success will be led by inclusion. The DIACC coalition of public and private sector leaders are making a sustained and significant investment in the future of digital identity. By connecting committed stakeholders and the broader Canadian community at-large around focused, inclusive, and beneficial standards, we ensure every Canadian has the opportunity to share their view.

 

Contact us to to share your ideas for collaborative and Canadian principled standards that can advance Canada’s digital economy.

 

 

Spotlight on Prodigy Ventures

Meet Prodigy Ventures

1. What is the mission and vision of Prodigy Ventures?  

Prodigy Ventures’ mission is to enable its clients with faster digital transformation through the design, development, testing, and deployment of emerging technologies that drive value. Our experienced professionals are building new innovative solutions in mobile, secure digital identity, voice/smart speaker, video, and more.

2. Why is trustworthy digital identity critical for existing and emerging markets?

All our clients have 3 things in common. First, they offer products and services to consumers. Second, they have one or more digital transformation projects underway; either moving their business online (e.g. selling insurance products directly to consumers), or wanting to leverage the efficiency benefits created through digital processes (e.g. reduce cost, increase convenience and security with online self-service applications, etc.). And third, they share the need for a trustworthy digital ID, either because of regulation, or financial risk. Facebook or Google IDs simply don’t meet their needs.

As part of that digital transformation, a number of classic digital identity use cases emerge. Prodigy is working on a series of “privacy-by-design” enabled solutions that facilitate the use of trustworthy digital identity to support account creation and updates, account recovery, eligibility checks, as well as service add-ons and changes.

3. How will digital identity transform the Canadian and global economy? How does Prodigy address challenges associated with this transformation?

Canada is one of the most connected countries of the world. We believe Canadian businesses and the economy in general will take a major leap forward when a solid, trustworthy digital identity service becomes available to all Canadians. It will create groundbreaking business opportunities.

Prodigy plays a critical role in helping companies go from “aspiring to change”, to “realizing the benefits” from digital transformation. Central to this is the need for a trustworthy digital identity. One that enables end-to-end digital business processes, which until now have been too often fractured, incorporating physical documents, requiring in-person interactions and/or using questionable data.

4. What role does Canada have to play as a leader in the space?

We can find in the country’s very own history the foundation for two important aspects that make for a strong and trustworthy digital identity service. First, the Canadian government and provinces all recognize and protect its citizens’ privacy. This is clearly demonstrated in a number of ways, from the appointment of privacy commissioners’ responsibilities, to the incorporation of privacy-by-design requirements when introducing the development of new consumer-facing services. Second, Canadians are used to cooperating. Around the world, telcos or banks are rarely the first to cooperate. In Canada however,  we have seen this a number of times. Since 2014, we have been witnessing banks, private and public sector institutions, and telcos, working together to build the foundation of a trustworthy Canadian digital identity.

What we are collectively building and the accumulated knowledge around an inclusive, strong, secure, private digital ID, is clearly something that should make Canadians proud. We believe this makes Canada uniquely positioned to lead, with plenty to offer to other countries.

5. What else should we know about Prodigy?

We are a public Canadian innovation company (TSX:PGV) with combined thriving enterprise services business (Prodigy Labs) and a venture builder (Prodigy Ventures). Highly complementary, these businesses work together to drive growth with the latest technologies.

Prodigy is helping to accelerate the adoption of Canada’s first digital identity network by enabling enterprise clients to rapidly test, deploy and demonstrate business value with Verified.Me.

 

Canada’s Digital Economy Relies on a Foundation of Digital Identity

Canada’s Digital Economy Relies on a Foundation of Digital Identity

The Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) publishes white paper that underscores the economic impacts of digital identity on Canadian citizens and Canadian economy

Read the Paper: English | French

TORONTO May 16, 2018 – The Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) released a new white paper about the economic impacts digital identity has on Canadian businesses and the national GDP.  The paper highlights the critical foundation that digital identity establishes for every industry in protecting consumers and making Canada competitive on a global scale.

Almost every Canadian has some kind of digital identity, with the average person having 92 accounts registered to one email. The white paper, released today, outlines how digital ID is critical to the Canadian digital economy and greatly impacts everyone, notably citizens, small businesses, financial services, healthcare and government.  Given this, reliable digital identity is key to increasing efficiencies for Canadian citizens and business, and making digital services safe, secure, and accessible.

Digital ID isn’t being used to its full potential, given a general lack of trust in the validity of digital identification when used for transactions or services. The white paper, called “The Economic Impact of digital identity in Canada: understanding the potential economic benefits and the cost of inaction,” explains methods to build the trust that will allow Canadians to fully adopt digital identity, which create new opportunities for both individuals and businesses, with significant benefits to the economy.

“All of us increasingly manage our daily lives on mobile devices and online,” said CJ Ritchie, Associate Deputy Minister and BC Government Chief Information Officer. “We want to choose when, where and how we access services and don’t care if the service is provided by the public or the private sector. Trusted digital identities are absolutely required to make that possible.”

Currently, many processes that require identity authentication and validation used in government, health care, financial services remain manual, which lead to increased costs and slow access to services that directly impact taxpayers. An estimated $482 million CAD is lost each year from manual government processes at both provincial and federal levels.

“Canada has an incredible opportunity to lead in digital identity, setting the groundwork that is required for an integrated, interoperable, and reliable digital economy,” said Franklin Garrigues, Vice President of Digital Channels at TD Bank. “We were happy to contribute as a DIACC member and help demonstrate the scale and impact of digital identity across industries.”

Countries like Estonia have already experienced the benefits of implementing digital identity tools, including electronic ID cards for all residents over the age of 15, which are used in healthcare, electronic banking, online shopping, signing digital contracts, encrypting email, tram tickets, and more. This has created efficiencies for citizens, while adding 2% to the country’s GDP and saving an additional 2% through the use of electronic signatures.

As stated in the whitepaper, “there is no better time for consumers, businesses and government entities work together to achieve the common goal of enabling a safe, secure and trusted ecosystem for Canadian digital identity.”

Read the full whitepaper to find out more about how digital identity will set the foundation for Canada’s digital economy.

About DIACC

The DIACC is a non-profit coalition of public and private sector leaders committed to developing a Canadian digital identification and authentication framework to enable Canada’s full and secure participation in the global digital economy. The DIACC was created as a result of the federal government’s Task Force for the Payments System Review and members include representatives from both the federal and provincial levels of government as well as private sector leaders.

DIACC members work together by sharing resources and perspectives to address the needs of digital transformation through the development of the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (PCTF). The PCTF is a set of Canadian standards that support open government principles and enable Canada’s full and secure participation in the global digital economy. DIACC members collaboratively develop market educating innovation white papers, proof of concepts, and applied research to secure Canada’s full and beneficial participation in the digital economy.

To learn more about the DIACC visit www.DIACC.ca

About Consult Hyperion

Consult Hyperion is an independent strategic and technical consultancy, based in the US and UK, specialising in secure electronic transactions. With over 30 years of experience, we help organisations around the world exploit new technologies to secure electronic payments and identity transaction services. From mobile payments and chip & PIN, to contactless ticketing and smart identity cards, we deliver value to our clients by supporting them in delivering their strategy. We use a practical approach and expert knowledge of relevant technologies. Hyperlab, our in-house software development team, further support our globally recognised expertise at every step in the electronic transaction value chain, from authentication, access and networks, to transactional systems and applications. We define, develop, design and deliver.

For more information contact pressoffice@chyp.com

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