Fintech expert Leda Glyptis, a true Sibos Insider, is a resident blogger for Sibos 2021, offering her unique take on this year's event. This blog is part of a series released daily throughout Sibos week.</em></p> I have 150 Norwegian krone in my wallet. It’s been there, mocking my immobility throughout lockdown.Why is it even there?I spent two years going back and forth to Norway, for work.Norway. One of the most mature, API-first digital economies of the world. With ID.me a highly interoperable digital identity asset. Norway, effectively cashless (I have bought cookies from girl scouts on ApplePay).In that country… I went to the opera and wanted to pay my friend back for the ticket.And we spent about 15 minutes throwing apps and services at each other that would allow me to transfer cash without touching it.No dice.We were digital ships in the night. We both had phones full of stuff but none of the stuff talked to each other. We needed to download the same stuff or just find a cashpoint. Which is what we did. And then she insisted on giving me my change and now here I am with 150 krone in my wallet.Big deal?No. But an interesting conundrum because there are ways to pay each other across borders and jurisdictions. They can still be slow and expensive. It might take a few days and often costs more than a ticket to the opera. Ask any migrant and they will tell you that most of the time, in most of the places, they needed to club together or wait to accumulate enough money to send home to justify, absorb or share the interchange fee. Or use ‘third parties’.</p> What does this have to do with identity?Everything.Identity goes beyond financial transactions, of course it does. But as Sopnendu Mohanty rightly pointed out in the panel Digital Identity: balancing convenience and trust, digital identity assets are not developed in a vacuum. They mature in a continuum of data policy, verifiable data sources for various credential inputs and proof points, and infrastructure. They also develop hand-in-glove with use cases and, frankly, payments and financial inclusion plays have been driving the conversation for a long time. Not because they matter the most, but because you must start somewhere and your bank already had ways of proving who you are – credentials, proofing mechanics etc – when the journey started. Your bank had already put in the effort of getting to know you and could vouch for you in a way that made it an obvious place to start, and work on portability of an identity asset.</p> Also because finance understands identity as a doorway. A manner of getting access into the system. A doorway that needs to not exclude the poor or the digitally illiterate. It needs to work online and offline. That’s hard enough. But it’s not the whole story.How big is the system?If the vision and the mission is to create a global system, to power access; and limit fraud, money laundering and exclusion, you need interoperability. Standards that are universally accepted and adhered by. Everywhere.Brace yourself for another anecdote. Mine. Not the panellists’.I am a UK resident. I have an NHS issued COVID-19 vaccination pass and, because it is issued for travel, I do not haven an EU one. Is it a problem? You’d think not, but the very diligent receptionist of a small museum in central Athens would not admit me, because her scanner couldn’t read my QR code.What follows is a lecture on the superiority of the NHS certificate as the QR code expires after a period of time reducing fraud, versus the certificates they use in my native Greece that are static, to accommodate for the fairly low digital literacy among the elderly who carry a printout. You solve one problem. You create another.She let me in to shut me up, as you’d expect, and the exhibit was delightful.But the question of ‘where you pitch this’ stayed with me. And as the panellists kept pointing out, you don’t get to pick. You must do the whole thing. You must battle exclusion. You must operate cross-institution and cross-border. You must not leave anyone behind.</p> We don’t start with payments because that’s the start. We start with payments because that’s where we were when the journey started. And we used what we knew to solve the problems we could see.And with every passing year we discover new problems – the pandemic most definitely ‘helped’ with that– and we solve new problems and, no matter which way you slice this, no matter which way you look at identity, what angle you start from, what particular problem you try to solve, everything leads back to the need for international cooperation. Or maybe that’s where the start is, the heart of the matter and the whole ballgame.</p>