Indicio’s James Schulte shares five things RSA Conference 2026 made clear — about identity security, AI-driven fraud, portable identity, and where this market is headed.
By James Schulte
The RSA Conference 2026 is over and I’m back in my seat with a lot to think about. Four days at the Moscone Center, more demos than I can count, and conversations on identity security that ranged from genuinely excited to quietly urgent. Here’s what I took away.
1. A Clear Signal from the Market for Verifiable Credential Infrastructure
I say this not as cheerleading, but because it was consistently reinforced by the people we spoke with. When you spend four days fielding questions from security architects and identity leads who are actively trying to solve hard problems, you get a fast read on whether what you’re building actually answers the question they’re asking.
It does.
The combination of Verifiable Credential infrastructure (including support for remote mDL verification with ISO 18013-7), multi-format support, standards-native interoperability, and privacy-preserving architecture is exactly what practitioners are looking for.
And even though we were on a busy expo floor, the conversations we had went surprisingly in depth: Buyers are looking for a real solution to a structural problem and were relieved when I showed them what Indicio Proven can do.
2. IDEMIA Public Security: The Right Identity Proofing Partner
Sharing a booth with IDEMIA Public Security was a statement about how identity security gets built. You need world-class identity proofing and biometric verification at enrollment, and you need the decentralized credential infrastructure to make that verified identity portable and instantly verifiable everywhere else.
That’s exactly what the Indicio–IDEMIA Public Security partnership delivers. At RSAC, people could see the two sides of the solution working together into a real, production-ready stack that delivered a new solution to increasingly challenging authentication problems.
3. Verifiable Credentials for Financial Services KYC — A Live Demo
We ran a demo showing how Verifiable Credentials applied to financial services KYC and it was the clearest proof point of the week. When you walk someone through a bank issuing a customer a credential that contains verified identity data and authenticated biometrics, and then show that credential being instantly verified anywhere with no database call, no re-verification friction, and no centralized biometric storage, the reaction is visceral.
What made it land was the specificity. This wasn’t abstract decentralized identity theory. It was: “here’s the customer, here’s the credential, here’s the verification. Done.”
For an industry that’s been drowning in reverification overhead and compliance complexity, seeing that frictionless simplicity in real time was as exciting to demonstrate as it was to see — to judge from the reaction.
4. AI-Driven Identity Threats Are More Serious Than the Industry Admits
There was also a lot of talk at RSAC about how fast AI is becoming a weapon against identity systems. Deepfakes and synthetic identity are not emerging threats. They are the current threat environment, and traditional authentication has no structural answer to them. This also points to the great timing of our recent announcement of Indicio Proven AI for Financial Services
A convincing deepfake voice paired with leaked personal data defeats most call center authentication. An AI-generated identity document bypasses legacy KYC checks. Biometrics, once considered the gold standard for authentication, are increasingly vulnerable to synthetic media, and unlike passwords, a compromised biometric can’t be reset.
Proven turns an authenticated biometric into a Verifiable Credential that can to be cryptographically verified and cross-checked against a liveness presentation. No need to store the raw biometric anywhere, and the digitally signed biometric and credential, cannot be forged by AI.
With Proven AI, we’ve taken our KYC solution a step further. AI agents can now verify these credentials. They can verify other agents too. And this solves a fundamental problem in the AI economy that legacy authentication technology cannot.
The industry is slowly arriving at this conclusion and, yet again, Indicio is leading the way.
5. Portable Digital Identity Is the Future
The clearest signal from the week came from the culmination of all of my conversations: eIDAS 2.0 in Europe is making portable digital identity a regulatory reality for businesses around the world. The entire bloc will soon be using portable credentials. Governments are issuing digital IDs. Financial institutions around the world are looking for reusable KYC that works across borders and are actively shopping for the infrastructure they need to meet the pending deadlines.
Indicio Proven is that infrastructure. Multi-format, multi-protocol, standards-native, and already in production across travel, finance, and government use cases. The world is moving toward identity that travels with the person, verifies instantly, and works anywhere. We’ve been building toward that for years. RSAC 2026 confirmed we’re ahead of it.
Overall, it was a great week. It was great to see the urgency, specificity, and companies ready to move. That energy matters. The market is catching up to what we’ve been saying, and the conversations we had at RSAC showed it.
A genuine thank you to IDEMIA Public Security for the platform, the partnership, and standing with us through four days of non-stop demos. We’re headed somewhere important. It’s better to be going there together.
Want to see what Indicio Proven looks like in your environment? Request a demo and let’s talk.