Identity Services Business Models

Conference IIW8 Room/Time: 2/F

Convener: Bob Blakley

Notes-taker: Bob Blakley

Attendees: Daniela Barbosa,Hank Mauldin, Jeff Shan, Chris Lunt, Drummond Reed, Gulshan Kapoor, Pete Rowley, George Fletcher, Katrika Woodcock, Pak Maark, Keith Dennit, Henrik Biering, Lucy Lynch, @tharon, Praveen Alavilli, Mary Ruddy, Phil Windley, Alex Nennker, Steve Williams, Andrew Nash

Technology Discussed/Considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Identity services businesses exist today which offer authentication, federation hub provision, identity attribute vetting, identity risk assessment, user experience augmentation, compliance assistance, breach remediation, and whitelabeled IDP services; companies are already making money in these areas, usually by charging RRs or IDPs on a per-transaction or per-user-per-month basis (often with an initial setup fee).

We discussed other areas where services have yet to emerge, including revocation (I want to ensure that a company has actually erased some data I shared about them), escrow services (a few of these exist including ability to anonymously exchange domain names for money), and personal agents (or “advocates” – like a concierge).

The VRM discussions are relevant here – services which the VRM community calls “4th parties” (we prefer a term like “advocate” or “user agent”) are not yet widely available but seem to offer value. There are also a few other kinds of services: user identity risk management (e.g. Lifelock, reputation defender), Social facilitation (Poken), user sponsorship (InCommon identities used by students to access banking services), User-oriented profiling services (Garlick, which collects transaction information for the purpose of making it available to the user rather than to relying parties). We discussed the need to examine the history of emergence of banks, stock exchanges, and credit card networks as models for emergence of 4-party agency systems in the identity space.