Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And when you realize that, you're like, okay, the root of trust is actually my driver's license or my passport. That's what authenticates and gives trust to every other ID card in my wallet that has my name on it. because they can compare my face to me. They can see that the credential looks legitimate and doesn't look to be counterfeit.
And once they trust that I'm Blake, well, now if I show a health insurance card that has my name on it, and this is why hotels collect your legal ID and your payment every time you go in, because the stakes are quite high.
So from a first principles point of view, I'm like, if the root of trust is our interaction with the government, if everyone in banking and healthcare said, we don't want to be in the credential issuance business, that's what the government does. So you just bring over a government ID, whether it's an ID card, like a driver's license or a passport, and then we'll help you open up a bank account.
I was like, well, that's how the market should work. That whoever builds a consumer-centric digital wallet that is able to be accepted by the federal government, and when you deal with the government, you're at the apex of risk and standards and incentive, then you can go back to the private sector and make it really easy for people to open up bank accounts and to check in at a healthcare clinic.
I'll share one story that's super meaningful to me. When we first started working with VA, you had to go in person when I got out of the military, then we brought it online. And the more that I looked into it, I realized you had to have a presence in basically credit records in order for you to pass these federal standards.
Which I found deeply unfair for folks that effectively like we'd linked access to affluence. And so I went back to NIST and said, hey, you gotta rewrite these standards to give an exception flow to people who are homeless, who live overseas. Like homeless veterans are super important to me, always have been. I wanna serve the most vulnerable.
One of the first gentlemen that we got through is 81 years old. He lives in Tokyo. His wife had Alzheimer's and he hadn't been able to get access to his VA benefits in years because there's no VA facility near him and he can't travel. And at the end of this video chat session, which was this exception pathway that we had, he began to cry. It was just the most touching thing ever.
And so now we've had over 10 million Americans go through that process. The security and the inclusion gains that we drove in the public sector as a shared service, now anywhere where the IDB button's at, if it shows up at a bank or a FinTech or a patient portal,
He would be locked out because most of those organizations use data brokers that are only focused on domestic folks and don't cover a lot of low-income folks. He would now be able to seamlessly prove his identity, so making his life safer and easier than what it was before.
And when I think about what we get to do as a team, one, we get to protect people, which is like my core drive is why I was a soldier. But we also get to give them time back. So Visa in 3D means once your core identity enables more access to financial services and healthcare, that's the next phase. But that will be done. We've already issued 65 million of these portable identities.
On top of that, maybe your Netflix subscription. And think about setting up an Apple TV or a Roku box, how long that takes you to authenticate to every single streaming subscriber. We could just turn that into API calls. So once we know that you're you, you could just tell us your subscriptions.
If we could just fire off and say, hey, Netflix, Hulu, ABC, NBC, Paramount, whatever, is this person a subscriber? Yep, cool. Bound, authorize, out, done. Checking in at Vegas, just as a tactical example to close this out, was always like a happy hour. It'd be like an hour-long wait. And all your friends are there waiting for you. And it's just so demoralizing when you're behind this long line.
And we went to them several years ago and we said, hey, why don't we make this work more like airline boarding passes where you can just do it on your phone? The human agent's the bottleneck. Clearly, it doesn't scale as you're turning over these huge hotels at five o'clock every day. And today, millions of guests use ID.me to check into MGM and to win properties.
And we save them an average of 15 minutes of their life, which is incredible. Sometimes when you look at the time savings of the access gains we drive for federal agencies or like what it means to do authentication before somebody might interact with a different system, we're saving on an annual basis hundreds of years of life that people spend waiting.
And I think with my single life, that's really motivating in terms of giving people time back to spend it in a way that is much higher quality than standing in line at a DMV or at a hotel. And instead, they could be with their family and friends.
So usually, if you're just curious about the world, you can go find examples of folks who've already solved the problem that you're working on, but maybe in a more local way. So what Disney did is really ahead of their time, if you're going into the park, you would authenticate with a biometric with your fingerprint in the magic band.
If you're authenticating to the web app, you'd start with the password, because that's what most people are familiar with. And then If you were on a mobile device and using their native mobile app, you would use whatever is on your phone with like Touch ID or Face ID.
And so I think in many ways, Disney already figured out what's the most convenient way for you to open up your digital wallet based on channel. If you extend that to the call center, you'd be like, what would be the most convenient way, the safest and easiest way for you to authenticate? And so the natural things you use when you're calling someone is your voice and a device and a phone number.
So the more that you can make that be the way that we recognize Patrick. Now, once that's done securely, then there's a host of other things related to it. It could be you've got tickets to the park. You might have a fast lane pass. You might have all these other things. And so...
When I saw what Disney had done, I said, all you really have to do is just make this accessible to everyone, democratize it through a network. And if we can build the same capabilities to allow for these really fluid in-person and online and call center experiences, then everyone will benefit.
Showing 161–180 of 270 · page 9 of 14
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