In any NEW business relationship WHO you’re doing business with requires checks and balances (performed as part of the due diligence process to mitigate risk). The initial ‘gentleman’s handshake’ to demonstrate trust and confidence in who you are doing business with has been replaced by digital sharing of documents and virtual introductions and communities replacing the old boys' network of previous centuries. The digital identity conveys the physical trust in bricks and mortar of corporate premises and the physical production of company ledgers and leatherbound records of accounts. The way this digital data is stored and shared can lead to control risk, privacy issues and fraud so some form of anonymising & securing data is part of building out solutions.
Think of a paper document proof of identity, you need the letterhead on that document to prove its source and therefore whether you can trust the information in that document – you need proof in a new business relationships but trust is built over time – and can be built up and multiplied in a network effect.
Using blockchain provides PROOF that a document has not been tampered with (verified)and OBJECTIVE while the TRUST in the document is more SUBJECTIVE and depends on the reputation of the issuer and the relationship with the viewer.
“ The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” - Aristotle
The strength of Umazi lies in the network effect and the sharing of data and trust but you cannot anonymise a credential without effectively reissuing it and therefore becoming the source so how are we achieving one without the other?
Anonymity can be secured by amalgamation but the value of that data is in the sum of the individual parts – a community of trusted business relationships.
Our Umazi scorecard augments public records such as companies house which have no need to be anonymised (the value within these records in fact lies in the public sharing and viewing of these records) alongside pooled data to provide shared anonymity to support a named validation from a third party and add the weight of approval. Effectively this augments each cryptographically verified credential with a validated group rating without effectively resissuing a credential. The data accessed via the secured Umazi platform ALWAYS remains under the control of the client and the individual components of any pooled anonymised validations are only revealed with the permission of each individual validator.
