Digital identities are becoming the foundation of our rapidly evolving technology-based and data-driven economy and society

N: You guys created innovative technology solution for mobile authentication and get prize as best region Eastern fintech solution. This gave you opportunity to work with huge companies in more than 13 countries. But, I wanna ask you at the beginning, how you came to this innovation in the first place, how was it born?

STEFAN: Yeah, well that is an interesting question and maybe I am not the best person to answer, you know, how the whole inception of the idea started in the first place. I mean, the whole story was invented by mister Harry Cheng, who is our founder out of Hong Kong. I mean, the overall idea started with the main aim how we can secure mobile devices further. Because they are becoming as we all know super important part of our lives. It is probably the only device that you bring with you even during your sleep and you can forget car keys, house keys but you never forget mobile device.

So as being the cyber security expert and etc, he has been thinking how to secure mobile devices all the time and identifying who are the right players in the industry who can help in enhancing the security outside the pure antivirus system that exists. So, that is actually where the Telecom operators have been identified as one the key players in the market that have possibility and the key to define next generation mobile authentication technology and security behind it. I am happy to say that a couple of a few important people that were hired here in Serbia after I joined IPification really helped to enhance and transform the product in the shape that exists on the market today. So, yeah, there is a huge contribution from our local team basically to shape the leading backbone mobile authentication technology which IPification is today.

N: I wanna touch base, what your job is actually today? As I understood this technology should enable mobile network operators, on the one hand, and on the other hand you should be implemented into mobile app creators, right, mainly in the finance sector? There are some obstacles here, probably because like mobile network operators and huge corporations they are very slow on innovations, especially with technology. I think that is the biggest obstacle. How can you overcome this?

STEFAN: Yeah, its a good question. I think it applied generally to all industries, not only to ours. I mean any new technology innovation and adoption, it takes time, right? For all players in the ecosystem to realize the true benefits and etc. And the adopting is never going as fast as the founders would want it. But if we look at our industry, if we look through the lenses of Telecom persons, I would say that the speed of adoption is a relative thing. If you ask some Telecom expert whether getting one deal with Telecom operators in 6 to 12 months whether that’s fast, they would say that is light speed kind of thing. I am looking backward in our space, singing up more than 30 operators in little bit more than 2 years, it is considered fast.

Although, as you say, we are never happy with the speed of the adoption on both, the enterprise and Telecom side, and we are always trying to find a way how to further speed up and catalyze the adoption even faster in many markets globally, and that is something that it is in our daily routine, thinking to find a ways that can help us to scale up and to speed, as you said, traditionally innovation agnostic industries, especially when it comes to the authentication space.

N: When we talked the first time about you entering this Chair talk and to talk on this subject, one of my questions was who is your competition and you gave me a rather interesting answer to that. You told me that basically you are making your competition to your partners and that is very interesting for me and especially because we talked about innovation and that was very innovative in terms of business development and that part. How do you do that? How do you make your competitors your partners?

STEFAN: For me it is an interesting anecdote, I’ve discussed it with a couple of investors in the early days. It was like telling them we don’t have competition and its get them shocked.

N: You are doing something wrong, right?

STEFAN: We are in the wrong business, right? I want to clarify this, when we say we don’t have competition it mainly refers to the technology side on the operators side of the story where, I would say unfortunately, we are still one of or the only company that is providing the platform on the operator side for building the next generation mobile authentication, but when it comes to the enterprise side of the business, there is for sure already a hand full of companies who are trying to solve the same problem as we do, but just their are using some of the existing technologies which unfortunately most of the cases either outdated or deprecated. And that is why along the way as being technology pioneer in the telecom authentication space we think that the only way forward is to work with everybody.

We don’t want to redo the job that someone else already did it. You have hundreds of A2P SMS companies, payment providers, fraud prevention companies who already have probably the top 10.000 app developers and online enterprises that are using some form of authentication, whether is SMS, one time codes, biometrics, header enchantments etc. So we are just helping them to enhance their current offering by offering the next generation better technology for mobile authentication and actually satisfying their customer mobile authentication needs in the best way possible. So that is the reason why we are saying and I am happy to say that we are already doing that, empowering actually all the existing players in the market with something better, for the benefit of the whole ecosystem.

N: You started from Asia and I will go back to our subject very soon, about digital identity, but it is an interesting story about IPification and and everything you guys do. So you started from Asia then you got the prize as the best fitech solution in easter Europe, you started to work here… What is your next plan? Where are you going next from here?

STEFAN: We are very humbled and grateful to get the best fintech award in the space, especially given its been the award assign by one of the leading European bank groups here. Interesting story is that during the past year, during 2020. I think there are probably 13- or 14 awards that we won globally which only proves that the things we are doing it’s really going above any local markets or regional markets. What we are trying to actually tell the world its a global thing and we truly believe that IPification is the adoption of IPification is important not only for us as a company but for the entire digital ecosystem. And that is we are going for. We have some internal kind of things, saying okay we reached 30–35 operators, they are encompassing roughly 350–400 million users, but there is 1000 of them. Long way to go. It is already a great number of people that are enabled with this technology but we are just heating up, we are just starting. The road to 1000 as we call it is just starting. Basically we are looking at deploying this technology and this service to every telecom operator in the world, basically to every country globally.

N: To go back now on our main subject, digitally identity itself. When I started to research about it there was so many, because as you said earlier its buzz word of today and it is very important thing, it’s not just the buzz word, its important thing regarding how all society and economic starting to work and were they are going. So, when I started to research I came to one very interesting from the World bank, and its says that more than billion people at this point they lack of any kind of legally recognized identification. Okay, there is Africa, other countries and so.. But on top of that there is 3.4 billion that have some kind of legally recognized identification but they almost can’t use it as all digitally. What needs to be done to change? From companies, NGO, governments, what are we lacking to plummet this number rapidly?

STEFAN: Probably all the guys you mentioned needs to give their contribution and to sit down, but as you said, digital identity is becoming the center of any business. Not only online business, we are talking about that if you are not going digital most probably you are not going to exist in just few years from now. There is a big challenge with many, you know, no matter developing, undeveloped, developed country where a big portion of people, the great number of people, they don’t have any form of digital identity or any form of identity at all. And that is United Nation one of the biggest challenge that they are trying to solve also through their unsustainable development goals and something that also we had the opportunity to speak at the UN, at one of the similar events, one of our board members were there and tackled this story. I mean there is no silver bullet or lets say the single solution to this topic. It is something that in my opinion it should be tackled locally or regionally as you said, I mean it is a different kind of development in Africa, its different in South East Asia or other parts of the world.

There is some clear direction that everybody thinks and I partially agree that the future of identity should be decentralized and that people should own their own digital identity. The problem there is that how many people are aware what decentralized identity means. Probably you and me can talk about it and a few identity experts, but if we go through 7–11 or to any local shops and say let’s move the identity on blockchain 99% of people will look at you what the hell you are talking about. So the question is whether people are ready, whether there is enough digital awareness and etc for people to self manage their identity. What happens if I lose my identity, what happens if I lose my phone or how I am going to reissue the identity and etc. so that is where centralization gets back in the story. There is, I mean you need to have in every country the most trust able organization to be related to identity of any person and in most country is 3 main entities which is governments in the first place and then banks and telecom’s, who are also recognized as trust able companies that can manage the identities on behalf of people.

So, probably the best answer and the best solution would be for this 3 entities to sit together and create a mutually contributed solution, but it is hard to bring all those players at one table. I think there is only a few examples out there. Belgium could be god example, where actually all 3, governments, banks and telecom they created great solution that’s called Its me. It took them probably more than 7 or 8 years as I discussed with the guys behind the solution to actually come to the place where they are now. And there is a lot of challenges, keep in communication etc. behind it. But probably that is good recipe to follow in terms how is the best to tackle the overall identity story and I am happy to say for ourselves we are trying to at least empower telecom to give their contribution in the overall digital identity ecosystem.

N: I wanna just go back for a second to Africa. I mentioned it, you mentioned it. I wanna hear your opinion about this. You worked a lot in South East Asia and especially in those parts of world, let’s say India, they have huge gap when we talk for example mobile payments, they have a huge gap from money, paper money to digital payment. They didn’t have cards in the middle. That part of the world use that as a great opportunity to jump like 10–15–20 years of different development to just jump into new technology. What is your opinion because you mentioned how to explain blockchain, how to explain digital identity to people in Africa where they don’t know that? Do you think that because of their lack of that layer of time that they used something else, do you think that is an opportunity for them to embrace new things and to get from just having identity to jump into digital identity directly?

STEFAN: Africa is probably the most innovative continent when it comes to mobile payments technologies. It’s been recognized by some of the leading organizations in telecom space, in overall identity space as well. As you said, they skipped several generations of development which was done in developing country so people in Africa they get used for using mobile for everything. They are receiving their salaries there, they are consuming video content, they are doing any payments any money transmitting they are doing via mobile which is one step that still needs to be developed in many developed countries.

That presents an enormous opportunity, they had to do it, that was the only way for economic inclusion for these people but that actually helped to cut the road to faster adoption of any innovation, including digital identity. As you mentioned Africa there is a lot of examples we are familiar with and some of the companies we work with they are enhancing their population to jump on fully digital experience. When we say digital experience and digital identity mostly refers also at least in large portion it is involving your mobile phone, it’s been your ID card as your driving license and so on and so forth and that is where Africa has a huge opportunity to lead the way as well, not only in mobile payments space.

N: I wanna ask you about the market of mobile identity. How it looks like at the moment?

STEFAN: It is quite diversified I would say. When you say digital identity everybody thinks something different, whether it is bio-metric solutions or talking based solution or mobile based solution, it is etc. so its quite wide topic but at the very essence when we talk about confirming digital identity online we are always talking about one of 3 possible factors that you can verify on the end user side. And that is known in industry as something you know, something you are and something you have.

So these are the 3 elements and most of the solutions usually combine you know combination of factors to satisfy either regulations or to satisfy a bit of security now and there etc. So usually as what we are seeing, something you know, which is basically username and password which has been there for 50 years or so, it’s no longer considered as a reliable factor. Lot of organizations are keeping this factor to satisfy some of the regulations, but in terms of security a lot of CISCO experts they don’t count as this factor because most probably thru a lot of breaches happen through many of the well known global websites, your password have been breached. And there is a lot of websites nowadays where anyone of us can come, type our email address and find out whether our password is there or not. I am sure a lot of people faced the same issue.

To that’s why a lot of organizations and enterprises and solution providers are tend to focus on other two factors, which is the inherence factor, what user is, which is his bio-metric, face ID, touch ID, Apple is trying to do vein ID, I don’t know how far will they go with that because is consider convenient, just scan my face or touch my finger, not that convenient in Covid time, I must say, under the masks and gloves. And there is possession factor, something user have, which is usually in the form of verifying the mobile device, because every user nowadays, that is only external device that we always bring with us. So combination of those two factors most probably will shape the future of digital identity confirmation solutions out there. I am happy to say in terms of where we are as a company we tend to specialize and actually enhance possession factor, which is mobile device, but not only mobile device, but we tend to verify possession of 3 different elements within, that mobile device, and that is sim card, phone number attached to it as well, next to mobile device itself. Which further enhances the security and user experience.

N: You said security and I think it is the right time to ask you about SIM swap, because that is becoming a huge problem in the finance world today. How mobile identity can tackle this issue?

STEFAN: That’s the really good question and a growing security concern. Being present in 10–20 markets we are seeing that it’s already happening, it is not something that is going to harm and etc. but there is already a proven record of many security scams and frauds happen in this way. So just to explain for the wider audience what the SIM swap is.

N: I did my research but…

STEFAN: It is basically applying for a new SIM card on your telecom operator by registering someone else’s existing phone number. Whether they say they lost the SIM card or their phone has been stolen and etc. So they can get the same phone number of the existing user on a new SIM card. Why they are doing this? Because these days phone number is probably your last mile protection when it comes to any banking activities, any logging mechanisms, any crypto trading accounts etc. where you use two factors authentication via SMS, as a last mile protection of your account.

When they get a hold of your number they are able actually to overcome this last mile and basically receive a SMS on your behalf and then get access to your banking account, crypto account etc. and strip off all the money that is there, and it is something already happening, not only in Asia but it is started in Europe, UK faced I think over 50–60 milions of SIM swap frauds last year. In our region, Greece is the one who reported just, I think, a month ago, so there is close to a million euros that being strip from the users banking accounts via this SIM swap issue.

That’s why we urge not only telecom operators to approach this issue not only from the people management and process management point of view where they instruct people to make sure they verify ID cards, identity of the people at the retail, retails shops. But also to provide the technology solution to enterprises to put in place to actually help to prevent this type of issue happening in any country including our country.

N: So, we talked about what are the challenges that you are facing right now and challenges that you are solving right now in terms of digital identity, and always when we finishing the Chair talks we are talking about the future. Tell me, by your opinion, what is going to be the biggest challenge that you need to resolve but you can’t see it now or resolve it now, at this moment?

STEFAN: I like to say, what defines the future is not technology but actually dreams behind the technology.

N: And I am going to quote you on this.

STEFAN: Thanks a lot. Our vision of a future when its come to digital identity is that mobile users security should not be compromised over simplicity of use and their privacy. And we thing in the future all this 3 important elements, including security, seamless user experience and protecting the end user privacy must be combined in the future of mobile identity in equally important.

We believe that the future of mobile identity should be as simple as a signing as any ID number. Basically to have finger print without a fingerprint, basically a scoring record without a real record or a fraud detection mechanism without too many check up points. Basically to have a simple mobile ID that can tell the whole user story in a single tap in any mobile app in the world. We hope to actually have this vision of the future mobile identity as a reality.

Of course there is a lot of challenges on this road and as you said there is a lot of things to be tackled today so we can have this tomorrow. There is a lot of approaches and discussions going on the cross border identity and standards that needs to be in place as what we are seeing a lot of digital identities are been issued and tackled locally, every country has its own solution, whether its government based, telecom based, bank based but with globalization and e-commerce business etc. there is a great need to identify people and customers all over the globe no matter where your business is. And that is actually where the standards needs to come in place so that different digital identities and different countries will communicate in a proper way to share the information that is needed for a seamless and secure mobile experience.