A digital identity platform that took onboarding from days to minutes.

The situation

Banks and government bodies in Southeast Asia needed a shared way to verify who someone is: reliably, repeatably, and without every institution re-running the same slow onboarding checks from scratch. Customer onboarding measured in days wasn't a technology limitation; it was an architecture problem. Identity information existed, but every institution held its own copy, in its own format, verified its own way.

I led the technical design of a blockchain-based digital identity platform to fix that, built on verifiable credentials and decentralised identity, so a person could be verified once and then prove who they are to any participating institution in minutes.

The constraints

• Two very different stakeholders: commercial banks and government, with different risk appetites, procurement processes, and definitions of success.
• Regulatory alignment wasn't a checkbox at the end; the design had to satisfy financial regulation and data-protection requirements from the first architecture diagram.
• Decentralised identity is easy to whiteboard and hard to ship: key management, credential revocation, and recovery flows all had to work for real users, not just in the protocol spec.

What I did

I owned the technical design from architecture through to a working pilot: the credential model, the trust framework between issuers and verifiers, and the integration points banks and agencies would actually use. That meant sitting between the cryptography and the compliance teams, translating what the technology could guarantee into terms a regulator could assess, and translating regulatory constraints back into architecture decisions.

The pilot was the point: a working system that let a real user onboard once and verify in minutes at the next institution, not a whitepaper about interoperable identity.

The outcome

• Onboarding time reduced from days to minutes for verified users.
• A working pilot delivered, architecture proven with real institutions rather than argued on paper.
• A trust framework banks and government could both operate within, designed for regulatory scrutiny from day one.

Why it worked

Digital identity projects usually die in one of two places: a design that regulators can't accept, or a protocol that users can't live with. Having one person who could hold the cryptography, the product experience, and the regulatory reality in the same head kept the design out of both graves.

This maps to the Technical & product support engagement on the services page, senior technical input alongside your team, from architecture reviews to hands-on delivery.