 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to this press conference from Davos. You're watching this press conference at the 49th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum here. Thank you for being here in the room. Thank you for watching, whether you are watching on Facebook, Twitter or our homepage. You're joining a press conference titled The Value of Digital Identity for the Global Economy and Society. And we have a fantastic panel for you today to discuss the value of digital identity. And I'll use a very old-fashioned way of identifying them here in my voice. To my immediate left, we're joined by my colleague, Manjo George. She's the Head of Platform Services in the Digital Economy and Society at the World Economic Forum. To her left, we have the pleasure to be joined by Yuri Ratas, who's the Prime Minister of Estonia. Right at the heart and center of our panel, we are joined by James Manika, who's the Chairman and Director of the McKinsey Global Institute. To his immediate left, we are joined by a man you've seen in many spots in the program here in Davos already. Today, we're joined by Nandan Nilikani, the Chairman of Infosys, of course, from India. To his left, we're joined by Mary Snap, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Philanthropies based in the US. And last but definitely not least, we're joined by Mike Kibzanski, the Managing Partner of the Omidia Network, also based in the US. Thank you very much. And mindful of our full schedule, let's jump right to you, Manjo. Why is the World Economic Forum bothering with digital identity? Why are we looking into it? Why is it such an important topic for us? Please. Over 60% of the global GDP is expected to be digitized by 2022. More and more people, businesses, devices, and things are interacting online. And the topic here today, digital identity, sits at the heart of those interactions. How we construct and use digital identities would determine how people are represented online, what opportunities they have access to, what or who is trusted online. So it's quite a foundational role that identity plays in digital economies and societies, and so one needs to shape it thoughtfully. There are a couple of areas that need our attention. One is to make sure that the opportunities associated with digital identity is distributed widely. So today, we only have about 50% of the world's population using the internet. According to the World Bank, over a billion people do not have any form of legally recognized identity. That's excluding them from participating in the digital economy. And there are divides within. 60% of those people live in lower middle income countries. 50% are in sub-Saharan Africa. In the lower income countries that were surveyed, about 40% of the women don't have access to identity compared to about 30% men. So if we don't prioritize inclusion, then we risk exacerbating some of the divides that already exist. Second priority is the quality of the identity. Does the digital identity give you access to a range of meaningful opportunities in your sort of daily lives? Does it keep me and my data secure? Does it protect me against discrimination, exclusion, harms? And does it give me control over how my identity and related data is used? There are also tricky questions involved. How do you balance multiple goals? An individual's right to privacy. At the same time, a nation's need to protect its citizens. So tricky questions like this need greater dialogue and cooperation between businesses, governments, and civil society across industries, across regions, and across communities. At the forum, we offer a space to have some of those conversations, define what good looks like, and try and move action towards that good destination. Thank you, Manju. Prime Minister, I think it's fair to say that Estonia has been somewhat of a pioneer in these areas within Europe, but also globally. Why don't you share with us the experiences that your country made with digital identity, please? Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to share our experiences. And I try to say some words from Estonian side as well. I know that the topic of this event is impact of global economy, but I think that Estonian's case is a useful example. Digital identity is one of the cornerstones of the digital economy. Every digital service that has legal consequence or business value needs a secure digital identity. In Estonia, we decided to solve this challenge already 20 years ago through shared uniform national identity platform, which built not just for all public services, but also for the whole economy. Since the ID card, like this one we have in Estonia, are the mandatory in Estonia, it gave many companies an automatic customer base making it profitable to build new services on it so digital identities can support new business generation and also innovation. When you think about the economic benefits of having a digital ID, you first think of all the time that you can save. With trustworthy secure digital identities, you can build many digital services that make your life much more easier. In Estonia, digital IDs are used for doing taxes, e-voting, e-prescription, e-panking, e-school, and most importantly for signing any documents digitally. These are just some and few examples. Digital signing alone saves every working Estonia at least an estimated five business day barrier, amounting to a total efficiency gain of 2% of GDP annual, as they say time is money. Finally, in Estonia, we have unlocked another value from digital identity. In 2014, we started issuing our digital identity as e-residency to people from all corners of the world. The aim was to attract new global users for the digital services offered by Estonian companies and also government. There are almost 50,000 e-residents from 168 different countries currently. The number is growing quite fast. We are growing as an economy faster than we otherwise would. Because we have embraced digital business space, strong identity has been key to making it possible. Thank you. Thank you, Prime Minister. And ladies and gentlemen, you can tell that the Prime Minister is confident in the safety and security of the residency system because he just held his card into the camera to a global audience. So that's a very good proof point. James, this press conference is also dedicated to the launch of a report that your Institute, the McKinsey Global Institute, has done on the economic value of digital identity. Why don't you run us through a little bit of the key findings of that report, please? Well, thank you. And thank you very much. And also, I should say, it's always a pleasure to be next to Prime Minister Rataskas. I've actually experienced the digital economy in Estonia every single time I've gone there. It truly is remarkable. But we've just completed an extensive study of the issue of digital identity. And this is the result of work and research that we do, but also in collaboration with several foundations that have been part of this journey to really understand what the potential opportunities are for the world. And you'll hear from Mike here shortly, who was partly involved in some of the research that we did. Let me just highlight a couple of things from what we found in the research that we did. One of them is to dimensionalize a little bit more what Manji just described around the people who don't have any ideas at all. And also, we have these partial ideas that limit their participation. First of all, these people are mostly in the developing world, but also in the developed economies, which was interesting. We looked deeply in about seven countries, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, the US, and also the UK. Part of that was to try to understand a very diverse set of countries that have quite different challenges when it comes to identification and being able to fully participate. I should also emphasize, when we say fully participate, we're thinking about people in several roles. People as consumers, who may not be able to fully purchase and function as consumers in the things that they want to do. People as workers, where it's quite extraordinary how, quite often, when people are trying to get employment and prove who they are, where they live, and what they're capable of, the issue of identification comes up. People as micro-entrepreneurs, when they're trying to set up businesses, often very small businesses. People as citizens, when they're trying to get access to government services that they are entitled to as taxpayers in their economies. But also people who have rights and assets and ownership of various things. And quite often, women suffer the most on this issue, by the way. So all these are different ways that people participate. So when you look at these, we examined something like over a hundred use cases and cases of what, in what ways could digital ID actually help these instances across all these different countries. And we found that a few things. First of all, the economic impact is actually quite substantial. Across these countries, the range of impacts range from about 3% to as much as 13% of GDP of these countries. And especially when you look at countries in the emerging, in the developing economies, which is quite substantial. The numbers, of course, are a little bit less when you look at some of the more advanced economies like the United States. The other striking thing about this economic impact, this by the way, this is the economic impact by the year 2030, if in fact we embrace these technologies and digital IDs. And something like the use cases I just described come to full fruition. And there's adoption and usage of them. The one thing to note about the economic opportunities that half of it accrues to the users themselves, to the individuals themselves. And this comes through, again, participation. It comes through financial inclusion. The World Bank has denominated that something like 1.7 billion people could be more financially included and participative in a financial inclusion sense if they had access to digital IDs. So half the impact goes to the users, but also impact goes to the institutions involved. Because when people function as workers, citizens, consumers, and so forth, there's often a counterpart that they're interacting with. It's either a government or a company or some other institution. And those institutions benefit mostly through cost reductions. They save money on fraud and risk and other issues. And so they also get some benefit from all of this. Now, of course, at the end of the day, full implementation of these issues requires that we think about what a good ID looks like. It also requires that we think pretty hard about how do we mitigate some of the risks that come with these. Because we have to keep in mind that digital identifications are often what you might call dual-use technologies, that in the hands of misuse, it would be quite easy to misuse these. But I'm sure we'll talk about these aspects that we need to think about as we go forward. Thank you, James. Anandan, I think India has quite a lot of experience with digital identity. But I have to put you on a spot a little bit and ask you not only to talk about the positive examples there, but also about some of the learnings, because it has been a journey with digital identity. And India, please. Yeah, thank you. And it's great to be here at the launch of the McKinsey Report. India started its digital ID journey exactly 10 years back because of the need to make its delivery of public services more efficient, because the lack of IDs was leading to a lot of fraud and so on. It was also an inclusion measure, because many people didn't have birth certificates or any form of ID. And they needed some ID to migrate, to travel, to get a job, and so on. So I was asked by the then Indian government to join. I joined them in July of 2009. And I worked in the government for about four and a half years, built a very modern digital ID platform using biometric deduplication. And when I stepped down in March of 2014, there were about 600 million people on the platform. Today there's about 1.2 billion people on the platform. And we have had two different governments, but the project has been very successful in both governments. And the people use it for a wide variety of things. They can use it to open a bank account, get a mobile connection or identity when they go to the plane. So it really has many, many uses. It's also linked to the financial system. So you can link your ID to a bank account. And today about 600 million people have IDs linked to the bank accounts. And just in the last five years, 300 million new people have opened bank accounts using things like the ID. So it's also a very important tool for financial inclusion. And because the ID is linked to the bank account, you can do a direct cash transfer, a direct benefit transfer into people's accounts. And India today runs the world's largest direct cash transfer program running into billions of dollars into a few hundred million people's bank accounts. And it's all electronic straight through processing. Nobody touches the money. It goes straight into the account. And that's been very successful. So I think this has demonstrated the use of the ID. And the ID, as you said, we had a lot of concerns about privacy and security and so on. And the matter went up to the Indian Supreme Court. The Indian Supreme Court held that the Indians do have a fundamental right to privacy. But it could be circumscribed in a second circumstances. And then they upheld that Adhar meets that privacy requirement. So I think it's been a 10-year journey to get here. But this is clearly the largest scale implementation of digital ID anywhere in the world. And its benefits are there. We obviously have to manage the risk. We have to manage the risk of privacy. We have to manage the risk of security. We have to make sure that there are no data losses or data breaches. Many people were concerned that perhaps these IDs would be used for surveillance kind of activity. But the law that governs the ID as well as the Supreme Court judgment makes it clear that it cannot be used for any other purpose. So a lot of purpose limits have been put on the ID to make sure that it meets everybody's needs. So I think, as James has said, there is so much potential in ID. In the coming years, you're going to see more and more use cases of the ID, which I think will show even more the need why people around the world need ID. One last thing, I think in developing countries, it's a leapfrog. Because in Western countries, people have IDs. And they need a digital ID. In developing countries, people have no ID. And we're using this technology or opportunity to give everybody a digital ID. Thank you. Thank you very much, Nandan. 1.2 billion is definitely an impressive number for people with this digital idea. Mary, we heard these two use cases from Estonia and India. But I know that you have more insights into use cases of digital ID, and it would be fantastic if you could share with the audience, please. Great. And I'll also talk just a little bit about the role that businesses would play with this, too. I think you've heard a lot of great examples of use cases from the previous three speakers, from very individual ones in a city setting to provision of services, to provision of education. And each of these are valid. And each of these provide the kind of economic benefit. Perhaps the thing that I would focus on, given my role in leading Microsoft philanthropies, is thinking about the importance and the need for digital identity for people who are on the move. The 75 million or so people who are on the move today, that number will continue to grow. And for many of these people whose identity is captured by a piece of paper that is easily lost or stolen, they then become, in essence, stateless. And the ability of people then as they traverse across a boundary to provide and to receive any kind of services related to education or to health or to registration is severely hampered. So the importance of providing this kind of identity in a digital form for people who are on the move, I think, is a use case which we are quite interested in. You may know that we, along with a number of others, were founding members of ID 2020. And this organization started one year ago, has come together to create, essentially, a coalition of founding members to come together to create, in essence, a platform by which digital identity can be created that could be used by others. So the goal here is not to have one particular use of technology or one particular application, whether it be a fingerprint or iris scan or facial recognition, but to, in essence, build a set of standards by which digital identity could be developed in many different use cases using many different kinds of platforms and many different kinds of applications. And if we are able to do that and create this sort of standard, it will enable the prevalence and the use of digital identity across countries, across NGOs, across use cases. So for us, thinking about the role that companies can play in helping to submit technology to create the standards is really critical for the growth and the use of digital identity. So the technology piece, I think, is important and an important role for companies to play. I also think it's important to leverage our own experience in developing similar technologies, which we have required to be secure. So whether it's financial services, whether it's health services, whether it is enterprise data on Microsoft services, all of these have been developed with use of technology and learnings along with them that need to be leveraged as we think about this technology as well. And then finally, I'd say, particularly in the technology sector, as we go into areas like artificial intelligence and enhanced reality, we know that there are ethical standards that we have learned from from our work in privacy that need to be adapted and even taken further as we think about how this technology is driven forward. So as we're developing the technology, we also need some ethicists and some philosophers and some historians to be alongside of us so that we ensure that as the technology is developed, it is developed in a way in which we can ensure ethical use. So those are how I sort of think about broadly our contribution into this work. Thank you, thank you, Mary. Mike, Omedia Network has invested in a whole range of activities in digital identity. You've given grants, you invested in various portfolios. You're definitely supporting the work of the World Economic Forum in that space. How would you describe the role of investors here? And I guess my second question would be, I know Omedia Network is very conscious and concerned about privacy issues tied to digital identity. Maybe you could speak to that as well, please. No, that's great, thank you. And I think they'll tie together, in fact, those two questions, because we're not just an investor, we're an impact investor. And so we're looking for a sort of a positive impact from that work. We're pleased to have partnered with McKinsey, you know, among others on this. And I think we, taking a step back, we look at this as a movement that's just getting started around, you know, there's finally an SDG around identity and that sort of thing. And so this is a chance to learn from other areas like the education sector, which in the first round of MDGs was really focused on access and not so much on quality. This is an opportunity for us to think about access and quality in the same go and not have to come back and redo it. So we talk a lot about not just any ID, but what we call good ID. And good ID is an ID that is, could be both government issued or comes from your virtual digital trail or a combination of that identity and your digital trail together. And an ID that really fundamentally empowers and protects the individual and provides agency and control for the individual over the use of that identity. And as we've heard examples of already out of Estonia and India, that is absolutely possible to do and imperative to do. And so this gets a little bit to our thesis as an investor, which is to say, if you go to the McKinsey study, 50% of the value accrues to individuals and the consumer benefit. That value is only gonna accrue in an environment where there is trust. And if there is no trust, and I was struck by the Edelman releasing their new trust barometer at this event, then that benefit cannot really be realized. And so there's a lot of potential value that can be left on the table. And where does trust come from? And it comes from control, privacy, agency, and confidence that the data and the identity that you've signed up for is not gonna be exploited. So it could be leaving a significant portion of that economic benefit that James described on the table. So we think there's a thesis there for both investors and policymakers to be followed on both sides of it. But on the policy side, you heard Nandan describe already some of the rulings in India that have clearly articulated that right to privacy. And we found an investable thesis around looking at startups, for instance, that allow individuals to own, and sometimes not own, but just control and permission the use of their, the use of their information and their data, and their digital identities and their digital wallets. And so we've invested in companies like DigiMe, which allow you to control and manage the flow of data and decide who you wanna share it with. And it doesn't get asserted unless you've asserted that data. Company called Learning Machine, which does a lot of work with credentials, that works with institutions to issue credentials into your own digital wallet, tied to your identity, that then you can again permission out. So we think there are investable opportunities out there against this privacy thesis that will become more important as the architecture comes into play from the other side. Thank you, Mike. Mindful of the time, let's open the floor for questions and answers from the members of the media. If you could indicate whether you have a question. There's a gentleman there in the front row. If we could get the microphone over there. Please identify yourself for the sake of online. Dawei Peng from China News Service. It's my first year here in Dallas. So I have two questions. First question for Mr. Maniakar. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit more about China's situation because as we heard this afternoon, Vice President Wang, he mentioned that when it comes to technological innovation, people should emphasize on the security of all mankind. So do you think that China could balance the security and privacy with making values at the same time when it comes to digital identity or digital economy? And my second question maybe goes to Mr. Prime Minister and Mr. Maniakar. Because nowadays in some countries, there was a debate that whether people should continue the cooperation with Chinese technological companies. What's your point of view on this issue? Do you think that China or Chinese companies still remain as partners rather than rivals or I mean the enemies or competitors? Thank you. Thank you very much. And I think that's a great follow-up question to what we discussed. How do you balance the security and the privacy aspects and I think we could hear from James first but also Nandan, I think you have to add some learnings there from India and after that, Prime Minister, the question on kind of basically global cooperation in that space, I think with the focus on China would be interesting. Please, James. Yeah, thank you for the question. I actually think the question you posed to China is a question for all countries. I think every country is gonna have to find a balance between protecting and building the trust that's required for the assistance to be fully functional. And that's gonna incorporate, I think as Mary said, very thoughtfully, considerations of ethics or privacy of even having philosophers and others who think about values and what matters to individual sense of agency is gonna be fundamentally important. And of course there's always gonna be tensions between that and questions about security. But I think if this is gonna be good for people everywhere and for individuals in particular, which I think should be the reason we should be thinking about these systems, then I think issues of trust should be paramount and issues of protecting people's privacy should be paramount. And so I would hope that all countries, not just China, but all countries think and navigate that very, very thoughtfully. Otherwise, we risk not giving too many people. I mean, Manji just described us, we have somewhere between four and five billion people who have none or some partial ID who are not fully able to participate. And I think it would be unfortunate if we didn't enable those people to fully participate in the economy and as citizens. Thank you, James Nandan. Do you want to add to that place? No, I think in India there was a huge and long debate over the last 10 years. In fact, the other case is the second longest running case in the Indian Supreme Court. So it was really a long case. And I think all these issues got really discussed in great detail. And I think the point James mentioned that, we have a social obligation to include a billion people. We need to give them access to services. We need to give them a ladder for their future and so on. And obviously, whenever you bring in new technology that are risks of privacy, data breaches, security, surveillance, I think societies have to figure out how to balance this out. And I think India is in a good place. The laws are there. The Supreme Court is very looking at it very closely. Civil society is looking at it closely. So I think it's a good balance that has been established between the benefit of something like this and making sure that the risks are averted or mitigated. Thank you for your question. I would like to give maybe a little bit larger or general overview about the cooperation between the different countries across the border and also the cooperation between public and private sector. If I am talking about the private sector in Estonia, then I could say our ecosystem is very good between public and private sector. And it's very positive, and we are very happy about that. But I think if we are talking the digital identity, there are these kind of three main cornerstones. This is trust. You must be always transparent. And it is the data security. And these are, I think, the main points if we are talking the cooperation also in international level. Thank you. Thank you. There's a question from Jennifer, please. Thanks. Jennifer Shanker from the Innovator Magazine. So there has been talk, even by the forum itself, I think came out with a report a couple of years ago that talked about the opportunities for private sector businesses to become the brokers of data. And specifically in this case, I think in the forum's report, it was the banking or financial services sector. But there's also movement with the telcos to also insert themselves in this area of managing people's digital identities and their data. How do you see this playing out across the world? Do you think in some places it will be countries and other cases it will be private sector, a mix of both? And then what sort of outside governance system needs to be put in place? Because in some places, governments may abuse and other places private companies will abuse. And they need to be held accountable. So ideas on how to make that work? Thank you. Who wants to take a stab at the question? James? Sure. I think it's actually how this gets implemented is, I think, one of the fundamental questions. And that's, I think, what you're getting at. And I would, I think there's a, there must be at least a few principles we apply. I think the principle should be that if in fact this is intended to be an inclusive mechanism for people to participate, then whichever entities are providing the platforms should have that as their goal. Now, in some cases, private corporations will have that. In some cases, they may not. But I think in any case, there's got to be some governance framework above it all that allows transparency, auditing, accountability, through it all. So if in fact we end up with a system where private sector is doing it, there may be good reasons for that. They may have made the investments. They may have the reach. They may have the technology. But even then, we should still have some accountability mechanism that allow transparency, review, auditing of some kind. So I guess I'm agnostic as to who does it, who actually implements the systems. But it seems pretty clear that somebody, usually government, who has oversight over the system, should have some ability to have oversight and transparency and review of how it works. And if I could just comment, I think you have to really separate the question of data from the question of governance. So there is a tremendous amount of data that sits in private sector. And perhaps for financial services might be a really good example, and a tremendous amount of data that sits in the public sector and should stay in the public sector. And the data is quite sensitive in all of these cases. So in my mind, it wouldn't make sense for a single entity, or whether it's nonprofit, public or two, to sort of manage and control all of that. But we should talk a lot about transparency of various data sets, and what data sets should be combined or not combined, and how they might be anonymized or not anonymized. So I think you have this question of what data sets you want to put together for what uses, under what rules of consent. And in my mind, it cannot be a single entity that manages and controls the breadth of the topics we're talking about, although some combination of data sets will be key in order to provide the services that we're talking about that are owned by different entities now. Thank you, Mary. Prime Minister, do you want to add? Yeah, only some remarks. If we are talking, for example, AI, then we need very concrete regulations. We need very concrete laws. For example, if we are talking the e-medicine, if we are talking the defense industry, everywhere we could see today that they are going and improving and investing in AI very strongly about controlling the data. I am totally agreeable about transparency. But in Estonia, for example, the question is, who owns your data? Who owns my personal data? And we have this kind of once-only principle that we are giving our data only once. But the owner is this person who is giving this data. For example, myself, if we are talking the e-medicine, of course my doctor, he or she, could check my data. But always I could look who was checking my data. And I think that it's very important that the data must own this concrete person. Thank you. Prime Minister, Mike, you want to add? Yeah, just one note to say that, well, there is no global governance framework in place, obviously, for this. And there's been multiplicity by use cases, by whether it's state or private, that sort of thing. In the realm of identity, there is a set of principles voluntarily agreed to that the World Bank spurred, which is, I think, a starting point for a conversation around the governance of identity and related data. That's not, I'm sure, the final stakeholder forum in which things will be adjudicated, nor the final set of principles that will come out. But it's a starting point where a number of actors from the international development community and the private sector and everything in between have started to come together to think about what principles should be governing the use of these systems. Thank you, Mike. And I want to point out one thing. One of our co-chairs, Mohamed Mohamoud, actually, who spent 20 years of his life in a refugee camp, he actually does not own any identity papers, and he's here in Davos, and so it's very close, and it's very close, and the camp he's living in, there's 185,000 people who do not have identity, so it's a real, it's real, the problem is real. To end on a lighter note, question to our three American panelists. Have you ever been caught with a fake idea trying to enter a club? There's only one answer to that question, and just no. Okay, okay. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for my wonderful panelists. Thank you for you here in the room. Thank you for your questions, and thank you for watching. Good night. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What's the best book you could write?