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Background
The first telephone call was made on March 10th 1876. The first commercially-available mobile phone* was created in 1973, a mere 97 years later. Passports have been in our back pockets since the 15th Century when King Henry V of England created a method to allow UK merchants to prove their connection to the King when travelling. 500 years later we added the biometric chip.
We cannot wait another 500 years for a fully functional and successful digital identity solution to become widely available. Speed is of the essence.
Taking up the challenge
Understanding how the mobile and identity industries function, including the opportunities and the challenges, is critical if we’re able as an industry to make a success of providing workable identity solutions for the future in order to deliver success in identity verification.
There is a clear gap our market: true at-scale commercialisation is largely missing in the mobile attribute sector. Operators have many data attributes that they would like to monetise (within clear security and privacy rules), and many organisations out there – from banks to betting services – have the need to verify users and prevent fraud, but the speed at which real revenues are being generated from this market remains very slow.
Sekura was born over a pint and a packet of crisps in a London pub in mid-2018. Complementary minds and a shared experience in the industry created the initial spark: we can help. But the challenge with any new idea is in making it a reality. In the mobile digital identity landscape, with its many players, multiple moving parts, cross- border challenges and disparate technologies, this is especially complex.
A blueprint for success
In the face of this complexity, successful organisations must keep things simple. Trust and honesty are equally important. It’s easy in our industry to over-promise and under-deliver, and we believe that openness and realism in communication with the market is will set the successful companies apart. Don’t shy away from telling a customer that something is not available or will need some development, instead work with your partners to clear the barriers, overcome obstacles and make the impossible possible.
Relationships with the providers of our raw material, mobile operator data, is the key ingredient to the success of a business in our market. Be successful by using the experience and connections that you have, develop partnerships, work on relationships with the key decision makers at all levels to become an extension of the mobile operators themselves. This will ultimately drive the trust that you will need to maximise the chances of mutual success in identity verification.
As an industry we love to make ourselves sound successful, clever and informed through adoption and use of technical acronyms and buzzwords. This helps no-one. Work to de-mystify and clarify, make things simple and accessible, focus on the benefits for the customer and the end-user and success will follow.
At Sekura our philosophy is to embrace the complexity and deliver straightforward services that work based on the mantra to keep things simple. We encourage our partners and the industry around us to follow suit.
To learn more about how we work, or to discuss the Sekura approach with any of our team, Contact Us
* The Motorola DynaTAC 8000
