Blog

Going Further Together

We will shortly be making some exciting announcements about taking YuTru from concept to reality.

Much progress has been made already as we work to create a secure, low-cost, state-of-the-art digital identification consortium with you and other partners. 

Our greatest investment to date has been in coordinating the large number of stakeholders and interests involved. The primary means of engaging stakeholders has been through the scheme operations meetings (SOMs), which provide a qualified and confidential space for discussion amongst consortium partners. These meetings also enable a meaningful two-way dialog to find common understanding and answers to your questions about how YuTru will work for all of us, and its direct benefits to our institutions and customers.

We are also working hard behind the scenes to raise the required startup capital, carry out essential technical research, and undertake vendor discovery amongst a number of other complementary work streams. 

The ground work that is being laid will help all of us to make a giant technological leap ahead of the systems functionality presently available to individual organisations. Together we can go much further and achieve far more for our institutions and customers.

We are striving to adopt a rules-based system that provides the necessary assurances that will allow people to verify their identity once, in one place, and use it anywhere. We will all benefit from a common way to verify customer identity. Our customers will benefit from not having to identify themselves differently every time, at every transaction and every institution. The economy will benefit from the huge reduction in cost and time, and from the inclusion of more people. 

By working together we can access world class, cloud-based digital infrastructure that makes use of multi-modal biometrics, artificial intelligence and machine learning for behavioural metrics, with integration to a global network of risk assessment data services. All of this would be prohibitively expensive if we were all to go it alone.  Establishing common infrastructure means the cost for everyone is greatly reduced, and as YuTru grows, the marginal cost of identification will decline over time.

We envisage an industry-wide system where a big bank can trust an identity verified by a small business. Similarly smaller and new entrants will have the same level of assurance of customer identity as larger institutions. We are working right now to put together all the moving parts to make this a reality. The huge number of variables means it will take some time to complete, but we are sure the rewards will greatly outweigh any single institutional effort.

At YuTru we see great merit in the old Swahili proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. But, if you want to go far, go together. 

We recognise that some of our partners may feel it could be faster to build their own stand-alone digital identification platform in isolation. But for all the reasons outlined above we also know that we can go much further  and achieve much more together with YuTru.

We are working to strict output-based milestones and that means we need all consortium partners to take their seat at the table and remain actively engaged. Over the coming weeks we will confirm ongoing commitments so that all partners can be clear who is in and who is not to  maintain the trust and confidence necessary to advance our joint operational matters. 

Until next time, thank you for your commitment to this exciting joint endeavour to enable all Papua New Guineans to participate in the formal economy.