Starting in 2021 Lucy Yang and I began working under the brand “Identity Woman in Business”. I am the Identity Woman, as I have been since beginning this blog in 2005 and Lucy was the “in Business” with an MBA from the University of Toronto. We both share a passion for ecosystem building having met during the pandemic and the collaborating together with John Walker as the three co-leaders of the COVID Credentials Initiative to help share information and coordinate amongst efforts world wide. Under this modest shingle on the internet we served a range of clients and did some fantastic work. In the summer of 2025 we found we had different industry segments and projects we wanted to focus on. Here is an overview of the work we did together.
Agentic AI Payments:
KYAPay: Toward an Open Payment and Identity Layer for Agentic AI, White Paper, June 2025.
Aviation Trust Framework Development:
Aviation Security Trust Framework Enhancing aviation security through open Verifiable Credential Standards, IATA White Paper, January 2025.
Getting Started with Self-Sovereign Identity
We co-authored this LF Training course. In it folks gain a solid foundation on self-sovereign identity (SSI) with a 360 degree overview of its evolutionary journey, key concepts, standards, technological building blocks, use cases, real-world examples and implementation considerations.
Standards-Based Digital Credentials: Flavors Explained
This publication aims to provide a simplified but technically-accurate overview of the main flavors of standards-based digital credentials (for humans) in the market today to inform policy, business and technical decision makers sitting on the fence regarding what to use for their implementations. Accompanying it is an infographic that provides a high-level overview of the four major flavors and two emerging flavors we are going to cover in the paper. (link to paper)
The first version of this paper, titled “Verifiable Credentials Flavors Explained”, was written in the midst of the pandemic in 2021 and addressed only credentials following the W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs) Data Model. The first version has helped many with their understanding and decisions. However, the market has been evolving rapidly over the past two years. It is time that the paper was updated to reflect the current market condition. And this is made possible through the sponsorship from DRUK HOLDING & INVESTMENTS LTD. (DHI), the investment fund of the Royal Government of Bhutan.
“We (Bhutan) launched our self-sovereign-identity-based national identity system in February 2023 and are currently strengthening the privacy, security and scalability aspects of our solution for the next major release in early 2024. Our standards-based focus requires us to make use of experts like Identity Woman in Business to ensure that we have a great global view to augment our regional view. The research published here is both extremely timely and insightful for our journey ahead. We hope that by sponsoring this project and making the outputs openly accessible, those in similar situations will benefit from the work as much as we do.” – Jacques von Benecke, Chief Technology Officer of DHI”
Community Engagement: W3C VCs vs. ISO mDL
Thanks to the sponsorship of Spruce and the support of many who are working on and/or following the W3C Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and ISO 18013–5 mDL, we have had the pleasure of conducting a community engagement project in the 2022 to find out where the two standards can meet.
By “meet,” we mean finding common ground and alignment so that the two standards can be compatible to the fullest extent for the market to understand their respective unique values, for implementers to build on them with ease, and for users to manage credentials based on them with a good experience. We started the project with some knowledge, but it was more from the W3C VCs side than the ISO 18013–5 mDL. With such awareness, we felt it important to put aside our own judgments of the situation at the time so that we could really engage with those experienced in both, particularly the ISO 18013–5 mDL, and keep our minds as open as possible to learn about mDL.
The entire engagement included a community input session, reviewing relevant existing materials, one-on-one interviews, and a community feedback session. Through these efforts, we were able to conclude the project with some thoughts and recommendations.
| Project Announcement | Community Input Session |
| Relevant Existing Material | Stakeholder Interview Summary |
| Community Feedback Session | Final Thoughts & Recommendations |
Digital Wallet Market Review and Analysis
Having dealt with their own clients’ confusion about how to approach digital wallets (for individuals/persons), MATTR sponsored Identity Woman in Business to conduct an independent study to understand the digital wallet landscape and offer insights and clarity to those looking to formulate their digital wallet strategy and plan.
The project involved reviewing existing market information and analysis, interviews with key players and industry experts, and finally sharing our own insights and recommendations. Two project deliverables are publicly available:
An Interviews Summary Report that aggregates the input from the key players and industry experts interviewed by us. [Medium Post] [Download Here]
A final article/report that shares our take on the current digital wallet market and insights and recommendations for any existing and potential new players.
“As we’ve worked with customers and their wallet users, we’ve seen first-hand how important it is for users to trust where their digital wallets and credentials are coming from, and shared some of our own experiences along the way. While building digital trust has its challenges, we’ve seen many customers successfully lean on their existing brand trust and expert technology partners to create wallet solutions that scale. We are excited to see that the independent study Kaliya and Lucy did reached similar conclusions as well as drew new insights from those working in a different capacity in the industry from us. We hope you will enjoy reading and learning from the work as much as we do.” – Luke McIntyre, Chief Product Officer at MATTR
Open Wallet Foundation First Developer F2F
Operating a global community is challenging. While working group meetings take place on a regular basis, members hardly ever get a chance to meet in person, which is essential to alignment building and momentum generation. Therefore, when that opportunity arises, it is critical that community members are empowered to share, learn, and connect.
We designed and facilitated the first developer face-to-face event for the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF) prior to the fall edition of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in 2023.
The event was attended by over 40 OWF community members in person and 20+ online. It has a structured first half with project presentations. The second half was featured by an engaging and interactive workshop to get community inputs on critical topics raised by the OWF leadership and community members.
Though a short event, it generated great momentum that was carried over to the IIW event and led to further discussions there.
Learn more about the project from the OWF blog post.
California mDL Community Hackathons
We supported the first ever hackathons the CA DMV co-hosted for the community of mobile driving license implementors in partnership with the OpenID Foundation. The hackathons attracted nearly 30 participating teams from 50+ organizations as well as 100+ observers from digital identity and mDL stakeholder organizations.
Unlike conventional hackathons that focus on innovative technical solutions, the CA mDL hackathons were designed to support entities that have real-world mDL use cases and tackle pressing challenges. As a advisor to the CA DMV, Lucy Yang, our Managing Partner, co-led the design and delivery of the hackathons with Gail Hodges, the Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation, who is also an advisor to the CA DMV.
This project marks a significant progress in our work to support organizations and ecosystems that are implementing emerging digital identity standards in the real world. With our deep connection to standard development communities, we believe that our direct involvement in live implementations will enable us to better support the development and iteration of standards.
