Guest Opinion: Hard Yaka reveals how its $30 million partnership with Yoyo will make self-sovereign identity relevant

| November 6, 2018 | By

Hard Yaka is building a globaliD framework that will create the most secure, trusted, and private identity for every online user. After announcing a $30 million partnership with Yoyo, they reveal how this is going to transform how businesses and retailers interact with their customers.

Guest Opinion: Hard Yaka reveals how its $30 million partnership with Yoyo will make self-sovereign identity relevantLtoR: Hard Yaka founder and CEO Greg Kidd, Dwolla CEO Ben Milne and Forrester principal analyst Brendan Miller speaking at Money 2020 (October 2018)

Over the past year, we’ve talked plenty about the globaliD framework and how it’s a welcome upgrade to the existing status quo when it comes to security, privacy, portability, and general user empowerment.

In a sense, having a digital identity designed from the ground up in the spirit of the Internet will have a profound social and economic impact on our interconnected, globalized reality.

And having recently returned from Money2020 in Las Vegas,   we received an incredible amount of validation from our approach.

A year ago, it felt like the conversation was just getting started. Fast forward to Vegas, we heard many of the terms we defined in our white paper, such as “attestations”, being exchanged by businesses, panelists, and other startups at the biggest US fintech conference of the year.

We’ll be talking plenty more about our vision in the coming months as we get closer to the re-launch of the globaliD app — in particular, some unique aspects of our model that will truly reflect what it means to build an identity layer for the Internet. But envisioning a new way to do things is only half the challenge.

The other half is ensuring that a self-sovereign identity is practical and useful for the end users – creating a portable, digital identity that is relevant for the people that matter most.

That’s why we’re so thrilled about the $30 million partnership deal between Hard Yaka and Yoyo, Europe’s fastest growing payments and loyalty app. Launched in London in 2013, Yoyo has been able to master tokenized identity and created rich data around customer ID, based on loyalty preferences.

Yoyo is essentially Europe’s version of Wechat Pay.

Having the benefit of joining the party late, the Chinese market leapfrogged card networks straight to digital payments. Last year, mobile payments volume in China hit a staggering $12.8 trillion.

Compare that to the US market, where Forrester expects mobile payments volume to triple to $282.9 billion by 2021.

Western markets continue to lag, but the trend is clear. And this latest deal with Yoyo puts globaliD’s digital identity framework at the forefront of this massive transition happening in global payments.

In the longer term, this will have a transformative effect on how businesses and retailers interact with their customers.

Just as the World Wide Web gave companies a means of directly interacting with their users, a portable identity will allow companies to create a direct economic relationship with their patrons.

Today, Yoyo pays their participating merchants from their bank account to theirs. In the future, these transactions will occur directly from the customer ledger to the merchant ledger, bypassing existing bank and payment rails, eliminating the middlemen and consequently, the fees.

This setup also presents the opportunity for merchants to reward customers in new and innovative ways.

Yoyo chairman Alain Falys told Forbes:

“Digital identity, enriched with consumer purchasing data and loyalty preferences, has been the cornerstone of the Yoyo proposition to consumers and retailers. It is only natural that we would team up with Greg Kidd and his Hard Yaka team to embed his vision of a globaliD useable across all channels into Yoyo’s proven, highly secure and scalable technology platform.”

“Our deep partnership will generate a boost to the globaliD movement that will shape the future of the global consumer market and will also disrupt the status quo in payment by giving more choices to consumers and retailers.”

Yoyo also published a video interview with their CEO Michael Rolph on their vision and the need for a consistency of identity: