Part 1: Can Self-Sovereign Identity Create a Shared Universe for Supplier Loyalty & Corporate Travel Programs?

Recognizing loyalty used to be so easy. The neighborhood supermarket would give you a piece of plastic you used every time you shopped and you would get a few cents off your groceries.

Now every company wants to be in the loyalty business and wallets and purses are creaking at the seams thanks to being stuffed with increasing volumes of plastic discount cards.

An increasing proportion of our purchases are also being carried out online rather than face-to-face, giving companies wanting to secure loyalty a headache—how can they really identify loyal customers in a verifiable way?

There is also the issue that loyalty schemes are only as good as the information that the companies running them have access to. If you have moved house, had children, changed jobs or started traveling much more frequently, wouldn’t it be sensible for those who can offer benefits to know that?

Nick Price, chair of the Hospitality and Travel Special Interest Group of the Decentralized Identity Foundation, said, “Is it really viable to carry a bigger and bigger wallet full of more and more plastic cards representing the ever-growing number of so-called loyalty programs? Our world as a consumer doesn’t orbit around one single company so it would be better from a consumer’s point of view to consolidate all that loyalty into one thing.”

What’s Self-Sovereign Identity?

Loyalty seems ripe for reinvention and a technology-based approach known as self-sovereign identity or decentralized identity may provide the answer.

Many services on the web require you to identify yourself before you can use them and many individuals do so by signing in using their Google or Facebook credentials, giving the big tech companies a huge role in verifying identity online. SSI seeks to wrest power back from the tech giants, giving individuals power over their own identities and letting them share only those elements they wish to, for example to secure a loyalty discount at a hotel.

Whenever the terms “technology” and “decentralized” appear in a sentence together you know that the term “blockchain” cannot be far behind and so it is here.

Many of the discussions around self-sovereign identity focus on blockchain, the cryptographically secure digital ledger of transactions or assets that is owned, managed and verified not by a single corporation but by everybody in the chain. Provide a digital passport or loyalty card to a trusted player in the chain and then everyone in the chain can rely on it.

The appeal of blockchain, however, is that it offers immutability. “Once you have established the record it can’t be changed and you can determine the chronology of the record. You can determine that it hasn’t been changed or, if it has been changed, when it was changed and who did it,” said Price.

Ownership of the chain—or the fact there is none—is also key. “The nature of the public blockchain is that no one person controls the chain and no single person can take advantage of it,” said Don Birch, CEO of Simard, a company using the blockchain to provide a decentralized marketplace for travel and building offerings around smart contracts in the corporate world.

Blockchain isn’t the only game in town. Other technologies for SSI do exist—one such is called Keri or Key Event Receipt Infrastructure, which is based on secure chained data structures, minus the ledger.

Regardless of the platform itself, TravelScrum co-founder and chairman Gene Quinn believes SSI functionality offers travel companies tantalizing opportunities to know their customers better and recognize loyalty, but the individual him or herself controls access to their personal data and preferences.

“What this technology allows us to do as individuals is to mete out portions of who we are and create a bidding process—bidding for us,” Quinn said.

Price agreed.

“Loyalty programs today are clumsy things that are typically available for everyone: from the customer who shops once a day to the customer who shops every day. And [that one-size-fits-all model] is effective for neither of them,” he said.

The future will be different.

“If I have just bought a Tesla it would make sense if a hotel might want to give me free Tesla charging with my next six months’ hotel bookings. They can’t do that today because they can’t see that interaction,” he said.

He cites another example of a frequent traveler who in one year stays 50 nights with Marriott and just one night with Hilton.

“Hilton would look at them and not give a discounted rate,” said Price. “If Hilton knew [there were] 51 nights [in play], they would surely have a different view. They would want to win their business.”