Customer Futures Digest
Customer Futures Digest
A regular dive into what's going on in Empowerment Tech, covering digital wallets, Personal AI and the future of digital customer relationships.
Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures.
Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Most digital ID companies think they are offering products. But really they are building features.
It's where many product teams are going wrong.
Because digital ID needs to be embedded into customer experiences. It shouldn't be an experience in itself.
Just look at the payments sector to see where this will go. We are already seeing the emergence of 'embedded finance'. Payments weaved into existing experiences, rather than a separate step or app.
And so soon we'll see the same thing with digital ID. The arrival of Embedded Identity. Where we can seamlessly add digital ID and verifiable credentials into existing processes and customer interactions.
'Passwordless' is a good example. We used to use easy-to-guess passwords and clunky SMS checks. Now on many websites and apps it’s a simple tap or swipe to log in.
You see, that's the promise of digital wallets. They can disappear into the background.
Embedded.
But there's a twist.
Once you offer this passwordless future using a customer digital wallet, you can unlock so much more.
Because a digital wallet is a digital Swiss Army Knife. A new customer platform that can enable
private data sharing
consent management
customer-side automation
verified messaging
digital signatures
And remember, this is all possible today. It’s just not yet evenly distributed.
Passwordless is a feature. Not a product.
But it also might just become the market entry point for digital wallets.
As ever, it’s all about understanding the future of being a truly digital customer. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s newsletter, I’m trying a different format. More of a digest.
Let me know what you think.
Let’s Go.
Deep fakes can now be applied to real-time camera feeds
In April 2023, watching the breakneck acceleration of AI, I predicted this would happen within 2 years. It’s happened in 18 months. This is a big deal, and breaks many KYC models out there. It’s crystal clear we need new approaches, new digital tools, to prove who we are online (cough digital wallets cough). READ
Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy - Here’s How It Actually Works
A very helpful breakdown on how Apple keeps data separate, private and personal. And how AI can (and cannot) access, store, and interrogate your personal information. READ
Is it weird if ChatGPT remembers things and then contacts you without being prompted?
Someone on Reddit is claiming that ChatGPT proactively reached out and asked them how their first week at school was going. Woah. OpenAI is now claiming this is a bug, not an A/B test of a new feature. Erm… is this weird, or helpful? Folks, once again this is about Personalised AI (run by someone else) vs. Personal AI (run by you). More on that difference here. READ
WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps
This is one of the bigger impacts of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Message interoperability between digital services, like WhatsApp and iMessage. There’s a lot of angst about how this breaks end-to-end encryption. But it should lead to more open market competition. So what would you rather have? Lock-in to one vendor who can’t read your messages (but who can see the metadata - who you message, when, how frequently etc.), or a more open choice of apps, but who could, potentially at least, steam open the envelope? READ
It’s time for the Global Acceptance Network (GAN)
Credentials are useless unless you can present them somewhere. Fine if you are in a walled garden. But what if the other party is in another country, or sector? To the rescue comes the new Global Acceptance Network (GAN). Just as the Diners Club and Visa were originally set up to join up fragmented payment and customer networks, the GAN is building a ‘registry of registries’. Helping organisations look up (and potentially pay for) credentials that have come from outside their domain, sector or country. This is an important milestone for the Empowerment Tech market. Get in touch if you’d like to get involved. READ
Operators stand to lose $3 billion in SMS business revenue
This is about how Over The Top (OTT) telco players are killing off SMS. A 25-year-old industry disrupted by new tech at the edge. Sound familiar? It’s about to happen to digital ID too. We’re about to see an explosion of ‘OTT ID players’ (for example, scanning an ID document once, turning it into a verifiable credential, and enabling it to be used many times) disrupting the digital ID and IAM market for the same reasons. But how and where will those credentials be accepted? See the GAN announcement above. READ
US background check company gets hacked for 2.9bn rows of data
I don’t quite know how to process this one. Nearly THREE BILLION ROWS OF DATA. Apparently, the data includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers (SSNs) and postal addresses. Thoughts and prayers to the CDP vendors, right? READ
What exactly is an AI Agent?
There aren’t many good definitions, but this TechCrunch piece takes a swing. READ
Another Alliance for the Adoption of Decentralised Identity
As the Empowerment Tech market shakes out, we’ll see more and more tech and vendor partnerships. Collaborating at different levels of the stack. This week’s edition is Cheqd + Dock. They’ve merged their Web3 tokens and will be working together on enabling payments for verifiable credentials, digital wallets and trust infrastructure. READ
Google gives up on killing cookies
Since 2019 Google has talked about replacing cross-site cookies in Chrome. To be replaced by anonymised, interest-based targeting. The so-called ‘privacy sandbox’. But they have failed to get everyone (read AdTech and data protection groups) to agree. So they are now proposing a new way to “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice”. Hmmm. ‘Informed’ is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. READ
It’s worse than we thought - GDPR impacts the profits of small business tech by 15%
The Draghi report is out on EU competitiveness. Written by the previous head of the European Central Bank. Sadly, the GDPR has throttled EU innovation and business growth. In a parallel universe, GDPR could have become a way to build customer trust. But it’s become a compliance overhead to be minimised. Digital trust over growth. I’ve argued for over a decade this is a false choice. We can have both if only we implement the tech - and regulations - the right way. READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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