Another good friend of ours, Katryna Dow, from Meeco.me, brought this case study to my attention and I think that it is well worth sharing.
Piloting Workplace onboarding in Australia – Finding the real benefits of SSI.
With a growing focus on data driven efficiency and digitisation, digital identity using SSI and Verifiable Credentials was looked at, to reduce costs and risks associated with personal data management and improve data privacy and security practices.
Governments across the world are reconsidering society’s relationship with data and looking to enable fairer competition and innovation by “maximising the value of data” while at the same time increasing “trust and protection”. The first ever Australian Data Strategy is a powerful example of what governments hope to achieve. Building on the Consumer Data Right, it follows the European Data Strategy, which aims to “provide control to citizens and trust to companies”.
Against this backdrop of empowered data sharing, it’s clear there will be increased demand for services that enable individuals and public and private sector organisations to share data in a way that delivers efficiency and convenience, while protecting privacy and improving security.
Additionally, the focus will be on “trust” aligned to an increasing need to be able to verify the source of data. This also means being able to provide tamper proof evidence that the data has not been altered. This applies to people, entities and things. Trust means knowing that there is a real person, organisation or approved device generating and sharing the data. With the rise of fraud and identity theft alongside the low cost to generate bots, the ability to prove an identity will be as valuable as the identity itself.
Fast Tracked Workforce Onboarding with Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials
In 2021 Meeco (https://meeco.me ), together with a digital identity exchange, state government and an engineering and technical services company, ran a pilot to demonstrate the commercial benefits of digital identity and verifiable credentials in workplace onboarding. The pilot enabled a skilled workforce to onboard with a new employer through a fully digital process. Instead of presenting originals of physical documents, the employees digitally asserted their identity and provided a digital driver licence, in the form of a verifiable credential, all from a wallet application on their phone.
Outstanding Efficiency Gains
There were significant gains across the whole onboarding process.
· The end-to-end onboarding process, covering license and identity credentials checking shrank from three days to just 30 minutes, a 99.3% reduction in time.
· The time for a new employee to provide the necessary information went from 48 hours to 30 minutes, a 98.9% reduction in time.
· 100% of participants (both HR teams and workforce members) found the pilot process easier than the current process.
· Verified the validity of the data, thus improving trust and significantly reducing fraud.
In addition to significant efficiency gains, the pilot provided a powerful illustration of the improved data privacy and security benefits of verifiable credentials and digital identity verification. Moreover, reduced handling of personal data offers additional benefits of reduced data compliance risks and a reduction in associated data management costs.
Its important to show that the benefits of SSI go far and beyond the well-known examples and ‘ease of use’ for the citizens. It is important that we do not under sell SSI.
How can we build this awareness so that the economic case for SSI is clear? Without showing the benefits and quantifying the outcomes, it will be difficult to establish the financial models that need to underpin SSI and help make it truly transformative.
Meeco wrote the case study about the pilot and its full results, you can read the case study here.
I should like to thank Katryna and Yolanda Lopez (also from Meeco) for all the effort involved in the case study and this blog.