A new blog from Andras Cser, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, says standardized use cases, such as Indicio and SITA’s development of digital travel credentials will drive adoption of “exciting new identity technology,” what he calls, decentralized digital identity (DDID).
SITA recently announced its role as lead investor in Indicio’s Series A funding round, citing the co-innovation agreement as being key to its digital identity strategy. This means offering verifiable credential-based digital identity solutions that meet International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards for a Digital Travel Credential (DTC) to its 400-plus members and 2,500 worldwide customers, which SITA says is about 90% of the world’s airline business.
With the digital travel credential — or DTC — Indicio and SITA have applied decentralized identity technology to enable pre-authorized travel and seamless border crossing using verifiable credentials. The simplicity, speed, and security of the process applied to the often stressful experience of travel will not only drive the adoption of the technology in air travel but show the world how verifiable identity and data can be easily applied to make everything from passwordless login to banking and finance better, more secure, and faster.
“We agree with Cser,” says Heather Dahl, CEO of Indicio. “When you can solve one of the toughest security challenges — crossing a border — and solve it so that it becomes, easy, frictionless, and seamless, you have the opportunity not only to scale the technology across the global travel industry and affect the lives of millions of people, but to show how this simplicity can be applied to any digital interaction that requires personal or high-value data. It is a very exciting technology, these are exciting times, and we’re going to change everything.”
Cser’s observation highlights Indicio as a leader in the development and deployment of decentralized digital identity software and solutions through its growing customer roster of global enterprises, governments, organizations, and financial institutions.
Decentralized identity and verifiable credentials are a new and transformational method for data sharing that allows information to be verified without intervention from a centralized third-party or through creating a direct integration between systems. This means data from disparate sources and systems can be easily and quickly shared directly to organizations and governments by end users to make informed decisions based on accurate, verifiable data.
The key to this, as Cser notes, is standardization: “standardized use cases will drive interoperability and usability and help grow DDID adoption.” Government contracts for IT infrastructure increasingly mandate open source and open standard-based technology over proprietary solutions because the former is easier to scale, easier to sustain, and less expensive. In practice, this means that a verifiable credential solution like the DTC can be easily adapted to other identity verification purposes because it is easy for anyone to access and use verification software combined with governance rules.
Indicio’s engineering team are key leaders, contributors to, and maintainers of open-source projects at the Hyperledger Foundation and Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), and Indicio’s products and solutions align with the open standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Trust over IP Foundation (ToIP). With the DTC, Indicio and SITA not only followed ICAO’s standard for DTC but also the open standards and open-source codebases that enable interoperability.
“Open standards are a decentralized identity superpower,” says Dahl, “and It is, in large part, due to the work of the open-standards Hyperledger Foundation that we have a complete technology solution that meets the needs of global enterprises and governments now and, equally important, will meet them in the future. Technology will evolve and we have to be ready for that, but we know the direction it will evolve towards: universally verifiable identity and data. It’s the only way forward that makes economic sense. That’s why we provide our customers with a universal solution — Indicio Proven®. It can meet current requirements for eIDAS, OpenID4VC, and mobile driver’s licenses but also allow the evolution, expansion, and innovation that will come — that is already coming — from business models using verifiable data.”
As 2024 continues, more global enterprises are learning about this exciting new technology and contracting with the Indicio Academy to help educate and train their workforce on the latest advancements and technologies encompassing decentralized identity.
Please reach out to our team for more information about Indicio, Indicio Proven, or the Indicio Academy.
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