A “Know Your Customer” process (KYC) is a regulatory requirement for companies to properly identify and assess risk on all clients. This subset of compliance and identity management is one of the largest operational challenges facing every financial institution, exchange, financial intermediary or fintech company globally.
Anyone who has a career in financial services, can tell you about the time and cost of KYC onboarding. On average, it takes 26 days to onboard a legal entity and costs between $15,000 and $50,000 USD, per client. Identity & KYC management is not restricted to individuals, and it is a more tedious process for relying parties to perform KYC on legal entities than individuals.
The SelfKey identity network still aims to solve many of these KYC inefficiencies and costs for individuals, but the corporate wallet is an important step into dealing with KYC from a more complex business perspective, and is arguably a much larger market than individual KYC.
The SelfKey corporate wallet is an important layer, providing identity management software to individuals, and also to companies and organizations.
There is now a blossoming open source community building technology for decentralized identity. Many other groups have started planning and building in earnest:
The development of DIDs is an effort led by the W3C Credentials Community Group and Decentralized Identity Working Group. Its aim is to define a standard on how decentralized identifiers should be handled by the different implementations. Therefore, one of its main goals is to achieve interoperability and portability of digital identity.
When it comes to things like DID specifications and self sovereign identity - more industry collaboration among companies building decentralized identity software is certainly a good thing. It is important to note that so called “competition” in this space ultimately should mean greater overall awareness of self sovereign identity, more users for companies which are actually self sovereign, low switching costs with no vendor lockin, and an ultimately a larger market share for all participants where we empower the individual, to finally own their identity.
We believe decentralized identity management is not a zero sum game, but rather a massive opportunity for various participants to work together. The SelfKey network is interoperable (via technology such as DIDs) with an industry. Phrased very simply: a rising tide lifts all boats!
We communicate directly with the growing SelfKey community, a large and dynamic group of people who, along with us, have an interest in solving the challenges of digital identity. The SelfKey community is distributed, diverse, and vital to the overall success of the SelfKey Project. Community members are responsible for providing user feedback, maintaining various forums, and provide invaluable insight into the UX of SelfKey technologies. One concrete way anyone can provide feedback, or contribute to various ideas, is in the SelfKey ideas portal.
The project has benefited enormously from this global spirit of community and collaboration towards creating a future where we truly own our identities, free and clear, through the power of distributed ledger and encryption key technology. It might not be dramatic to say that the future of identity for human kind depends not on SelfKey - but on the SelfKey community, and the efforts of each person, acting on their own, individually.
A substantial benefit of utility tokens is the possibility for users to both utilize, as well as participate directly in the outcome of a project. This paper will now change focus from the technology (BUIDL) to how the network is being powered by the native utility token: KEY (HODL).
