What if we don’t start with digital identity at all?
Digital signatures are a sleeping tiger - and a new adoption path to customer ID
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Hi folks,
Another Customer Futures Conversation for you. Today we’re diving into the unexpected world of digital signatures.
But first, some context.
I’ve been thinking about something counterintuitive for a while. In the search for a magic answer around the adoption of digital ID tech, I wonder if we are looking at it all wrong.
What if we don’t start with digital identity at all?
Don’t start with digital ID strategy. Don’t start with digital wallets and credentials. Don’t start with identity verification platforms, or multi-year transformation programmes.
What if we start somewhere else, with a different - but still expensive - problem inside the business?
Because one of the biggest mistakes organisations make is treating digital ID as a destination. Something that requires a strategy, a roadmap and years of customer adoption.
The result is almost always the same. Lots of discussion, a bunch of politics, lots of planning, and over the years, little progress.
What if there was a simpler way in? What if digital ID arrived automatically, through a different customer interaction… and one that already exists?
Which is why I want to talk about digital signatures.
They don’t get much attention.
They’re usually viewed as the final step in a process. The admin, the compliance hoops, the detail that happens after the important work, like the sale or the onboarding, is finished.
But look closer, and something interesting happens. Because the signing moment is often where customer identity matters most.
Why?
Most banks have spent years improving their digital onboarding. ID verification, KYC, fraud controls, risk scoring, customer decisioning and all the rest of it have all become increasingly sophisticated.
The front door has now become heavily protected. Rightly.
But the actual business risk - the thing that sits on the balance sheet for the next 20 years, literally the entry in the company ledger that says this customer is safe - is rarely the onboarding check.
Rather, it’s the customer’s signed contract or agreement. That’s the object that really matters.
So what? Well that’s now an interesting gap.
Look again. Identity is almost always verified at the beginning of the journey. When the checks are completed, and a lending decision is approved or whatever.
But the agreement itself - the loan, the insurance product, the rental, the healthcare plan - is often signed later. And almost always through a separate process - and under a different level of assurance.
In other words, the business gets strong identity when the customer joins. But then weaker identity at the point of commitment.
How do we know it was the same person?
It feels a bit weird.
And when those agreements, those contracts, are later challenged, few people ask whether onboarding happened correctly 5 years ago. They ask simpler questions about the agreement: Who signed this? Can you prove it? Can you prove what they signed? Can you prove the document hasn’t been changed?
It’s where Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) become interesting.
They are a higher standard of digital signing than just the ‘finger wiggle’ in a browser. And they are going to matter more than people realise.
So in today’s Customer Futures Conversation I’m joined by Jon Evans from Digidentity.
We spent 30 mins digging into digital signatures, and why QES could be a sleeping tiger in the digital identity world:
The importance of assurance in digital signing (06:25)
The implications of Qualified Electronic Signatures (09:58)
Transforming home-buying with a digital signature (15:59)
The role of digital wallets in signing (20:36)
Digital signing + digital wallet = Swiss Army Knife (25:27)
Where businesses should start (27:17)
You can find the full recording here.
But there’s one more thing to say. Because with a QES, you get a digital ID check at the same time.
Which means there’s another twist.
The digital ID created during a QES transaction can become portable. It can be reused elsewhere across the organisation.
Maybe to onboard the individual to a different product. Maybe to reduce some repeated ID checks. Or to ‘re-KYC’ a customer without having to get them to jump through new hoops.
In other words, the business gets a signed agreement today AND a reusable digital identity asset tomorrow.
That’s a much more interesting outcome than simply replacing a ‘wet’ signature.
In Europe, the ‘eIDAS2’ digital ID programme talks about digital signatures as part of the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet, set to be rolled out to 400M citizens over the next few years.
But how many of the EU’s 27 member states (or the 1000s of private sector companies involved with eIDAS2 for that matter) are making digital signatures the central use case to drive adoption?
I do wonder if we’ve become too focused on the grand destination of ‘customer digital ID’. And not focused enough on how organisations can actually get started.
Which might not be with digital identity at all.
Maybe digital identity won’t arrive through a customer onboarding platform, another data transformation programme, or your government’s new Digital ID Wallet initiative. Maybe it shows up through the thousands of customer agreements that businesses are already processing every single day.
Jon and I have written a short paper about exactly this: on QES, on not starting with digital ID, and on why businesses, especially banks, should be looking at signatures differently.
I believe that digital signatures are one of the most important adoption paths for digital identity that nobody is talking about yet.
A sleeping tiger of digital ID transformation. And I’m excited to see what happens when that tiger wakes up.
I hope you enjoyed this Customer Futures Conversation as much as I did. Stay tuned for more episodes coming soon.
There’s never been a more important time to shape the future of digital ID. So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
Grab 30 minutes, your headphones, and Let’s Go.
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Absolutely brilliant piece Jamie. Over time, it can even become the basis for digital ID.