The huge-savings curse. Part I.

There is hardly a day passing by without new reports about hundreds of billions or multitrillion cost savings on their way with the Trust Infrastructure. Of course, these are in the right ballparks – and the western world for sure need them also against increasingly politically engineered cybercrime. 

Luckily the identity building verifiable credentials are now high on the agendas in over 100 countries and EU.  

And it is already widely understood that the next layer – employing and empowering AI-agents cannot be done without verifiable credentials.

But when we try to tell the story how this will make life easier for the critically important small enterprises, we meet scepticism.

Can the figures really be so enormous? And even if – how much do I save?  I have seen this before – and usually it means that I must learn something complicated and buy more support. 

And if it is EU and governments driving it, we do remember the GPDR overkill.  I may understand that it is good for the economy – but I hope you understand that it cannot be on my top10 list.  And my SME-association will have to have the same list…

 What should we do?

Should we then (A) not drive the migration on EU- and national levels – but wait and see if the markets will make it happen, (B) do it – but slow down or (C) move ahead faster and take organisation wallets in use from the market right away to get a critical mass of data flowing – and thus open the SME-eyes. 

My vote goes for C. 

What have learned from the past?

When e-banking was introduced for large enterprises in Finland in 1979 and for private customers and SMEs in 1982 it was driven by convenience and curiosity – not cost savings. 

Some twelve years later Bank of Finland showed that the total costs of banks in Finland had been cut in half. This was possible as wide e-banking made it possible to close branches and back-office automation advanced further. 

The study should have pointed out that customers pay every cent of all service providers costs - visibly - or worse – hidden. And that the huge cost savings in banks mostly went to customers if very sharp price competition. 

A typical aspect omitted here - and in most multi-million/billion cost savings - is the productivity increase achieved when employees used less time on cost-accumulating boring routines and more on better paid interesting income generating work. 

Of course, there should also have been a cost saving estimate made for time savings by citizens (German impact evaluation sets this at 25€/hour) when banking became possible – all the way to signing loan agreements – at home and by using employer’s computers. Later in everybody’s pocket and handbag. 

 What can we learn? Would a popular vote by customers have been for e-banking? No – the old cosy branch visits would have won. So – then – and now – all the way to using ID-building credentials from and to EUDI-interoperable wallets – we must drive the change. And now it should be understood that we need politicians to force the public sectors forward – enterprises will then follow.

I will walk through my experiences from e-invoicing, e-receipts, ID-wallets and ID&AI-agents later.