Web Payments and Identity

I was recently asked to speak at the world banking conference about Web
Payments. I had a ton of meetings with various big banks (HSBC,
Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, etc) over the past week. They
desperately need an online identity solution, and I'm trying to get
leading thinkers in this space together to talk about how we might come
up with a solution that works for them while dovetailing it with the
work we're doing here on identity.

Here's the basic problem:

In order to do anything serious with money in the world, financial
institutions need to do something called a "Know Your Customer", aka
KYC, process on their customers. This involves doing things like
verifying their address, government ID, making sure they're not on a
government watch list, etc. Each bank does this, typically in a way that
is specific to that particular bank. The Bitcoin community is having to
do this now as well, for large transactions.

An identity solution for the Web should take these use cases into
account. We already have a mechanism of endorsing data on the sorts of
identities that we use in PaySwarm, but the bridge between that and
things like Persona's PICL stuff is not clear at the present time. We
really need to work through these details.

Any future identity standard for the Web should take these issues (of
KYC, government or private institutions endorsement, extensible
metadata) into account. We're going to be discussing this at a high
level on this weeks upcoming Web Payments call. I ask that at least a
representative from the Persona, PICL, and Bitcoin communities
participate in the conversation. The details about joining the call are
here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2013Sep/0126.html

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Sunday, 22 September 2013 13:36:48 UTC