Decentralized identity is a privacy- and security-by-design solution for authenticating digital identity and data. It makes it easy for companies and organizations to comply with data privacy laws, makes business partner integrations more secure, and does away with the need for third parties to manage and hold personally identifiable information (PII) in order to verify users.

Decentralized identity allows individuals to control their own data, provides consent-based data sharing, and the ability to verify the source of information—and its integrity— without having to check in with the source. This combination of features solves the privacy, fraud, and security issues that undermine current models for managing identity online.

A verifiable credential is a tamper-proof way to issue, share, and verify any kind of digital information and enables a holder to provide meaningful consent to sharing their data. Frequently, a verifiable credential is seen as being equivalent to a physical identity document, and that is a major use case; but digital identity is a much broader concept: it applies to machines, and even things and the information associated with them or that they produce.

Verifiable credentials can be used to create portable and permanent digital identities, which are under the control of the identity owner. This sharing can be done in privacy-preserving ways through selective disclosure (where only the information needed by a verifying entity is shared) or through predicate proofs (where the information can be shared without disclosing its precise content — as in a “yes” or “no” answer to a request for proof of age.

Verifiable credentials are, therefore, a powerful way of ensuring privacy and security for digital identity and any data associated with an identity.

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is the concept where individuals or individual entities have complete “sovereign” control over their digital information, and how it is used and shared.

This control means the “sovereign identity” does not have to rely on third parties to hold and store their personal data for access to products or services or for verification purposes. There are different “flavors” of self-sovereign identity, some of which are maximally sovereign and some of which are less so and address the control that other sovereign entities—such as nations—have over their data subjects.

Know Your Customer (KYC) is the mandatory legal process of identifying and verifying a person’s identity when they open a financial account. KYC may also be periodically updated for account holders. KYC can also be known as Know Your Customer in other industries.

Indicio technology fits into existing KYC processes by allowing issuing authorities to provide proof of identity in the form of a tamper-proof verifiable digital credential. This enables others to rely on that KYC information if they trust the issuing authority.

The advantages of using verifiable credentials from Indicio for KYC is that a verifiable credential is reusable. Once the appropriate KYC processes have been conducted, the verifiable credential is portable and can be reused with the certainty that it hasn’t been altered or tampered with. It makes verification across services, departments, agencies, and organizations frictionless, turning KYC into an actionable asset for many different contexts. It also saves customers and organizations from the inefficiencies of repeated manual KYC of the same information.

Identity Access Management (IAM) is a set of processes, policies, and tools for controlling user access to critical information within an organization. Indicio amplifies traditional IAM systems that can be used as part of the credential issuance process with a complete end-to-end system for the creation, issuance, and verification of verifiable digital credentials. Using the information contained in an IAM, any type of information can be contained in a verifiable credential and used according to the machine readable governance contained in the system. This makes IAM systems more flexible, privacy preserving, and extensible across a trusted digital ecosystem.

Indicio is the market leader in developing Trusted Digital Ecosystems, providing companies with the software and infrastructure needed to authenticate and exchange high-value information and develop trusted, secure relationships.

Specializing in financial, healthcare, and travel markets, Indicio’s global decentralized network, field-leading software, and information management products enable customers all over the world to issue, hold, and verify data through encrypted digital credentials. These verifiable digital credentials allow companies to confirm data authenticity, repeatedly and efficiently, from its source without the expense or risk of direct integrations.

As a Public Benefit Corporation, Indicio is committed to advancing trusted digital ecosystems as a public good that enables people to control their online identities and share their data by consent. Identity and application teams rely on Indicio’s simplicity, extensibility, and expertise to make trusted data work for everyone.

Indicio’s award-winning decentralized identity Networks and complete Trusted Digital Ecosystems, built on open source, simplify data compliance through privacy-by-design architecture, boosting bottom-line profit and mitigating costly risks.

Companies can build new business models around trusted data and relationships and enhance their reputation for information privacy and zero-trust security with Indicio.

Indicio produces technology that can supplement existing KYC processes in any sector, making it ideal for situations when data needs to be shared, but without using complex backend integrations.

Anti Money Laundering (AML), also known as anti-money laundering, is the execution of transactions to eventually convert illegally obtained money into legal money. Indicio builds Trusted Digital Ecosystems, using new technologies that are helping to reshape how compliance is practiced and how financial crime is detected and prevented. Using verifiable credentials, actionable data can be securely shared among multiple entities including regulators, law enforcement, and financial institutions.

Hyperledger Indy is an open source project at the Hyperledger Foundation, which is hosted by the Linux Foundation, that was built from the ground up to create networks specifically for the exchange of verifiable credentials. Nodes built on the Indy codebase are an essential component to the exchange of verifiable credentials.