The Payments Trilogue

Episodes / TPT #17

TRUST

· 35 min

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In this episode, we engage with Chris Skinner, one of the most famous payment experts in Europe, to explore the evolving landscape of digital trust and identity in the financial sector. We discuss the challenges of onboarding and KYC processes, the potential of the upcoming EU ID wallet, and the fragmentation of digital identity solutions across Europe. The conversation delves into the complexities of trust in banking versus government, the implications of deep fakes, and the future of digital identity in an increasingly digital world.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Introduction to Digital Trust and Identity
  2. 2:40 Challenges in Onboarding and KYC
  3. 6:02 The Promise of the EU ID Wallet
  4. 10:15 Fragmentation of Digital Identity Solutions
  5. 13:25 The Role of Trust in Banking vs. Government
  6. 19:56 Navigating Trust in a Deep Fake World
  7. 25:39 The Future of Digital Identity and AI
  8. 31:02 Concluding Thoughts on Digital Trust

Guest: Chris Skinner (Author and fintech commentator)

Transcript

Michael Salmony 0:12

Hello, my name is Michael Salmony and I'd like to welcome you to another episode of the Trilogue where I'm joined by Gijs who looks at things from the banking side and Ralf who looks at things from the fintech side. And this time we have another very special guest, Chris Skinner, who everybody who works in banking and payments must know. He writes books all the time. He publishes all the time. He has websites and newsletters and everything.

and is super interesting on everything around our topic. So Chris, welcome. Tell us a bit more about yourself and tell us about your latest thoughts, which I believe are around trust.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 0:56

Hi Michael and Gijs and Ralf. I've been in this industry for longer than most people. In fact, I have the same now that I've been around payments and banking since before most of Earth was conceived. So it's my area of interest, but primarily around technology, the future and how it's changing the financial world.

And I've been writing about that for over 30 years, to be honest, 20 books, working on the newest one. And the newest one's theme is around digital trust in a deep fake world. And it turns that idea of the old cartoon that many of us know of no one knows you're a dog on the internet into how can I prove I'm a dog on the internet? Because now we've

switched it kind of the other way around.

Michael Salmony 1:57

That sounds intriguing. So that sounds more like a political thing and deep fakes and AI and fake news rather than about banking and payments or where is the connection?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 2:09

And the connection is around onboarding and money laundering. And it's all around KYC know your customer. And how can I prove that I am me when I'm applying for something? And I'm finding the onboarding process for most digital financial services is becoming overly cumbersome and too difficult. At the same time, it has to be that way because it has to be that way.

Gijs Boudewijn 2:30

You

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 2:38

But there needs to be a better way.

Michael Salmony 2:42

So Gijs, this is all your fault, right?

Gijs Boudewijn 2:42

No,

well, no, it's the regulator's fault, of course, and not the bank's fault. They just try to be compliant with any law or regulation that's out there or what any supervisor deems necessary. on the onboarding, Chris, the great promise of the eIDAS 2.0, the EU ID wallet, I learned is that specifically this onboarding, this cumbersome onboarding should be

made a lot easier for everybody, if every citizen, let alone the corporates, but let's stick to consumers, would avail of a state or non-state issued EU ID wallet filled with its verified credentials by that very member state, being able to say, hey, this is me, please onboard me. Do you see that potential too for the eIDAS 2.0 wallet?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 3:42

to an extent, but everybody's attempted to crack this nut and failed. And I think that's the rub, you know, Swift has tried to do it in the corporate context. The EU ID is trying to do it in the European context and everything I've studied so far, and I've been involved in huge numbers of digital identity projects has really failed because we don't have

agreements across the board around how it works. We don't have good ways of making it work and to a large extent it's the balance between the fraudulent criminal community and the truthful general populace and how to balance the custom experience between those two and I don't think anybody solved it and I don't think EUID will solve it either.

And the worst thing about EUID, well, I shouldn't say the worst because like it's not even here yet. It's coming downstream. who's telling anybody about it? I, know, and most people in Europe probably have no idea that it's coming. I tell you a little quick story and I'm sorry, Mark, I'm going off stream here, but we've got road works outside our house. I've been going on for six months and my wife said to me, they're going on for the next three years.

I said, well, why hasn't anyone put a note through our letterbox saying that's going on? No communication, absolutely zero. And I feel the same about EUID.

Michael Salmony 5:13

I mean, I don't think the EU ID wallet is going to solve your plumbing works in Poland. think that's asking a bit much. if you say there's been...

Gijs Boudewijn 5:18

Well,

if I may, I have some good news. is the Dutch, it was a press release of the Dutch Financial Conduct Authority the day before yesterday, who said, new digital identity offers new opportunities, but could become a barrier to some consumers who are not so digitally savvy. And they've made a pretty good analysis of it, but also, hmm.

might help, but it could also, again, for those who are not so digitally savvy, be a problem. But at least it is a supervisory authority that is already proactively sort of communicating about it.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 6:01

Yeah, but the thing is you can do a press release. What about actually putting a leaflet drop? What about sending out an email to every citizen saying, you aware you have this service?

Gijs Boudewijn 6:04

I know, I know.

Ralf Ohlhausen 6:12

Yeah, if I could come in here because you know, from our FinTech or especially TPP perspective under open banking, one of our main reasons for wanting this identity wallet was as a substitute for some of the not so good strong customer authentication flows and apps by banks, so that this identity wallet can be used to authorize payments.

The reason we could convince the authorities about this like, DG Connect some some years ago, when the whole thing was conceptualized, was that the payments use case is a daily use case, so that people would get the need or would better understand the purpose of it and get used to it by using it with for something which they which they do every day.

and not just whatever showing their mobile passport, sorry, their car, know, the driving's license or their passport every once in a while. So daily use cases, I think is exactly what will make it work. But I guess you're right, to get it into the people's mind in the first place is a big challenge.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 7:25

Well, also, I think we have this big issue around digital identity fragmentation.

And so my main ID is my passport and my driving license, for example, and my residence card here in Poland. So I get access to Schengen. But then when I'm logging into services online, I've got maybe 60 services I use, each of which has a username and password, some of which have the same username and password, some of which don't.

And I got incredibly frustrated the other day because my children use Roblox and Minecraft and they wanted me to log into Microsoft 365 and I couldn't remember the password. And then I realized if I reset it, that's all my business things are lost as well as now giving them access. And the whole username and password thing is absolutely ridiculous in 2025.

Michael Salmony 8:22

I mean, I'm sure

everybody agrees with you with that, passwords are the thing that were invented in 1970s, we can do a lot better than that. But isn't there a chance, or 60s maybe even, but isn't there a chance that sort of having this sort of attribute based, standardized, harmonized way in Europe might get rid of all these silos? I think Germany has 56 different identity schemes alone, the Fraunhofer Institute did. I mean, it's complete madness. So isn't there now an opportunity to have a sort of

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 8:29

actually the 60s.

What's

Michael Salmony 8:51

although regulatory driven at last, getting a sort of harmonized way which we can use for payments and for everything.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 8:59

There is a strong argument for a harmonized digital wallet. I guess the questions lie around whether every country wants to have that wallet because at the moment they all have different ones. Here in Poland, I guess the most prevalent is Blik. In the Netherlands, as you know, iDEAL. If you look across the Nordic region, know, Swish and Vipps. So it's kind of the case of what is

going to make that work for all 27 members of the community and what happens when you step outside that community? I made the comment a long time ago that I could fly from Beijing to anywhere in Europe and use Alipay as my wallet. Why can't I do that as a European when I fly to Beijing?

Gijs Boudewijn 9:50

Well, you can now. But I mean, there's a difference, of course. The regulation stipulates that by October, November 26, all EU members must have one EU ID wallet, the basic wallet with the PID and the identity credentials stored in it. But that's it. That's only the basic identity.

Michael Salmony 9:52

Very much.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 10:13

Yeah,

you know that the European countries don't do what the Commission always tells them to do.

Gijs Boudewijn 10:21

Well, that's not the Commission, it's the Council in the Parliament. It's a bloody regulation.

Michael Salmony 10:24

That's the thing to say. I'm a stick.

I

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 10:28

It still doesn't always work.

Michael Salmony 10:29

know.

Gijs Boudewijn 10:30

No, I

agree. I I have to see if all these member states will have that, even the most basic version of that identity wallet, let alone, I can say that because we are part of the new, WE Build, which is the next level of large scale pilots that are trying to figure out what else you could do with this shiny new EUID wallet in terms of payments. We have four consortia now, there's two.

called Large Scale Pilots co-funded by the European Commission to figure out all sorts of use cases, one of which is payments. And we have payments related frameworks on top of the basic EUID thingy that we built. Sorry?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 11:15

Were you involved in

the digital wallet for the travel credentials or were you on one of the other ones?

Gijs Boudewijn 11:25

No, so we will be in the new WE Build, there's two follow-up consortia which have been granted access or whatever you want to call it, but have been okayed by the European Commission recently, which is the WE Build, which builds on the old EWC consortium, which is mostly Visa led, and we're very much into strong customer authentication. Ralf and Tink is very active in that, and the other is the NOBID.

a former NOBID consortium called Aptitude, which builds on what especially the German Savings Bank has been working on in the first round and probably the two consortia will work together on the payments use case and there's public transport, whatever other use cases there are, but there's also a payments use case. And that might hold the promise, Chris, to have these, let's say these payment wallets, the account to account wallets to harmonize as well, but I want to see that happen.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 12:20

So

if I go back to what I was saying earlier around my primary identity documents are passport and driving license, would the EUID digital wallet replace that?

Gijs Boudewijn 12:33

Yep, could.

Michael Salmony 12:37

I think it goes beyond that, right? mean, this is surely the point that in the past, a lot of these identity schemes have been based on passport and driving license, but you need also to verify whether I've been COVID vaccinated, whether I'm over 18, what my academic credentials are. You know, there are a hundred other attributes and this is what this EUID wallet aims to do. It aims to verify all my attributes in all life situations and the passport is maybe the wrong paradigm because I don't want to show somebody the whole

all the data on my passport, whether I've been to Israel and to Saudi Arabia. That's nobody's business if they're just verifying that I'm over 18. So that's why I think this attribute-based, not going beyond government identity, EUID wallet is actually quite smart.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 13:23

Yeah, but who owns the ID?

Michael Salmony 13:26

That is by the issuing institution. So my university will issue my academic, my health provider will tell whether I've been vaccinated and the government will have the data on my passport. I mean, it sounds quite smart, but I don't want to put you on the spot, but you were saying there hasn't been a single success of an ID. What about the Nordics? I think they've put a very clever Nordic ID scheme together, which is used in all sorts of scenarios, not just payments.

And there's a huge success and the banks are in the middle of that. Isn't that an example which one could use as a reference?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 14:00

The Nordics

has certainly been in leadership in this area for some years now, as they were with adopting digital banking, internet banking, 25 years ago. But what I mean by this is that at the moment I still feel

it's too fragmented, there's too many different schemes and there's too many difficulties in proving who you say you are and it's getting worse and there needs to be a fix. My example of using online services for Roblox and Minecraft is just one. So you kind of go well there are some digital identities that

must be completely authentic and secure and then there are many others that are not authentic and not secure and how do you differentiate between the two and when and equally how easy would it be for someone with criminal intent to create a authentic secure identity when it's not actually that person you know at the moment

I've just been writing about the levels of fraud and I remember the head of global fraud for HSBC speaking at my financial services club 20 years ago and saying around 2 % is an acceptable level, ideally below that, but that's the maximum level. These days, it's 5%. It's gone through the roof.

Ralf Ohlhausen 15:43

could ask you a question. Could I ask you a question there? Because you've written a lot about that one of the big values of banks is the trust that people have in it and having the deposit there. And so this is how like a big asset of banks over fintechs, which may have more functionality, but possibly less trust. And so when now

And I guess you were probably one of those promoting the possibility for banks to leverage that trust in providing more trust-based services and maybe credentials and this identification. Now, the government or the European...

Commission has taken the initiative of having the government issue these identity wallets. And we are actually currently seeing a bit of a competition now between the banks or how the banks want to use that wallet or not.

with their own credentials or the government credentials, etc. So in this, the well, how would you see the trust in banks competing with the trust in governments from a from an end user perspective? So what do you think is more trustworthy government or banks?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 17:05

Yeah, I mean, this is everything I'm writing about right now for my next book, Digital Trust in a Deep Fake World, which I haven't even finished yet. So it's going to be a while before it comes out. But you have to realize that there's like a an onion of trust and onions have many layers. And the core of the onion in this case of trust is who is backing

Gijs Boudewijn 17:29

you

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 17:34

what you believe in and if you believe in government it's the government if you believe in the internet and you're a libertarian it's the network the network of the people and i've had this debate for a long time between the crypto community and who are libertarians and the banking community who are not although some seem to be moving that way and the government you know when I say you have trust in banking you don't have trust

in the bank's brand, have trust in the bank's license. And so when I talk about trust in banking, it's about the fact that if I put my money in deposit there, up to 100,000 euro, then it's guaranteed by an insurance scheme that it won't be lost. And it's those factors around trust, because in the crypto community, we've seen huge amounts of

hacking and dilution from Mt. Gox through to Binance recently with 1.5 billion hacked from their exchange. Why should I trust that platform if they can lose one and half billion dollars in two hours? You know, was something like that. Thanks to the North Koreans is the alleged perpetrator. So the trust is around who is issuing the authority and do I trust that authority?

Gijs Boudewijn 18:59

But it's also interesting what you're saying, Chris, this onion of trust. To a certain extent, I would trust Kraken or whatever, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it, as they say in the US. I wouldn't put my life savings in a crypto world, but I would take a little gamble for a thousand euros, so my trust is enough to be okay if...

the North Koreans hack it and steal my 1,000 euro worth of Bitcoin. Okay, I'll survive, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I need a higher level of trust to do that and then that I would do with my bank, et cetera. it's also there's so many shades of gray in trust. What you would trust somebody or any institution with ending with of course, Mr. Elon Musk, because he seems to be the highest level of trust in these days in some parts of the world.

Michael Salmony 19:55

I did.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 19:56

Well,

I have this habit and I recommend it to everybody, is, and it started years ago when I first started using PayPal, that to begin with, I would only do small transactions. And then gradually, as you realize it works and it seems to be pretty good, my usage grew. But I always say to folks, when you open a new account or if somebody wants you to make a payment to them,

To start off with, make sure it's just maybe one euro and just check it goes through comfortably and that you can trust that it's gone through and then you can make a larger payment. But don't do a 50,000 euro payment on the first transaction because if you get a number wrong, if you do something stupid, it's gone.

Michael Salmony 20:44

That makes sense. Yeah, I mean all these levels of trust there I mean they're technically, you know coming back to the EU ID wallet They're gonna be several levels of trust, you know some like governments proven 100 % and some lower level and some of the lower level might be useful to like Facebook might put in there that I'm interested in French claret wines, right? And that's that's not a hundred percent guaranteed But that's something which would somebody might might want to use as an as an attribute, right?

So I don't think everything needs to be 100 % certified, depends on the use case. That's one comment. And the other one is, it's also psychologically really complex. It wasn't me, I think it may have been your colleague, Dave Birch, who brought this example, who said that I would trust to give my kidney to my son, no problem, but would I trust him to give him my credit card? Definitely not.

So you have sort of things which you would think are very highly trusted, which sometimes go the other way around, right? So it's a technical up to a psychological issue.

Gijs Boudewijn 21:48

Hmm.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 21:53

If you've met Dave Birch's children, you'll know that that's the reason. There's something else.

Gijs Boudewijn 21:57

you

But Chris,

coming back to the topic of your new book, where is all this going to end in a deep, in a perfect, deep fake world? How ultimately, I mean, with all waterproof or stamps or whatever things, I'm not a technical person, it. but you could still, because there's a watermark or a little stamp that you can see, it has been...

tangled with or it's not real or whatever. But this will all be solved of course by those who want to convince me that I'm not talking to you as a live Chris but a deep fake AI powered version of yourself. Where is that going to end?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 22:49

I don't know to be honest I mean it's quite interesting because the UK has just brought in some new regulatory drive to create new corporate identity systems and

Equally, America has theirs and Asia has theirs and it varies by every region and you know, I can't see us having one central global standardized identity scheme because it'd be too likely to have systemic failure. But you have to ask, you know, what is the granularity that comes in here? So the EU ID is coming in 2026. It's been in force for since 2024.

And I just sit and think, why is it that I have so many obstacles to access financial services, be onboarded, to have KYC? And equally, how is it that there are, you know, one in 20 people who can commit fraudulent transactions because they got through those obstacles and barriers and broke them? It's a very difficult balance.

And I think the technology we use these days is making it worse, to be honest.

Michael Salmony 24:09

Mm-hmm.

Ralf Ohlhausen 24:11

Are you aware of this project called WorldCoin by Sam Altman, the OpenAI guy and one of his separate projects there where he's trying to solve the problem of differentiating between real humans and the rest and whatever AI and whatever fake may come up by having this iris scan thing that you do in order to prove that you're human?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 24:18

Mm-hmm.

I'm aware of it. I don't think it's taken off because I haven't seen much about it recently. And it's also interesting because we talk a lot these days about agentic AI and bot to bot transactions where no humans involved. So now I can delegate my identity to a bot and then my bot just goes wild on the network. Who knows? And that's someone else's fault.

Ralf Ohlhausen 24:44

Hmm, yeah, me neither.

Gijs Boudewijn 24:47

Mm-hmm.

Michael Salmony 25:00

you

Ralf Ohlhausen 25:05

Yeah, well on that one, because when

we had Dave Birch on here, I was asking him about the concept of BankGPT, like a bot doing the banking for me. And it's one of his themes there that the real revolution in AI and banking is the customer becoming.

like basically more intelligent than using bots there. So and banks being unprepared for for clever, really clever, clever customers doing what they are otherwise too lazy to do, shifting money to better accounts and all that.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 25:37

Well, you guys are old enough to know that, you

know, we've had that concept for 30 years, you know, of infomediaries. You know, instead of an intermediary, it's the bot to bot infomediary that does everything for us and makes our life easier. And I think it comes down to four, you know, simple day to day transactional systems that will probably work a bit like contactless payments, which admittedly, you know,

Gijs Boudewijn 25:50

Mm-hmm.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 26:06

the ceiling on contactless payments is rising. But the reason why contactless payments works is it's simple day-to-day transactional payments that are of low value. When it comes to something of high value, a mortgage settlement, for example, you definitely want to have that handled by a trusted intermediary that is licensed. So it's really down to scale and risk.

Ralf Ohlhausen 26:34

Could I come back to your Minecraft example there? There is, of course, on the internet, I want to be seen as a dog in...

whatever some circumstances. So I want to have multiple identities. So I want to have I guess I have to have my sort of real identity when it comes to, you know, banking and buying houses and all of that. But if I want to play Minecraft or go on some other websites, I do not want to be known as my real identity. So I want to be have a fake or different identity or multiple identities that I can use and and proof some sort of proof for that.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 27:20

That's my favorite example in my presentations around why banking will always exist. And that when I was in second life, which you may remember from 20 years ago, I was a girl. And, you know, that was purely because I was just being stupid. I don't know why I did that. But got very interesting in some conversations. But then Ginkgo Bank was the biggest bank in second life. And it disappeared one day because

the guy who ran Ginkgo Bank, hit the delete button and took all the money. It's one and a half million dollars. He was a student in Sao Paulo in Brazil. And that's the reason why you need licensed institutions to store and exchange money because you've got to have someone that's not being run by a student in Brazil or anywhere else for that matter.

Michael Salmony 28:08

I mean, that

example you just gave with the Ginkgo Bank and also your mention of the UK improving how companies is the sort of B2B trust angle, which again, people don't talk enough about, right? I mean, you can register any old company at Companies House in the UK, give it any old name. And that of course is wonderful for fraudsters who say, let's put this in the Barclays secure trust account. And it's actually run by some...

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 28:21

Mm.

Michael Salmony 28:36

somebody who's less than dodgy. So have you looked at people being trusted?

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 28:39

I have noted you picked on Barclays.

I've noted you picked on Barclays there, Michael. I've written that down now.

Gijs Boudewijn 28:46

You

Michael Salmony 28:47

Yeah, I was going to say some Bulgarian who actually owns it, but I didn't say that.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 28:48

you

Gijs Boudewijn 28:53

But they had an outage I believe, didn't they?

Michael Salmony 28:58

But have you looked at B2B Trust in your new book? Is that all you only look in consumers and robots and...

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 29:03

Not

so much because the way in which I write, I'm trying to get the broadest appeal. And I think a lot of the things I could write about in capital markets and investment banking, commercial banking, maybe doesn't have that broad appeal. So it tends to be targeted towards much more the retail consumer end. But I do find it interesting that you may remember, and this was some years ago, there was an awful lot of companies

Michael Salmony 29:19

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 29:33

trying to tackle the politically exposed person's database and the way in which that worked in corporate commercial banking relationships. And I like the ideas that people had around databases that would be open and shared. But again, I've not seen anyone crack the nut. these days we talk an awful lot about distributed ledger technology can solve this because it's immutable. And once it's on the ledger, it's never

Gijs Boudewijn 30:01

Ahem.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 30:03

never going to be altered. It doesn't solve it because you know people are very good, particularly those with criminal intent, at backing the system. And specifically if you go back to the Bulgarians, which is this you know spy ring run by Jan Marsalek from Wirecard that I was blogging about the other day, a lot of that was social engineering. It's nothing to do with technology.

Michael Salmony 30:28

Yeah, very good. Exactly.

Gijs Boudewijn 30:29

No, that's indeed

as good as you make that point, Chris. We should not have any illusion that with any technology we can root out any criminality as long as there is a human factor which can be socially engineered to do stuff with that perfect technology that you shouldn't do. So I don't see how we can solve the human factor being the weakest link in the whole chain.

Michael Salmony 30:36

Cough

Gijs Boudewijn 30:58

in any scenario, and we can solve that.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 31:01

I there has to be a solution over time. And I think the digital wallet from the EUID is a good step along the way of getting there. And eventually it does mean that instead of having a physical passport, and the reason I'm leaning over is here is mine in my nice blue livery, which I know you can't see very well, but used to be purple, it's now blue.

If we can make that digital, then that would be fantastic. And I had this vision a long time ago and I still have it that eventually every single human on earth will have some digital chip inside, Intel inside every human. That means that wherever you go, whatever you do, everyone can check it's you.

Gijs Boudewijn 31:47

Mm-hmm.

then you have to implant that chip at birth and it has to be implanted by somebody who can give you that identity and who is that going to be?

Michael Salmony 31:55

Mm.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 32:05

And also the question is, where do you stick it?

Michael Salmony 32:08

Okay, we're good. I mean, the passport thing is not so science fiction. I believe in the US you can already put your driver's license and your... Yeah, but this is actually in your phone, which in a digital that Chris, I think is calling for.

Gijs Boudewijn 32:17

I have a chip in my passport, I mean...

Yeah, yeah,

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 32:26

In Sweden they've had a digital ID chip that you can implant in your body for some years but most people don't want it because they the government is going to track and trace them.

Gijs Boudewijn 32:32

Yeah. Yeah.

Hahaha

Michael Salmony 32:39

would have thought that, yeah. Okay. Right, I'm not sure how positive this episode was. I think we all ended up rather in a bit of a doom and gloom and the only thing that will save us is being implanted by a neutral robot. yeah, unless anybody has any last minute emergency things to say, would...

Gijs Boudewijn 32:57

I was just a

question to Chris. sorry, Michael. What happened to the metaverse? I haven't heard that term for some time, to be honest. Did it just go away or?

Michael Salmony 33:03

Okay.

Thank

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 33:12

No, it's still there. And in fact, I was writing the other day around your digital twin is in danger, which goes back to, you know, this whole conversation, which is you, you now have two yous. You have, you know, your physical you and your digital you and your digital you is the one that we haven't actually solved the conundrum. Although there's lots of things that are moving towards trying to solve it. but what we need.

Gijs Boudewijn 33:18

Yeah.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 33:42

And quite rightly, as Ralf said, you know, in some worlds, I don't want to be recognized as Chris Skinner. I might want to be a girl or whatever I want to be, a dog. But when it comes to formal transactional, financial and government affairs, I want to have a unique identity that is recognized and secure. And we are getting there.

but it's just taken us a long time to get there. Bear in mind, the internet is only just over 30 years old, so there's still time.

Michael Salmony 34:20

I actually have two identities because after this Brexit nonsense I had to get myself a German passport as well. So I'm happy having two government identities and I don't know how many digital identities. So it's only going to get more complex. But anyway, thank you very much, Chris, for being with us. You've been very entertaining, very insightful as always. Chris, Gijs and Ralf have done some really excellent comments and probed you, I hope, in a not too intrusive way.

So thanks for being with us and hope everybody who watched this episode enjoyed it too. And look forward to seeing you the next time.

Gijs Boudewijn 34:56

Take care, Chris.

Chris Skinner, The Finanser 34:57

Take care guys.