Hello. I’m Lindley Gooden. Welcome to Money Life TV. Great to have you with us. Let’s talk about digital identities. Let’s talk about AI agents and the future of these entities within banking, with two wonderful guests. First of all, Clive, tell us who you are and what you do. My name is Clive Bourke, and I look after Daon’s EMEA and Asia business. I’ve been working in the field of biometrics and identity for the past twenty-five years. Starting with biometrics, and now we’re looking at agents and all to do with that. Fantastic. It’d be really, really great conversation. Monica, tell us who you are and what you do. I’m product leader in operating in the identity and authentication space. Worked with major banks like Lloyd’s Banking Group, Barclays, Post Italiane, back in Italy. Been leading digital proposition for most of my career. Well, let’s start with you then. You have been working with some of the household names of banking for a long time. Where do you think identities are currently under a bit of pressure? Things are changing very quickly. We need to stay across that stuff. So where are they feeling the strain? I think the biggest challenge, especially for big players and incumbents, is really ensuring the customer experience is smooth. And the right level of friction is applied for the right reason in the right moments, which brings to life the concept of disrupting silos. And ensuring that we’ve got that view of an identity of a customer. Throughout their life cycle, instead of thinking at a moment in time, the moment of onboarding, checking the box, moving to transaction moments, rechecking the box. So we need to kind of bring it together and establishing a concept of continuum of identity. Because authentication does not happen once. It happens regularly. And, Clive, what about you? You know, you’ve been also worked in this game for twenty years. Not much of a game. Very interesting area. Do you feel or not that banks are still solving problems of the past, or are we up to date and ready to move forward? Well, as Monica said, it’s changed. The world has changed where we have to look at it like continuous trust. Monica talked about you’re onboarding somebody, and then you’re authenticating somebody. They’re registering the first time, then they’re taking out new products. So Yeah. That’s how the world works. So that’s how we have to treat our customers. So we have to have this concept where you can prove them in the first place. Then you have to strongly authenticate them as we move forward. We call that identity continuity or continuous trust. That’s the first thing. The second thing is we have to protect people from fraud. So if you have things in silos, you can’t do your best job of protecting people from fraud. So again, as a product owner, Monica would have said, we can’t look at authentication on one side and new customer onboarding on the other side. So you have to bring them together in this concept, not create more silos. So people are looking at that. And the last thing is we have to get more intelligence from what we’re doing digitally. So when people have agents, when they have wallets, when they have several mobile devices, we have to be able to collect risk signals from that and use that intelligently to help people, help companies, service providers, banks, whoever stop fraud. In some ways, a bank, a large organization, it has the front runners who are doing interesting digital things, and then, of course, you got the the silos at the back. So it kinda stretches the organization almost. It does. To bring that back together is quite difficult. It is quite difficult, but if you have the vision to say I’m gonna have a consistent identity experience. Across all of your interactions with the bank, whether you come through a contact center, a web channel, or a common branch. Then, once you have that vision, you can then reuse it. And what a lot of forward thinkers, like you mentioned, are doing is they’re taking the digital solutions and reusing them in the in-person channel. So they’re saying basically, whatever way we use it to proof or authenticate you online, we will use that if you come in to register as well or to verifiers. Monica, you clearly agree with that. Yeah, hundred percent. I think, first of all, it’s not necessarily a technology problem, but it requires, as you mentioned, a vision that drives an architectural picture that brings these ecosystems together. And enabling those ecosystems, I think that’s a keyword, will enable as well those experiences for the customers. One of the big challenges when we as we move into Agentic AI is that you will also have agents interacting with your bank and wanting to make transactions and so on. So where do how does that work? How do we make sure that the agent acting on behalf of the human has the right information, is asking for the right things? We are in an age of generative AI. So how do you make sure that you know who’s asking the questions and the answers you need to give in the transactions that happen? This is definitely happening. There are a couple of scenarios, cluster of scenarios. An agent acting autonomously on behalf of a customer, which is probably the most stretched one, or an agent acting as a proxy of the customer. So the customer is present in that transaction and the agent is in that experience. In both of these scenarios, we need to enable that trust and binding that trust across the chain. In Europe, the regulation is quite specific and and tight. Players and incumbents and financial institutions to really be sure that they know who they are authenticating. Customer and that is happening on the customer will. So especially when it’s about fraud prevention and ensuring that security, I think we need to use the same principles that we’re using today when we authenticate the identity of a customer. So we need to do authorization and zero-trust layers, and we need to do authentication of both parties. Which for me, brings a concept of identity that stretch. So it’s an identity customer. But also, it’s the identity of the agents that we need to kind of think about and govern. Again, rather than having two separate, you’re not stretching this relationship; you’re bringing them together using the data. Technically, do you do that? How do you make sure that you can attach them again? Taking a step back for a second, we first of all don’t know yet how many agents people will have. Right? Or will they have a super agent? Right? And when we do the authorization and trust layers, will you have an agent that can do work for you, like research, but other agents might be more empowered to initiate and complete transactions. But like what Monica was saying, really was that at the end, the individual has to confirm they want to make that transfer or payment. So, something might do your travel analysis, but before you book a ticket, that ticket purchase payment confirmation is going to come back to you. But what we have to do in our technical world, you asked me, really is we have to have different identities, an identity for the agent and an identity for the person. Now we might not represent it like that; it might be an identity for the person with different personas. And so, there will be a binding between them. Yes. And then there’ll be a confirmation. And then we have to think about how do we make sure that someone because people are worried about in Gen AI hallucinations. And the guardrails and so on. So in the agentic world, what happens if someone says, well, I didn’t do that. You know? So we have to have an audit trail back to the individual to confirm that they did that. And regulators, I think, need to think about regulators and those players helping with the wiring and the operations of these relationships. They need to kind of define accountabilities as well as liabilities. And one thing that we discussed about in the past is how this is going at a pace which has never happened before. It’s super disruptive and there is a bit of catching up that is happening, especially from the regulators. So we’re still getting our head around what would that look like, but definitely we know what we’re kind of clearing this industry, what type of problems are there to be solved. And that’s just an individual that we’re talking about. If you’re talking about a board. If you’re talking about a business, you have a whole another set of, maybe lots of people within the business, doing their own version of this. So how do you think leaders feel about this? How do you think boards feel about this? How do you think you need to handle this problem at scale? My experience from the biggest financial institutions are really wide eyes wide open. With all of that. A little bit because the digital revolution and the competition has been expanding, so they know that they need to compete in the same levels where the customers are. They can’t create, the customers are expecting those type of interaction. Yeah. And big tech are actually gonna be pushing for these new layers of experiences to happen regardless of us wanting it or not. So my experience is there is willingness of play on this kind of pitch and collaborating. I think there is an ecosystem of collaboration and partnerships that is key to establish and create this trust environment for the customers ultimately. That’s really good. I mean, I suppose fear is a very big motivator. You know, we need to get this right. We cannot not get this right. So I suppose that’s that’s a conversation. I don’t know if you’re having that conversation with people. We’re having that conversation all the time saying in this new world of AI, is deepfakes gonna break everything? And then what we’ve seen so far is it hasn’t. Right? So what most people don’t realize because they’re not in the technical side is that there’s several layers of defenses. So the first thing we’re looking for is, is someone presenting a false identity in the first place. The next thing we’re looking for is someone trying to inject one. Then what we’re trying to do is say, take risk signals to say, is there a risk related to this person/device/transaction? And then finally, have deep fake detection as well, AI to fight AI. So there’s a whole bunch of things there. So when you see a lot of publications saying something is broken, it’s not broken. There are several layers. Maybe one aspect is more challenged than before. But security has always been about layers. Right? And context, is where the data allows you at least have an idea around that person, what they would normally do. And this is behavioral and that’s really interesting. Our time is almost up. So what a year from now, do you is there anything that you think will be obsolete? I it’s always difficult to put a crystal ball in front of you and say, what will be relevant? What will be irrelevant? Is there anything, Monica, that you think, okay, this this particular technique or technology is about to leave us. There is a a key question around the role of wallets. How they’re gonna enable customers to perceive participate into this ecosystem. There is definitely a question around what are these ecosystems and these frameworks gonna be made of, especially in the context of a multinational environment. So interoperability being a big question mark and orchestration about multiple ecosystems and and frame your frameworks or layers. There is a question for me of defining identity. Ultimately, I think there is gonna be a shift into customer identities and modular aspect of identities that made you who you are. Kind of citizenship identities or government identities as well as behavioral identities and I’m a customer of multiple estates so that all make my identity. So how do we shift the control panel to the customers, including the agents that these customers will want to let operate on their behalf? Absolutely. And what do you think, Clive? I think exactly like Monica in this regard about agents and wallets converging. So we know a couple of things for sure. Wallets are arriving. So there’s an Apple Wallet, an Android Wallet. There’s the GOV. UK app, which is a wallet. There’s the EU digital wallet and at the same time agents are arriving as well. So there’s going to be a convergence of both and your agent is going to use your identity in your wallet and may use a second credential that belongs to the agent in the wallet and that’ll access your identity as well. And so there’s going to then need to be an orchestration between the end user, the wallet, the agent, and the service provider who you’re interacting with. And so that orchestration is going to be really important. So everybody needs an identity that is linked to the other identity? Yes. Exactly. Alright. Hardest question of the lot and the question goes, the future of digital identity trust depends on what thing? One word. The future of digital identity trust depends on Interoperability. Okay. Clive, the future of digital identity trust depends on I only have one word, transparency. Excellent. Well, that was pretty good. Thank you very much for joining us. Lovely to see you. Was and very sweet, but thank you very much. And for now, that’s it from Money Life TV, streaming the future of banking. Thanks to our guests, and thanks to you for watching. See you next time.
