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How integrating TrustTech into existing processes streamlines transactions and experiences — while simplifying compliance and reducing risk.
Most people have heard the adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” (and even if you’re seeing it for the first time, the meaning is clear).
But sometimes the ‘cure’ or ‘treatment’ is so ubiquitous — such a constant presence in day-to-day activities — that it’s easy to overlook the underlying ailment.
Consider the tremendous effort and expense that goes into ‘treating’ a lack of trust. In today’s economy, trust is so essential to virtually every transaction that organizations:
- Execute lengthy data entry and acquisition processes to prevent, catch, and correct errors
- Perform extensive checks to validate information accuracy and integrity
- Purchase insurance and other risk management/offload products and services
It’s clear that being uncertain about information slows down operations, makes sharing information expensive, limits opportunities, and introduces a myriad of risks — cyber risk, supply chain risk, compliance risk, operational risk, and more.
In contrast, knowing immediately that information is authentic removes frustration, speeds up processes, reduces the effort needed to make decisions, and opens up new paths that simply aren’t practical or profitable otherwise. And being able to recognize immediately that information is inauthentic can prevent some very bad outcomes.
Trust Technology (or TrustTech for short) describes a new set of capabilities that are designed to work with existing systems and business process to enable high-assurance relationships, transactions, and experiences. Coming back to the adage, TrustTech is the “ounce of prevention” that can provide transformative “cures” to historically hard trust problems, changing for the better how we all live and work.
Moving from insurance to assurance
In the context of transactions, insurance is largely about limiting the financial consequences of bad outcomes, whereas assurance helps to prevent those bad outcomes from occurring.
“High assurance” means you can (with good reason) trust that something is true. There are different dimensions to assurance, any combination of which may improve risk signalling and may be materially important to determining whether it is reasonable to have confidence in any given transaction or event.
For example:
- Information assurance refers to the measures and processes used to verify the validity of presented information (for example, by its relationship to the source authority), ensuring it is authentic and has not been tampered with.
- Authentication assurance focuses on the factors (something you have, something you know, something you are) that you can challenge against to build confidence that a person or entity is who they are claiming to be.
- Identity assurance is concerned with ensuring that a user is indeed who they claim to be from a legal perspective.
- Proximity assurance verifies the physical location of a user, ensuring they are where they claim to be.
- Binding assurance is about ensuring that the assurance components of the transaction are bound together into a single atomic transaction.
Across industries and contexts, both in the digital world and in the physical world, TrustTech capabilities can create high assurance interactions adding utility and value to an array of key activities and journeys:
These activities and journeys become the building blocks that allow you to approach historically difficult challenges in new ways.
Suddenly:
- Assurance decreases operating risk and reduces exposure, lessening the need for brands to act as “insurer of last resort” when things go wrong.
- Explicit and auditable consent replaces assumed consent, creating greater traceability to the authority upon which actions are taken.
- Transactions that were once difficult to prove become non-repudiable (i.e., a user cannot deny having performed the transaction).
- What was once vulnerable to phishing is now resistant with more ways to establish and maintain bidirectional trust.
- Selective disclosure of the minimum necessary information replaces risky oversharing and the proliferation of honey pots vulnerable to bad actors.
- Friction-filled processes become much more convenient, reducing stress and cost.
- Manual workflows can be automated, speeding up processes and raising efficiency.
- Compliance is ‘built in’ and regarded less as a burden and more as something that strengthens protections, adds value, fosters confidence in moments and brands – and is straightforward to achieve.
In the aggregate, these changes are truly transformative across a wide range of industries. To list just a handful of examples…
- Governments can advance service delivery — increasing efficiency, strengthening privacy safeguards, and improving user experiences — without leaving any citizen, business, or other stakeholder behind.
- Financial services (FinServ) and financial technology (FinTech) firms can reduce risk, become more efficient, and drive revenue — while complying with stringent regulations (e.g., Strong Customer Authentication in PSD2/3, non-repudiable qualified e-signatures, anti-money laundering, know your customer, etc.).
- Transportation agencies can harness the power and flexibility of digital credentials to improve today’s services while laying the foundation for tomorrow’s offerings.
- Educational institutions and occupational licencing authorities can boost their brands, protect their reputations, and empower their students, graduates and qualified practitioners with tamper-evident degrees, diplomas, professional certifications, and micro-credentials.
- Businesses of all sizes can build assurance-based trust into every interaction, speeding up workflows, reducing cyber risks, and supporting compliance objectives.
Packaging information for high assurance outcomes in today's hybrid world
In the physical world, we secure information in the form of ID cards or documents with integrated security features such as special paper, watermarks, brands, and seals that help to give the relying party confidence that the information:
- is from a legitimate source
- hasn’t been modified or tampered with
In the hybrid world that we live in, with both digital and physical elements, we need new ways to package information and bind it to the data subject to give the same or stronger confidence.
TrustTech solutions provide these necessary capabilities, allowing us to digitally package data for high assurance outcomes. Like their physical predecessors and counterparts, these “data products” or “digital credentials” — such as digital driver’s licenses, digital occupational licences, and digital employee badges — need to be portable, tamper-evident, and secure.
But to achieve widespread adoption, trust and assurance must be maintained irrespective of the service channel (e.g., physical, digital, or hybrid). At the same time, the experiences themselves must be convenient for a transaction’s participants, regardless of their level of digital literacy.
By accommodating and enabling a hybrid world — where digital products proliferate, but paper and other physical form factors continue to play an important role — TrustTech makes it possible for:
- People to trust and verify the organizations with which they are interacting
- Organizations to verify their service recipients easily and with confidence
- Both people and organizations to prove to a third party that events or actions have occurred (e.g., signing, payment, or consent)
Example: Emma buys a car
Emma is a young professional who wants to buy a car from FourWheels. To complete the transaction, FourWheels sends Emma an invoice for the initial payment.
Emma banks with New Edge Bank and has their app installed on her phone. Because FourWheels is part of New Edge Bank’s ecosystem, the banking app allows Emma to review and verify the invoice for legitimacy — including that it originates from the real FourWheels and that it hasn’t been tampered with — prior to payment.
In fact, TrustTech makes it possible for FourWheels to prove to Emma that it is FourWheels (i.e., and not an imposter), at any touchpoint and in any channel.
All three parties to this transaction benefit from the added high assurance:
- Emma can confidently transfer the payment for her new car and can leverage selective disclosure capabilities to share with FourWheels only the information needed to prove relevant information about her eligibility.
- In addition to quickly receiving Emma’s payment, FourWheels easily complies with electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) regulations without collecting unnecessary information from Emma that would increase data risk and liability in the event of a breach.
- Because the transaction is legitimate, New Edge Bank doesn’t run the risk of having to compensate Emma for failing to prevent her from falling victim to fraud (i.e., as an “insurer of last resort”).
And this is just a single, simple example of how TrustTech is transforming how Emma interacts with businesses and governments. The same underlying fabric allows her to sign documents, prove eligibility requirements, register a company, access government services, carry her healthcare records … and so much more!
Creating a new world of digital trust
In practice, TrustTech seamlessly embeds trust into your existing solutions, adding the value of high assurance to what you already do and creating networks of trust that scale for the realities of how we work and live.
Building the trust fabric required to participate in and benefit from high assurance ecosystems, experiences, and transactions demands specialized expertise, up-to-date knowledge of the relevant standards, and insight into how the standards landscape is evolving.
Further, consideration needs to be given to:
- Authentication lifecycle: How continuous trust and assurance are maintained
- Credential lifecycle: How credentials are provisioned, bound, shared, and managed from day one to expiry or revocation
- Ecosystem lifecycle: How trust is established in organizations and across entire relationship networks
While it’s certainly possible to build your own trust infrastructure, there’s an opportunity cost — with the effort and resourcing drawing upon developer expertise that may be better applied elsewhere.
MATTR empowers you to get started today, with products and capabilities that can be integrated into any organization, application, or experience as you look to reap immediate rewards, consolidate leadership, or gain a first-mover advantage in emerging markets.
If you’d like to start a conversation about the potential of high assurance for your organization, please get in touch.
