Paving the way for mobile digital identity

Antony's role
Innovator, business model creator, corporate fundraiser, product manager, business developer

The Challenge
How can the global mobile operator community provide secure digital identity services?

The solution
Create Etalio, an innovative digital identity that uses the mobile phone as an authenticator. Etalio was intended to compete with the login methods of Google, Facebook and Twitter on websites globally. The unique value proposition was that unlike the alternatives, the data was not mined for advertising purposes. Etalio was launched in 2014 as a globally available service. The key business model innovation was that it would be available at no cost to anyone in the world. Over time, however, mobile operators would be able to claim their domains at any time and deliver them as part of their service package. Etalio was an experiment to see if the mobile industry could combine the free global availability of a start-up service with an eventual per-operator domain model where data protection was maintained.

Results
Etalio won a GLOMO at MWC but clashed at launch with the GSMA Mobile Connect initiative. Mobile Connect was essentially the same technical solution, but without Etalio's business model innovation of global reach from day one to enable adoption. In order not to compete with the operator community within the GSMA standardization body, Etalio was transformed into an Ericsson Mobile Connect compliant solution for operators. Although Mobile Connect was launched by many operators, the lack of global availability and the inability to bring its identity across operators resulted in low usage.

Lesson learned
Even the best ideas can be derailed by politics within industry working groups and standards. Many standards are a compromise between the business and technical objectives of several competitors and end up scoring an own goal.