Gunnar Nordseth, CEO, Signicat: "E-identity - customers want it, businesses save costs by offering it"

Signicat’s mission is to make electronic ID and electronic signature available in a cost-effective way to private and public sector organisations, enabling improved self-service capabilities, customer interaction and dialogue, as well as process improvements. We provide access to over 20 million citizens with electronic ID in the Nordic Region and will expand access to more than 50 million Europeans during 2013. How does e-identity contribute to the financial health of an organization and what is its role in assessing a company’s return on investment (ROI)?
Gunnar Nordseth: E-identity contributes directly to the financial health of organisations in several ways. It reduces costs associated with paper handling and manual ID-checks, but even more importantly, it makes products and services sold online available and more attractive to both new and existing customers.

Our experience shows that customers now expect to finalize all transactions online without resorting to printing out and signing papers, including those transactions that used to require manual ID-checks.

E-identity also contributes in more indirect ways to the financial health of a company. For instance, strong authentication will contribute to reducing the risk of fraud and identity theft.
Lastly, it also addresses core concerns, including compliance, money laundering acts and so on.

In what way can e-identity solutions improve an organization’s operational business processes?
Gunnar Nordseth: E-signature in particular is a key factor to improving operational business processes. We have seen organizations save up to EUR 35 in direct costs 0 per contract when e-signature is used instead ofpen-and-ink, while at the same time reducing time-to-completion. For organizations with several hundred thousand signed contracts each year, this adds up to significant savings.

Using e-identity and e-signature can also contribute to complying with legal requirements, for instance in relation to the authenticity and traceability of financial transactions. One example is a customer using e-signature to ensure the authenticity of payroll lists that are sent from SME businesses to accounting firms.

Lately, we have seen organizations starting to use e-signature to secure the integrity of archived documents. By using Signicat’s services for the long-time preservation of signed documents, the integrity of documents can be assured for time spans of 50 years and more. This is important for many kinds of agreements, for instance in the financial sector.

E--signature for integrity maintenance can be used both with documents that are e-signed by the end user, as well as for scanned images and other types of documents that are not e-signed to start with. In this latter case, the e-signature is applied for the purpose of maintaining the integrity of the document. In the former case, the e-signature both ensures the authenticity of the original signature and the integrity of the document over time.

Could you please identify some of the challenges to cross-border e-business from the perspective of the e-identity issues the latter may face?
Gunnar Nordseth: The European e-identity marketplace is fragmented, and a universal European e-ID is nowhere in sight. This means that a business that offers goods or services outside of its home market has to deal with a multitude of different e-IDs. In the Nordic Region alone, more than 10 e-IDs are currently widely used for e-signature and authentication.

This situation has several consequences: businesses have to ensure the technical integration of widely different e-ID infrastructures, and they also have to enter agreements with all the parties involved. This is both cumbersome and costly, with negative consequences to cross-border e-business.

In your opinion, could aggregating existing solutions in the field of e-ID serve as a solution to the problems arising from the current fragmentation of the global e-ID ecosystem?
Gunnar Nordseth: In the past few years, a new type of e-ID middleware has established itself. This is the e-ID Hub, reflected by Signicat’s European offering. The e-ID Hub lowers the technical barrier for cross-border and multi-ID support by aggregating existing 3rd party e-IDs issued by banks, telcos and governments. The e-ID Hub often adds value-added services such as support for the provisioning of e-ID, long-time archiving and registry look-up on top of the basic e-ID and e-signature services.

Also, what are some of the challenges facing interoperability between e-ID services providers and how can fragmentation in this space be solved?
Gunnar Nordseth: The challenges we have faced are both technical and commercial. The technical challenges are related to different and non-compatible standards, but also to the lack of universally used standards for categorizing e-IDs in different countries. This makes it difficult sometimes to compare the strength of a signature made with a Danish e-ID with one of a signature made with a Swedish e-ID, for example.

In some markets it is necessary for each service provider to enter agreements with all e-ID issuers in order to get access to the market. In other markets, e-ID aggregators like Signicat act as a reseller of access rights, making it much easier for customers to establish themselves in the market.

Pan-European projects like Stork and PEPPOL will likely make it easier to solve interoperability challenges, but the actual implementation of the infrastructures and standards proposed by these projects are still a long way to go. In the meantime, organizations that want to offer e-services in the fragmented European market space can profit from using aggregator services like those offered by Signicat.

In your opinion, what role will e-identity play in the future of e-commerce?
Gunnar Nordseth: The economy is becoming increasingly global, but at the same time, more and more businesses use the “internet” as a distribution channel and growth engine. This generally means that most companies serve customers at a more than an arms length distance. The use of e-ID offers online businesses the opportunity to “know your customer”, onboard “real” customers, secure payments is being done, and not the least, offers huge process improvements such as onboarding, credit checks, risk scores and trust.

E-identity and e-signature will become an indispensable part of doing business online. It is a simple equation really: customers want it and businesses save costs by offering it.