FAQ

Identity and payments are intrinsically linked. Fundamentally, identity is key to establishing trust, security, and compliance. Identity verification plays a pivotal role in ensuring the legitimacy of payment transactions and financial management, with mechanisms such as Know Your User (KYC) compliance and user authentication serving as essential components. Therefore, the two topics are inter-connected. This connection gives rise to a UWI key differentiator – it’s tying together of experiences involving identity, money, and objects. Today, experiences along these three dimensions are often managed and executed across various and fragmented technology solutions, resulting in overhead to reconcile across them.

Overall, the connection between decentralized identity and digital payments lies in their shared goals of privacy, security, user experience, trust, and interoperability. Leveraging decentralized identity for digital payments can enhance these aspects and provide a more user-centric and secure payment experience.

DDI and VCs typically consist of data that, on its own, offers limited opportunities for monetization, such as driver licenses. However, when combined with UWI, they gain added potential. UWI introduces Money and Objects as additional data types, expanding the possibilities for monetization. Furthermore, UWI’s focus on dynamic data as opposed to static data, significantly broadens the range of data it encompasses and the value it can deliver.

As demonstrated earlier, the adoption of DDI & VC is gaining momentum, and the ecosystem is evolving accordingly and coming together. We are currently conducting an internal pilot in collaboration with Gen, focusing on enabling HR teams to verify crucial candidate information, such as college diplomas, by utilizing verifiable credentials (VCs). With the growing prevalence of DDI & VCs, we envision the issuance and verification processes being facilitated through UWI, leading to further automation. This, in turn, incentivizes enterprises to explore UWI as a solution for automating processes, improving efficiency, and mitigating risks.

By combining digital identity with payment systems, companies can unlock significant value by enhancing security, streamlining user experience, enabling personalized services, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Robust security measures, such as biometric authentication and multi-factor authentication, strengthen defenses against fraud and unauthorized transactions. Additionally, the integration of digital identity and payment systems allows for personalized offerings, targeted promotions, and tailored loyalty programs based on comprehensive user profiles.

Additionally, as part of our efforts, we are actively involved with the Global Acceptance Network (GAN). The GAN is a non-profit organization that seeks to establish and govern a layer of digital public infrastructure that interconnects digital trust ecosystems, enabling parties to form authentic, private, and secure digital relationships that encourage the growth and value of the decentralized data economy. The GAN will facilitate safe and secure data exchange across various ecosystems while encouraging them to evolve independently. The GAN points its efforts at the need for credentials in one network to be capable of validation in another network. Moreover, against the backdrop of AI, regulatory drivers (i.e., Privacy Laws), and changing consumer expectations, the GAN is well positioned to deliver on the promise of self-sovereign identity for people across their digital lives.

When using a state issued unique identifier like the MyNumber system in Japan it’s used to verify the uniqueness of your request/claim to a service provider on the basis that only the requestor has knowledge over that unique number and in turn the service provider trusts that the party claiming who they are, are in fact who they are to associate services to that unique identifier. In this scenario personal data still sits with that service provider who needs to maintain and manage that data in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. While it’s a good approach for better customer identification there’s still very little control by the data holder to what’s shared and for how long as well as potential risk of correlatability and data leakage.

UWI is using/utilizing verifiable credentials, based on industry standards for maximum acceptance and universal use, as the means to prove claims. Claims include digital identity, specific attributes of an individual, membership status or other claims over ownership. Through UWI the data owner remains full control over their data, to whom it’s shared and how long for. This not only increases data privacy and security but also allows for enterprises to get access to accurate and consented information without the burden of managing its lifecycle.