Unlocking Trust: Exploring vLEI & Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) with Drummond Reed & Andy Tobin, Gen – Podcast Episode 96

Let's talk about digital identity with Drummond Reed, Director of Trust Services at Gen and Andy Tobin, Commercial Director, Europe at Gen. In this series opener of Season 5, Drummond Reed and Andy Tobin join Oscar to explore vLEIs and Self Sovereign Identity (SSI). They explore what LEIs and vLEIs are, how SSI principles are used within vLEIs, the benefits of vLEIs, which sectors and industries will benefit the most, and some use cases of where the vLEI has been leveraged. [Transcript below] “If LEIs were digitised in a way that could be instantly verifiable, it could transform company onboarding.” Drummond has spent a quarter-century in Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust infrastructure. He is Director, Trust Services at Gen, previous Avast after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was Chief Trust Officer. He is co-author of the book, ‘Self-Sovereign Identity’ (Manning Publications, 2021) and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification. At the Trust Over IP Foundation, Drummond is a member of the Steering Committee and co-chair of the Governance Stack Working Group and the Concepts and Terminology Working Group. At the Sovrin Foundation, he served as co-chair of the Sovrin Governance Framework Working Group for five years. From 2005-2015 he was co-chair of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee, a semantic data interchange protocol that implements Privacy by Design. Drummond also served as Executive Director for two industry foundations: the Information Card Foundation and the Open Identity Exchange, and as a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation, ISTPA, XDI.org, and Identity Commons. In 2002 he received the Digital Identity Pioneer Award from Digital ID World, and in 2013 he was cited as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor. Connect with Drummond on LinkedIn. Andy Tobin leads European and eIDAS strategy for Gen's Digital Trust Services business. He is one of the pioneers of self-sovereign identity and helped to establish Evernym as the world leader in this field. He is a well-known public speaker and writer on the topic of digital identity and has delivered some of the largest SSI projects to date. His career has spanned the three rapidly converging sectors of identity, mobile and payments. He has written code to control cash machines, built the world’s first mCommerce server, run a £1.2bn mobile messaging network and been CTO for Europe’s first fully mobile bank. He is a passionate technology strategist who believes that the identity ecosystem and the personal information economy is poised for massive change, enabled by the capabilities being built right now by Avast. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn. We’ll be continuing this conversation on Twitter using #LTADI – join us @ubisecure! Go to @Ubisecure on YouTube to watch the video transcript for episode 96. Podcast transcript Oscar Santolalla: Welcome back to Season 5 of the Let’s Talk about Digital Identity podcast. In this series opener I am joined by Drummond Reed and Andy Tobin, from Gen Digital, joining us to delve into vLEIs and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Stay tuned to find out more. Let’s Talk About Digital Identity, the podcast connecting identity and business. I am your host, Oscar Santolalla.  Oscar: Today, we are very happy to have two expert guests, Drummond and Andy. And today, we are going to discuss vLEIs and what is the connection with self-sovereign identity. First of all, we have Drummond Reed. He is Director of Trust Services at Gen, previously Avast after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was the Chief Trust Officer. He is co-author of the book Self-Sovereign Identity, published by Manning Publication in 2021. And he’s co-editor of the W3C Decentralised Identifiers, DID 1.0 Specification. At the Trust Over IP Foundation, Drummond is a member of the steering committee and co-chair of the Governance Stack Working Group and the Concepts and Terminology Working Gro...