AI will be a huge threat - but also your best friend, how ‘Connect Your Wallet’ will transform onboarding, and proving your golf swing to buy shoes
Plus: The EU Finalises its Digital Identity Wallet, The Least Worst Form of Identity, and The Impact Of ChatGPT And Open Banking
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the ever-increasing and disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Another packed edition for you this week.
The takeaway: it’s now time to start taking action. It’s time to make a difference.
How?
Start thinking about the digital Customer Future in your own business or organisation. Enterprise or government. Investor group or startup. It doesn’t matter.
Think about the impacts and opportunities. Where might digital wallets, Personal AI and verifiable credentials show up in your products, experiences or wider ecosystem?
What should you do? And where can you start?
It’s time to work together to create a better digital future.
Welcome to the Customer Future. And welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
EU Commission Finalises the EU Digital Identity Wallet
AI watermarking with content credentials
‘Connect Your Wallet’ could transform onboarding
How strong is your customer authentication?
Proving your golf swing to buy shoes
What is the least worst form of identity?
AI will be a huge threat - but also your best friend
Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
Will Twitter (X) become WeChat for the West?
… plus other links about the future of digital customers you don’t want to miss
Let’s Go.
EU Commission Finalises the EU Digital Identity Wallet
We must start of course with the latest digital wallet news from the EU. Hot off the press, the eIDAS digital wallet has now been finalised and agreed by the EU Commission.
For those who have been living in a cave, the proposed EU digital wallet:
“Will allow users to open bank accounts, make payments and hold digital documents, such as a mobile Driving Licence, a medical prescription, a professional certificate or a travel ticket.
“The Wallet will offer a user-friendly and practical alternative to online identification guaranteed by EU law.
“The Wallet will fully respect the user's choice whether or not to share personal data, it will offer the highest degree of security certified independently to the same standards, and relevant parts of its code will be published open source to exclude any possibility of misuse, illegal tracking, tracing or government interception.
This last point is particularly important given the recent online protests about potential government surveillance via the EU digital wallet.
(500 experts from around the world pointed out that some last-minute language was added to the eIDAS regulations. Suggesting that the latest legal text enabled near-complete EU government surveillance of online traffic.
Led by some heavyweight organisations like Mozilla and the Linux Foundation. They called it the “Last Chance to fix eIDAS: The Secret EU law that threatens Internet security”.)
But for now, here are some of the juiciest nuggets to digest:
Very Large Online Platforms (as defined by the EU’s Digital Services Act, which includes the likes of Amazon, Booking.com and Facebook) will have to accept the EU Digital Identity Wallet for logging into their online services (this is big)
Wallet holders will be able to access a dashboard of all transactions to and from the wallet (this will be very helpful, and unleash significant further innovation)
The digital wallet will be able to report data protection violations (this is inspired, and something I’ve been predicting for a while; real-time regulation)
The regulations allow for peer-to-peer verified messaging (this is going to have a profound effect on digital customer engagement everywhere… and in a positive way that the rule makers will never have intended)
Citizens will be able to onboard to the EU wallet using existing national eID schemes (this is pragmatic and excellent)
Well. We got there in the end. Though as I’ve said before, this is only the end of the beginning.
Now ask yourself:
Will the EU digital wallet be a threat or an opportunity for your business? Do you see a growth opportunity to create real, authentic customer connections? Or only compliance overhead and terrible user experiences?
What are the business opportunities around the digital wallet’s less discussed features, like digital signing, verified messaging and login?
If you are outside the EU, what can you learn from the world’s largest design and deployment of a digital identity wallet and credentials ecosystem?
And remember: there are always two things you don’t want to know how they are made.
Laws and sausages.
FINAL WALLET AGREEMENT, EU WALLET SURVEILLANCE
AI watermarking with content credentials
So the Big Cos are now officially endorsing ‘Content Credentials’. A universal - and it seems open - standard for authenticating content online. A smart new way to digitally watermark digital objects so we can trust them.
“Microsoft, Adobe, and other big names this week pledged to add metadata to their AI-generated images so that future compatible apps will flag them up as machine-made using a special symbol.
“The symbol – described as an "icon of transparency" – depicts the lower case letters "cr" inside a speech-mark like bubble.
“It was created by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a group of organizations across industries including tech and journalism.
“It’s being driven by Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic; and specifies in detail how metadata in an image can securely certify, digitally, the source and edit history of that image.”
Very helpful.
Now ask yourself:
How might your business verify customer-related content, not just published content online? And how can you trust data you receive from customers, like digital receipts? Could digital wallets and verifiable credentials help, and even automate the experience?
What if objects - digital or otherwise - had their own digital wallet, and verifiable credentials to check authenticity too?
CONTENT CREDENTIALS, WALLETS FOR OBJECTS
‘Connect Your Wallet’ could transform onboarding
‘Connect Your Wallet’ is going to become a new onboarding option for many. And soon.
For example, this could be enabling - and in some ways ‘training’ - customers to scan a QR code when they arrive on a site.
Worth looking at thirdweb’s new ‘Connect Wallet’ feature. Products and brands can decide the look and feel of the onboarding flow. And users can associate (connect) a digital wallet with an online account or experience.
I especially like this feature: Customers can 'continue as guest', where thirdweb creates a digital wallet on the fly for prospective users.
Right now they don’t care if it’s a Web3 wallet (like Metamask) or a Web5 wallet (holding verifiable credentials).
But the onboarding flow is instant.
Here’s the opportunity: if we get the UI right, most folks won’t ever need to know what 'connecting a wallet' means.
Now ask yourself:
How might this work in your business? What if you could offer instant customer registration using a digital wallet? What needs to be true for customers to try it out?
What if people can ‘check in’ rather than ‘check out’? You could completely personalise a digital experience from the start. Where individuals will only share the right amount of personal data to get what they need. And where your online flows can do away with the horrible ‘Pay with A B C D E’ options at the end… because you already know how the customer wants to pay.
Now that’s real digital transformation.
How strong is your customer authentication?
Towards Passwordless was posted a while back by Bill Napier, one of the world’s leading crypto experts. (Where crypto, rightly, means cryptography).
Quite brilliant - and helpful.
As ever, a reminder that customers shouldn’t have to trade-off ‘secure’ for ‘easy’. (Or private for that matter).
Now ask yourself:
How might you improve things for customers - and indeed the business - if you offered passwordless?
And what if you give people a digital wallet that not only gives them passwordless… but also much more? A Digital Swiss Army Knife that could also enable private data sharing, consent management, customer-side automation, verified messaging, even digital signatures.
Note: this is all possible today. It’s just not yet evenly distributed.
The point? Passwordless must be a feature. Not a product.
Proving your golf swing to buy shoes
I love this. A golfing store in London is asking shoppers to prove they can hit a 200-yard drive before they can purchase new Travis Scott Nike golf shoes.
They want to make sure these popular shoes go to actual golfers, not just sneaky resellers and scalpers.
Through a Customer Futures lens, this is very obviously about gating access with a credential.
In this case, proof of being a golfer.
What if this was done using a verifiable credential, shared from a customer’s digital wallet?
You’d get the same outcome, plus SO MUCH MORE.
Not only could that credential be used anywhere, for so many things (think at golf clubs, premium experiences, loyalty offers etc.), but the wallet would become a new customer channel.
For verified customer messaging. For payments. For building genuine customer engagement. (note how this approach compares and contrasts with asking for an email address, and getting back ‘spam@spam.com’).
But the stand-out point is this:
They turned a gating credential into an experience. The perfect example of ‘good friction’.
It creates a buzz. An experience. You earn it.
And all possible today using a customer digital wallet.
Now ask yourself:
What else becomes possible when customers can prove other things about themselves? To unlock a premium or exclusive experience? Or receive a discount or personalised offer?
What data is not being shared today with your business that could be? How could sharing customer data - like proof of membership or a market segment - be a flat-out win for both the company and the customer? All while building trust?
GOLF SWING CREDENTIAL, DESIGNING FOR GOOD FRICTION
What is the least worst form of identity?
Digital identity expert and provocateur Tim Bouma has suggested that none of our digital ID options are appealing.
We are forced to choose between:
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Powerful and disruptive, but often too challenging for corporates to understand and integrate?
Government-Mandated Identity (GMI). We get improvements to public sector services and bureaucratic processes, but get new risks of centralised control and security back doors?
Competitive Corporate Identity (CCI). Now tightly bound to your (personal) device and operating system. Seamless payments. But with society now quietly steered by corporate interests and the markets?
So which is the least worst? This one is going to fire up some spicy debates for sure.
Now ask yourself:
What are the unintended consequences of your current identity products and systems? Who gets excluded? Who gets control? Who writes the rules?
Here’s a Customer Futures tip for you: run a ‘Black Mirror Design Day’.
Spend a couple of hours with the key people in your company working on customer identity and customer engagement. Brainstorm the worst possible futures that you are accidentally making possible with your digital products today, and your approach to ID overall.
Who loses? What are the harms? How can you make this 10x worse by deliberately giving it to bad actors?
Then you can:
Update your company/project risk register with the biggest-impact items;
Decide on the risks and harms for each;
Explore how you can mitigate the risks;
Understand what would need to be true, and make the business case for change - for example product and privacy updates; and then
Talk about it internally. It will inform, and ideally influence, your team’s plans, designs and development of digital ID systems and products.
(I can help with this kind of thing btw - feel free to get in touch. Hit reply).
AI will be a huge threat - but also your best friend
Last week the British Prime Minister interviewed Elon Musk at the UK’s recent AI Safety Summit.
My big takeaway? Our Personal AIs will become so intimate they will know us better than we know ourselves.
Elon says we’ll talk to our Personal AIs every day. They’ll remember what we’ve said and done. And they’ll become a great friend, a real companion.
<stands on the soapbox again>
Remember: Digital privacy isn’t going to be the problem with AI. It’s digital intimacy.
“It’s going to be great, as long as no one can turn off my AI friend” (Elon’s own words).
And once again we’re back to Personal vs. Personalised. Because who really runs your AI that knows you so well?
Now ask yourself:
How will Personal AI impact your products and customer strategy? When your customer knows more about themselves than you do? How will product recommendations work? (more on that soon in a coming post).
What will you do when your customers change their shopping and payment habits because of their AI assistants? Just like they stopped shopping in-store when online options became viable and trusted? Will your business still be best placed to help them?
In other words: do you really understand the customer, her needs and context?
ELON ON PERSONAL AI, PERSONAL VS PERSONALIZED AI
Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
Mozilla hitting pretty hard:
“We had four lawyers, three privacy experts, and two campaigners look at Microsoft's new Service Agreement, and none of our experts could tell if Microsoft plans on using your personal data – including audio, video, chat, and attachments from 130 products, including Office, Skype, Teams, and Xbox – to train its AI models.
“If nine experts in privacy can't understand what Microsoft does with your data, what chance does the average person have? That's why we're asking Microsoft to say if they're going to use our personal data to train its AI.”
Data ownership - or rather, data permission and access - is perhaps one of the biggest questions keeping digital leaders awake at night.
Especially as AI romps across the market, disrupting everything in its path.
Mozilla is on to something here. Especially as it presses Microsoft - and, I assume soon, the other BigTech providers - on what precisely it is doing with customer data in their AI models.
Now ask yourself:
What customer data are you using to train your AI models, and do you have permission? What happens if that permission is revoked, or found to be missing?
Do your customers understand how you are using their data? How much more data might be available if you could build digital trust with them?
Will Twitter (X) become WeChat for the West?
SuperApps are the topic-du-jour. But in the ‘West’ there are no real players. Yet.
What is a Super App? As the tech analyst Ben Evans puts it:
“Imagine if you used OpenTable, Uber and Deliveroo entirely inside the Facebook app, using your Facebook identity and a Facebook payment account instead of a credit card…
“…and then you paid for coffee and paid for the tube with it as well.”
When they work, they go big. But that’s the hard part. Who will win the Super App race?
It’s no secret that Elon Musk has ambitions to turn Twitter into X, an ‘everything app’.
We can expect it will be a closed shop. Customers can go anywhere on the platform as long as it’s been pre-approved and pre-enabled. Part of the controlled UI and digital experience.
X will of course create yet another concentration of customer data.
More control in the hands of the few? It’s time for a new breed of super-app. One that’s more open, more private and more portable.
Something more like an ‘Ultra App’. Based on a portable, private digital wallet. Stuffed full of credentials, able to be used across a wide range of other organisations.
Unleashing customer data like never before.
While staying secure, private and under the control of the individual.
(And yes, before you point it out, all this will operate within agreed governance frameworks, so that we can check regulations and compliance, trust the data sharing, have transparent business models and so on.)
Now ask yourself:
When - not if - the Super Apps, and their more open, private and secure cousins the ‘Ultra Apps’ come to market, how will that affect your business? Will your onboarding experiences be as super slick? Will customers leave you, moving to competitors who do offer it?
Could you engage with digital wallets and Ultra Apps to offer new digital experiences wrapped around the customer, unlocking new levels of trusted data sharing?
X THE EVERYTHING APP, ULTRA APPS
📌 OTHER THINGS
There are far too many interesting and important Customer Futures things to include in this edition. So here are some more links to chew on:
Okta’s Customer Identity Trends Report READ
Credivera Is Transforming Workforce Credentials In High-Risk Industries READ
How do PayPal, Visa, banks and open banking interact with each other? READ
Your digital twin could improve your health READ
You Are Being Cloned READ
Use Cases for Decentralised Credentials WATCH
Differential Privacy Explained WATCH
The Impact Of ChatGPT And Open Banking Cannot Be Underestimated READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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