The case for spending $100bn on digital wallets, Bill gates on Personal AI and Bhutan goes live with digital ID for all
The case for spending $100bn on digital wallets, Bill gates on Personal AI and Bhutan goes live with digital ID for all
Plus: Governments are not the ideal providers of digital ID wallets, Apple will be a bank in all but name, and will privacy be at the heart of the EU’s Digital Wallet?
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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📖 STORIES THIS WEEK
Here’s my biggest fear. We don’t realise fast enough that digital intimacy will be a much bigger deal than digital privacy.
Let me explain.
There is a huge amount of excitement about GenAI. And a frothy debate about AI containment - not letting uncontrolled AI get out of hand.
But digital intimacy will be far more powerful than we realise. It will be more impactful than we think. And it will happen faster than we can manage.
GenAI is about visible changes. Things we can see. About cool new tools and content.
But with digital intimacy we won’t even notice it.
We already follow the blue line on GoogleMaps without questioning it. Because it’s been way more right than wrong. We follow the ‘Watch Next’ recommendations on YouTube because they have been more right than wrong.
And yet those are teeny, tiny examples of AI in our lives. Small steps towards powerful next-generation recommendation engines. New digital tools we’ll use every day to help us and make us feel good.
Until they don’t.
Look again.
Give a Personalised AI your financial goals and it will start organising your savings for you. Perhaps even recommend jobs or training.
Now give a Personalised AI your health goals and it will start organising your weekly food plan. Perhaps even recommend paces to live.
And life will get better. And it will feel personalised. Even private. And these tools will be shown to be more right than wrong.
So we’ll use them - and follow them - even more.
But wait.
Now ask your Personal AI who to vote for. Or who to marry. Or where to live.
The power of these tools, these platforms will be invisible. Yet will be more persuasive and influential than any social media feed or media campaign we have ever seen.
It will be like a best friend that’s always got your back. And after a while you won’t notice right or wrong. Or left or right.
Digital intimacy - knowing us better than we know ourselves - should be the biggest question of our time. Because our AI assistants will get better and better and better. And they will happen faster and faster.
AI won’t be dangerous because of autonomous robots with guns. Or because it will put people out of jobs (though both will happen).
AI will be dangerous because it will give us - and do things for us - what we (think we) want. And intimately.
The next five years are going to be perhaps the most important since humans invented money or computers. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Digital intimacy is the new digital privacy.
And we need to be paying attention. And fast.
Welcome to the future of being a digital customer. And welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
In this week’s edition:
Governments are not the ideal providers of digital ID wallets
Meta defending privacy
AI + GDPR = ?
The case for spending $100bn on digital wallets
Will privacy be at the heart of the EU’s Digital Wallet?
The Secret Ingredient for Building Trust in AI
Bill gates on Personal AI
The country of Bhutan goes live with a digital identity wallet for all
Who cares if Twitter is throttling links - wallets are coming
… plus other links about the future of digital customers you don’t want to miss
Let’s go.
Governments are not the ideal providers of digital ID wallets
Most people don’t realise that technology is at most 25% of the answer around implementing digital wallets.
And yet that is where most of the heat and light seems to be coming from. Below the waterline. How wallets works, not why.
OK so what’s missing?
Well for starters, governance frameworks. The (machine readable) documents that describe the trust lists, and who can do what. The governance bodies needed to audit and approve things like the wallets themselves.
These frameworks will also cover how the relevant regulations apply to specific industries and use cases. And of course will detail the commercial models and rules.
Then there’s the UI paradigm. Will digital wallets be invisible? Will they be chat-based? Image-based? Swipe-based? All to be worked through.
Then there’s the value. Why on earth will people care about wallets and data? (Spoiler: they won’t). So what are the use cases, the jobs to be done, the benefits and ROI?
But finally - and perhaps most importantly - why will wallets (and their cousins, digital smart agents) be trusted?
Yes, digital wallets will be adopted when they create value for people and businesses. But they won’t scale until and unless we can trust them. Until we can trust what they are doing with data. Who can see what. And why.
And much of that will come from who operates the wallets.
Will it be today’s brands (offering commercial wallets)? Or governments (citizen wallets)? Or NGOs (beneficiary wallets)?
Will it be new startups (for Gen Z,A,B wallets)? Or perhaps the businesses with the customers already… the large enterprises and BigTech players (offering customer wallets?)
That, my dear friends, is the golden question.
According to the Open Identity Exhcnage (OIX), it ‘shouldn’t be governments’.
“There are vast costs associated with issuing and managing a wallet, and the development requirements as wallets evolve will be extremely technical and complex. Governments are not best placed to maintain these effectively.”
If we want to create a new, private and secure decentralised data ecosystem, then who will provide digital wallets is fast becoming one of the biggest questions to crack.
And which organisations will perform which roles, under what rules, and for whom?
Meta defending privacy
That screeching sound you can hear is the PR handbrake turn from Facebook's owner Meta.
The UK government has been strongly critical of Meta’s plans to ‘protect’ user messages. The UK Home Secretary argues that message encryption should not come at the cost of children's safety, concealing child abuse and so on.
It feels odd to say ‘privacy’ in the same breath as ‘Zuckerburg’.
Yet Meta now joins the chorus of tech brands pushing back on the UK’s Online Saftey Bill, which looks like it will weaken the privacy of encrypted messages.
“Meta argues that encryption protects users from invasion of privacy. "We don't think people want us reading their private messages", the firm said.
"The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals", it added.
This is alongside a more robust response from Signal, who says the private messaging app will be forced to leave the UK if the Government goes ahead with the proposed bill.
AI + GDPR = ?
Are you working on or using AI, but freaking out about personal data and GDPR? Don’t worry, the CNIL (French Data Protection Regulator) has got your back.
They’ve produced some handy guidance and toolkits. Pitched as “concrete and practical answers to the legal and technical issues related to the application of the GDPR to AI.”
As many experts have said for a long time now, we already have agreed data protection frameworks for this stuff. Let’s all start there, shall we?
The case for spending $100bn on digital wallets
Apparently there’s a 3% chance that $3.5trn could be lost after a successful cyber attack on our global payments and financial systems.
So says a new report from Lloyds, one of the world’s largest insurance marketplaces.
Never one to miss a beat, Lu Zurawski points out that this now makes for an excellent business case for digital wallets. To invest 3% of that total risk - a mere $105bn - in new, secure, private and open digital identity infrastructure.
Well of course we should.
New portable and private digital identity tools for customers. Things like digital wallets, zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable credentials. We should all be sure exactly who - or what - we are dealing with online (and indeed in the metaverse, if that’s still a thing).
Investing $100bn in a new decentralised data ecosystem, to avoid a global financial disaster, looks like an excellent return on investment to me.
The cherry on top is that we can completely reimagine customer engagement while we’re at it.
Will privacy be at the heart of the EU’s Digital Wallet?
The EU Commission has announced that the first round of technical discussions on their planned Digital Identity Wallet is now complete.
It’s a big deal, and marks the end of this important first phase. You might say it’s the end of the beginning.
If you want to fall down the (technical) rabbit hole on the privacy implications, worth reading the GSMA’s recent postings (and concerns) about it on GitHub. One for the Credential Privacy Nerds.
“To ensure Privacy, Data Minimization that includes Selective Disclosure and Unlinkability shall be added in the ARF.
“We propose to add the definition of Data Minimization in the ARF and to add requirements on anonymization for PID and (Q)EEA. This paragraph shall define Unlinkability and Data Minimization and requirements related to privacy”
And if that’s not enough for you, why not join the new ‘Safe Wallet’ Special Interest Group (SIG). It’s been set up within the Open Wallet Foundation to explore this very issue.
What is a ‘safe’ wallet anyway? Private? Secure? Anonymous? Unlinkable, as per the GSMA’s request?
The answer to these questions is going to matter a great deal. And the impacts will be felt well beyond the EU.
EIDAS TECH MILESTONE, GSMA ON WALLET PRIVACY, SAFE WALLET SIG
The Secret Ingredient for Building Trust in AI
I recommend reading this piece on trusting AI assistants. It’s from Hyphen, a new startup that’s just raised funding to build “the world's first personal AI that can be trusted with your deepest secrets”.
They point to some important findings from a recent study into why and how employees trust AI tools.
“Emotional trust [in the AI] emerged from something else:
Anthromorphic design: design touches like names, avatars, and messaging that created rapport and affinity.
Sense of care: A sense of care and partnership between user and machine
Human-like connection: Feeling an intuitive, human-like connection with the technology:
“This emotional glue caused users to persistently experiment with the chatbot across new contexts. Despite imperfections, emotional investment paid dividends in forgiveness and patience, generating data to enhance its learning.”
Bill Gates on Personal AI
Worth listening to this juicy podcast with Bill Gates. He explores how Personal Agents are the next inevitable step for AI. And, one notes, why he thinks they will be massively disruptive for Google, Amazon and Facebook.
The good stuff starts around 24m00s.
The country of Bhutan goes live with a digital identity wallet for all
“The Bhutan National Digital Identity (NDI), a pioneering blockchain-based national cryptographic identity system, is set to launch today. The Bhutan NDI offers a unified digital identity for every Bhutanese citizen, enabling a single sign-on and effortless integration of this identity across various services, locations, and time.”
Even though it only covers a small region, this country-scale SSI project has, remarkably, been delivered within two years, and by a team of less than ten people.
When you consider that it’s taken a new act of parliament to progress, that’s quite something.
Bhutan may well become a blueprint for other countries wondering why their federated ID projects have taken so long, cost so much, and delivered so little.
Who cares if Twitter is throttling links - wallets are coming
From The MarkUp:
“Twitter is now slowing down traffic on links to the crowdfunding site Patreon, WhatsApp, and at times, Meta’s Messenger app, a Markup analysis confirms.
“In September, The Markup reported that Twitter, now officially named X, was slowing down links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, also by an average of 2.5 seconds, which can feel extremely slow for users.”
Such throttling is the result of centralised control over online content.
Yes, we need governance in our digital economy. But what if individuals - customers, fans, citizens, consumers, patients - could connect to others directly, privately, without these middlemen platforms?
It would not only offer smart new ways to distribute content - critical to these creators and providers. But would also unleash entirely new two-way channels for engagement. For messaging. And, perhaps most interestingly, for payments.
Because here’s the killer point in the piece:
“Patreon users told The Markup that the throttling undermines their ability to reach new supporters on Twitter, which has historically been a key platform for building donations.”
There’s a long tail of money and value flows that these Web2 platforms are today potentially choking.
So watch out BigTech. Today’s content creators - and their digital wallets - are coming for you. And specifically your rent-seeking habits.
📌 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:
Apple will be a bank in all but name READ
Former FBI Investigator Explores Programmatic Ads Murky Depths READ
OfCom Report into Adult Media Use READ
Can you pass this ‘AI or real’ quiz? TEST
FCA fines Equifax £11m for major consumer data breach READ
Intel ‘Downfall’: Severe flaw in billions of CPUs leaks passwords and much more READ
AI Voice Generator Can Now Fake Your Voice in 30 Languages READ
23andMe says private user data is up for sale after being scraped READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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