If you’re using Salesforce and considering implementing Verifiable Credentials, you’ve come to the right place.
(Not using Salesforce? You’ve still come to the right place.)
Verifiable Credentials Management (VCM) is the New CRM
Verifiable Credentials require significant staging and management before, during, and after the three stages of the VC lifecycle: issuance, holding, and verification.
That management is called VCM — VC’s analog to CRM. Credential Master is an enterprise-class VCM, built using the power of Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM.
The 5 Elements of VC Management
Managing VCs involves more than simple interactions between Alice and Bob. A lot more.
To implement VCs, five elements of VC administration must be addressed, one way or another:
Permissioning & Auditing
- Which employees, departments, or systems can issue which kinds of VCs?
- Who can make which kinds of changes?
- Who did what, when?
1
Staging
- Where is the source data? How will it be pulled together for VC issuance? How will you preview VCs prior to issuance?
- How will you ensure VCs are issued to the correct people? What ID proofing and security is in place, and how will you know it has been adhered to?
- Where will you manage issuance policies? (schemas, credential definitions, governance frameworks, internal policies, entitlements, expiration, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service)
- How can you present to Holders their “Potential Credentials”? (credentials they’re entitled to, but not yet issued)
- Which processing service(s) will you use and how will you manage it/them? Which wallet/storage options will you offer? How can you avoid vendor lock-in?
2
Data-Driven Workflow Automation
- How can you automate and batch the offering, issuance, expiration, revocation, and re-issuance of thousands of VCs? Millions?
- How will you handle issuance and verification delays, exceptions, rejections, and expirations at scale?
- How will you automate the verification and response to thousands or millions of proof presentations?
3
Interactions with Holders
- How will you communicate with Holders, and help those having problems?
- How will you permission, control, and report on communications with Holders, across departments and employees?
- How can you utilize VCs to authenticate Holders when they call in, log in, or walk in?
4
Recording, Reporting, & Analytics
- Where will you record and manage all Holder-related data and interactions, such as personal info, source data, VCs issued, verifications, communications, revocations?
- How will you report and analyze your event data?
- How will you discover which VCs are up for renewal this month?
5
Staging
- Where is the source data? How will it be pulled together for VC issuance? How will you preview VCs prior to issuance?
- How will you ensure VCs are issued to the correct people? What ID proofing and security is in place, and how will you know it has been adhered to?
- Where will you manage issuance policies? (schemas, credential definitions, governance frameworks, internal policies, entitlements, expiration, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service)
- How can you present to Holders their “Potential Credentials”? (credentials they’re entitled to, but not yet issued)
- Which processing service(s) will you use and how will you manage it/them? Which wallet/storage options will you offer? How can you avoid vendor lock-in?
2
Interactions with Holders
- How will you communicate with Holders, and help those having problems?
- How will you permission, track, and control communications with Holders, across departments and employees?
- How can you utilize VCs to authenticate Holders when they call in, log in, or walk in?
4
Tackle the five elements of VCM and more with Credential Master.
Credential Master Enterprise Features
- Separate user and departmental roles and profiles, with customizable constraints on functionality, data visibility
- Delegatable authority to issue (or verify) by Agent, VC definition, time/date, count, Holder type, more
- Multi-user approvals prior to initiation of any process (e.g., offering a specific type of VC, like a masters degree)
- All actions logged by initiating user; auditable
- High concurrency user access, with collision detection
Data Management
- Lifecycle management of VC issuance, verification, revocation, expiration and renewal
- Manage schemas, credential definitions, verification definitions
- Manage data sources for attributes of VC definitions, including external systems of record
- Automatic staging of VCs immediately prior to offer, pulling attribute values from source data locations
- Management of all Holder-related data and events
- Manage Holder access and authorization to resources (e.g. systems, devices, doors)
- PII management and encryption; GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA etc. regulatory compliance tools
- Guardianship management (to be built)
- Custodianship management (to be built)
- Support for structured and encoded VC attributes (nesting) (to be built)
- Multi-language/multi-currency support
- Extensible with custom objects
Integrations
- Manage processing service(s), storage
- Management of non-wallet VC storage (e.g. blockchains and databases) (to be built)
- Integration with identity proofing services (to be built)
Automation
- Build custom workflows, macros and automated processes for issuance and revocation
- Dynamic generation of proof requests (determined by Holder presentation) (to be built)
- Event-triggered secure messaging with Holders
- Auto-issue of VCs when connections accepted
- Auto-populate VC attribute values from internal/external data sources prior to issuance
- Proof results, analysis, transformation, forwarding and storage (to be built)
- Reusable presentations for Holder, connection, client application
- Event-triggered execution of internal or external applications
Batch Processing
- Macro, bulk-enabled APIs provide workflow processes via authenticated REST calls
- Batch upload source data, auto trigger populate and issue VCs
- Batch creation of Holder records
- Batch connection offers, VC offers
- Batch monitoring and reporting of VC Offers
- Batch re-issue expiring VCs, batch revocation (to be built)
- Scheduled batch processing for all Issue activities, for staggered delivery
- Batch secure messaging with Holders (to be built)
Secure 2-way interactions with Holders*
- P2P messaging
- Authentication (call in, walk in, log in)
- Voice and video (to be built)
- File exchange (to be built)
- Obtain consent (to be built)
- Polling, voting (to be built)
*For wallets that support it
- Detailed reporting of VC offers, issuances, verifications
- Detailed exception reporting and automation triggers (to be built)
- Detailed usage analytics for Agent / organization by date and Processor action/event
- Hundreds of analytics/reporting plugins available
- AI-powered analytics (Salesforce Einstein, IBM Watson)
- Configurable reports, dashboards, charts, graphs, with exporting
- Advanced search of Holders, issuances, verifications, events, and all other data
- Policy/trust framework adherence
- Pluggable platform for native and external applications
- Advanced features accessible programmatically to COAs (same as previous?)
- Support for multiple Customer Communities to deliver functionality to up to 1M users each
- Automated issuance of tens of thousands of VCs
- Up to one million delegated issuer users (e.g. testing labs issuing COVID-19 test results)
- Throttling of large volume asynchronous processes (to not overwhelm processing services)
- Thousands of concurrent verifications with sub-second processing times
- World-class perfrmance and up-time, with all the robustness and reliability of the world’s #1 CRM
The VC Stack
The VC Stack considers VCs as the foundational building block for SSI, rather than identity, blockchain, or anything else. It organizes VCs into four essential functions: Applications, Management, Processing, and Storage.
This separation clarifies product functions and vendor roles, expands administrative capabilities, reduces vendor lock-in, lessens the impact of changes in VC standards and technology, and enables service providers to focus on what they do best. Learn more here.
All Organizations Will Need Some Form of VCM
As VC adoption becomes ubiquitous, all organizations will need some form of VCM to interact digitally.
Unlike CRM, there is no “spreadsheet” work-around for VCs; the variety, complexity, and power of VCs—with the authentic data payload they carry, and the new authentic connections they enable—requires sophisticated tools.
To manage the VC lifecycle, you’ll need a VCM. To implement VCs at scale, you’ll need Credential Master.
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