DIGITAL TRUST is fast becoming the most valuable cultural currency of our time.

Trust – and increasingly digital trust – is fast becoming the most valuable cultural currency of our time.

1. With digital experiences now central to almost every interaction, transaction and relationship between businesses and consumers –
• The methods needed to establish trust, and
• The way that trust is enshrined, are transforming.
2. The World Economic Forum describes digital trust as:
• An expectation by individuals that digital technologies and services – and the organisations providing them – will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values

Digital trust is of immense value to current and future digital service providers.

1. Many forward-thinking financial services firms are already investing in building, strengthening, and measuring digital trust, as they come to realise its increasing importance. It underpins far more than good customer relationships or brand loyalty – it lays the foundations for an organisation’s very survival.
2. Creating digital trust is not so easy, however.
• Trust requires investment from both parties, but at present too many citizens are disengaged and data illiterate, led by media narratives that are overtly negative.
• Existing legal and data sharing frameworks, both domestic and international, create a preventative barrier to building digital trust. It will take a concerted effort by policy makers, businesses, and public services in the coming years to create the necessary pathways to success.
3. This means helping citizens transition to far higher levels of digital literacy than most can claim today – including a better understanding of why, how, and where data is shared for the public good – and laying down the legal and legislative frameworks that will govern it.

Why so important

1. The pace of change shows no sign of slowing and we’re fast heading towards a tipping point. By 2026, around a quarter of the world’s population – 2 billion people – are expected to spend at least a part of their day in an online immersive environment or ‘metaverse’.
2. These 3D extended reality (XR) platforms promise to blend virtual and real life, creating hybrid spaces that will revolutionise how we live and play.
3. Combining these worlds with the 2D web environments we are already familiar with, will require a collaborative, safe, reliable and seamless authentication framework that allows users to skip safely, and quickly between virtual worlds – an Authentaverse, if you like.
4. Establishing it is going to become the bedrock of how, as a society, we successfully embrace this digital evolution.
5. Everyday transactions – banking, shopping, insurance applications, government permits, investment and pension management, gaming, entertainment, education, healthcare and work – are inexorably moving to online and mobile, adding to an ever-growing list of activities that consumers can carry out with just a couple of clicks and swipes.
6. Even so, the evolution needs its main protagonists – the private sector, regulators, lawmakers, the public sector and, most importantly, citizens – to all move in the same direction. This requires digital trust to be ubiquitous.
7. If we get this right, the rewards are outstanding.
8. Imagine a new era of one-click mortgage and personal loan applications that are form-free.
9. A time when we can seamlessly transition from a banking website to mobile account safely and securely, but without any of the friction of remembering passwords or pets’ names, or entering codes sent via SMS. A time where car insurance and car tax applications automatically know your exact make and model of car, where it’s parked at night and how it’s driven, each day.
10. This grand vision of no-click authentication across the whole digital eco-system – an Authentaverse – is already ell within our reach, thanks to the speed and ingenuity of technological advancements. This report explores the final few steps needed to join up the dots. It explores what citizens want from digital trust and how it can benefit society, discusses the key frameworks required to govern it and considers the key technological building blocks on which an Authentaverse will be built

The Authentaverse

1. Digital trust in a new era of authentication – An Authentaverse
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ new report – The Future of Digital Trust: Authentaverse – provides a ground-breaking perspective about how embracing human pillars of trust can enable financial services organisations to deliver new innovative services and richer customer engagement.
2. What is an Authentaverse?
• The emerging ‘Authentaverse’ is a world defined by seamless, invisible, and instant authentication. By leveraging a host of digital signals and footprints created by an individual and their device as they interact online, people will be able to skip effortlessly between websites and service providers without being asked to identify themselves. An Authentaverse will enable loan and mortgage applications to be completed without filling-in lengthy forms, because providers will be able to access the required information in an instant.
• Users will enjoy secure access to their bank accounts without the need to enter unique customer numbers and passwords. One click or swipe is all users will need to manage every part of their personal finances.
• An Authentaverse will utilise a broad set of layered intelligence to embrace transparency and give consumers agency over their data. Both consumers and financial services providers will benefit from heightened levels of security, while reducing levels of frustration and dissatisfaction caused by the need to constantly add friction into processes to check that people and transactions are genuine.
3. The trends that will define an Authentaverse. 
• What is required to make a new era of seamless, low-friction user experience a reality? Certainly an outpouring of technological innovation led by banks is necessary to transform product and service experience sufficiently to lay the foundations for an Authentaverse to flourish. And effective intelligence is needed to build the type of instant trust and recognition of users that’s required to expedite verification. But beyond infrastructure, a raft of standards and expectations will need to be rewritten and the relationship between service providers and their customers renegotiated on level terms. The Future of Digital Trust: Authentaverse report explores some of these potential trends:
4. Immersive institutions.
• Seamless authentication will ensure that all those who inhabit virtual worlds are identifiable, discouraging harmful behaviours. Auto-fill checkouts and fast-track Agreements in Principle (AIPs) have already laid the groundwork for the speed and convenience that consumers will expect. A passwordless society will take this further. Authentication will become increasingly experiential and real-time. Imagine identity profiles communicated as trust scores for each user in a virtual environment, where they hover above each avatar’s head to give instant assurance between genuine users and protection from entities linked to suspicious behaviours, or those not satisfactorily authenticated.
• The ability to provide real-time insights on individuals’ trust scores is fast approaching, with exponential technologies fuelling enterprise innovation. LexID®, for example, provides dynamic profiles continuously updated to ingest new records. Automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and hybrid cloud technologies are helping organisations to bring their data together in one place, providing a single source of customer truth to power customer experience design and unlock new value and income streams.
5. Autonomous Access.
• The future is an autonomous financial system that gives users more control and agency over their data and assets. Open banking – secure interoperability allowing banking service providers to share data – has already set this in motion, and in the next decade, an Authentaverse will further unlock an era of autonomous access, with citizens able to seamlessly switch between hyper-personalised digital services from myriad providers.
• Promisingly, open data initiatives are springing up globally, with technological, regulatory, and competitive forces coming together to make financial data-sharing easier, safer, and more seamless. The latest PDS3 regulation proposals for the EU aim to do just that, loosening previous legislation that restricts responsible information sharing for the benefit of consumers. This will fuel greater consumer autonomy and control, and competition throughout the financial services sector to give consumers even greater breadth of choice.
6. AI Advocates. 
• In a world of data-rich digital environments, consumers will increasingly defer decision-making to AI assistants who will advocate on their behalf. As well as advice, people may soon outsource some aspects of decision-making to AI assistants entirely – particularly when it comes to online security. When it comes to fraud prevention, the best decisions are made by machine learning algorithms, which can search for patterns and anomalous behaviour. Technology such as LexisNexis® ThreatMetrix® can see hidden behaviour patterns in digital entities interacting online that are inconsistent with expectations – patterns and associations that a human would never find.
• It’s this type of personalised automation that will empower users and organisations in an Authentaverse – removing the guesswork and evasiveness from opting into lengthy terms and conditions. It will help ensure that consumers are clearer about who to trust, and when, and what level of data should be shared with them.
• At present, many organisations only enable data-sharing for the purposes of fraud prevention and cybersecurity, but advances in AI technology could make data-sharing even more automated and protective. Imagine your AI assistant reading a lengthy T&Cs document for you and alerting you to specific terms and conditions relevant to your needs or circumstances. That future is around the corner.

Click here to download the free report on  The Future of Trust: Authentaverse.

https://risk.lexisnexis.co.uk/insights-resources/research/future-of-digital-trust-authentaverse?trmid=BSUKGN23.BSUKBR23.DgtTrust.BL3P-1041101&utm_source=global-banking-finance-review&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=BSUKGN23.BSUKBR23.DgtTrust