What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing Digital Credentials: Verix's Blockchain Innovation in Fraud Prevention and Employee Recognition
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Curious about how AI and blockchain are transforming the digital landscape? Join us as we welcome Kirthiga Reddy CEO from Verix, a trailblazer who went from building Facebook's India operations to becoming SoftBank's first female investment partner, and now, a co-founder revolutionizing digital credentials. Discover how Verix is setting new standards in the fight against online fraud with its innovative "living certificates," which update in real-time to capture and verify ongoing achievements. These dynamic credentials have far-reaching applications, from preventing HR fraud to enhancing event participation, and Karthiga shares how partnerships with entities like Mom Relaunch and Stevie Awards bolster their authenticity.
Imagine creating a more personalized recognition system for remote workers and Gen Z. That's exactly what Verix is achieving by leveraging blockchain to craft immutable, verifiable certificates that elevate employee recognition. Through a compelling case study with Amdocs, we illustrate how these certificates acknowledge both technical prowess and interpersonal skills, providing employees with a robust platform to share their accomplishments. Verix's approach simplifies blockchain complexity, making it user-friendly and seamlessly integrating with tools like Zoom and Salesforce. As we look to the future, we'll discuss how expanding integrations and refining design will position Verix as a pivotal system of record for credentials across various platforms.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody. Really fascinating chat today as we talk about bringing authenticity, trust and recognition to the world of AI. Really interesting topic around the blockchain and beyond with Karthiga from Verix, how are you?
Speaker 2:Evan, so great to be here. Trust truly is the million-dollar word in today's world of AI and I'm excited to delve more into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really excited by your value proposition and personal story. Let's start with that, maybe introductions to yourself, your biography and what led you to Verix.
Speaker 2:Evan, I am a builder at heart. I was most recently the first employee for Facebook in India, their managing director for India and South Asia. What I did there has big connects to what I'm doing today, in that my first job there was to build one of their four global operations offices that now serves over three billion users, where we had to look at everything from are you a real user, a fake user, impersonation, hacking all of that. My co-founder led the creator economy and news entertainment, so a lot of questions around fake news, fake media, what's real, what's not. And then you bring that to today's age of AI, where that question has just exploded and it has even more significance.
Speaker 2:Between that role and my current role, I also did revenue for both Asia Pacific Facebook, meta and for India, grew that to the first several hundred million, now several billions, and came back to headquarters emerging markets role. And came back to headquarters emerging markets role Started missing the startup ecosystem was the first female investment partner at SoftBank, invested in enterprise, hr tech, mental wellness, quantum computing and the thesis was AI is transforming every industry as we know it. As I saw what was happening with AI and blockchain, jumped right back into building with Verix.
Speaker 1:Wow, fantastic story. So let's get to the topic at hand. The joke is on the internet, you trust no one or nothing, which is kind of almost true, sadly. So how are you bringing a fresh, new, smarter approach to authenticity and verification? What's the big idea behind Verix?
Speaker 2:authenticity and verification. What's the big idea behind Verix, Evan? With blockchain, for the first time, you have the ability to have an authenticated digital asset, you can determine who has issued things, you can determine who owns it, you can determine transfer of ownership. And while I am a huge proponent of AI, to me actually AI and blockchain go hand in hand because with AI, the question of is this real, is this human, is this AI is going to come up, has already come up, and that pace is only going to increase. You combine that with blockchain that lets you have that answer to is this real?
Speaker 2:And to me, those are the two magical components. So we have an AI powered blockchain platform. We work with clients like a Netflix, so from big tech to nonprofits like Room to Read, there we help them answer that question to determine proof of work, skills, accomplishments, awards, content, products and more, and very, very excited about the momentum that we're seeing and the tailwind that AI gives us to really transform the space and define the industry standard for verification Amazing. So you have this concept or approach called for verification.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So you have this concept or approach called living certificates. Sounds fascinating, as opposed to something off the shelf or static. What's the idea behind that? How does it work? How does it give authenticity to accomplishments or credentials or titles or what have you?
Speaker 2:It's patent-pending technology, Evan, and the beauty of blockchain technology is that it lets you have this living, immutable journey. I'll give you a real-world example. We partner with a company called Mom Relaunch, and that's another big passion area of mine working mothers, moms returning back to work. This is an incredible organization that helps moms through their journey of gaining specific skills being assigned to specific projects, certifications and courses. So as they start, they get a certificate that says you are part of this Mom Relon journey and as they pick up these certifications, they get certified for specific skills, complete specific projects. So certificate updates and it's a living certificate that lets you track your journey.
Speaker 2:The applications are immense, Evan. Think about this, even in, say, the event space. So we work with events. I'm actually dialing in from India, where I was speaking at Thai Global Summit, which is a mega summit with tens of thousands of attendees from all over the globe, really, and we issued certificates for every single type of participant, whether you're an attendee or an exhibitor, a sponsor, the minute that it's living. It means that you can now do things like loyalty. You can track who engaged in between the events. You can say you'll come to this event three times, four times, make connections in a really interesting way. So that's the concept, Evan, and I promise you, now that you have heard of it, you're come to this event three times, four times make connections in really interesting way. So that's the concept, Evan, and I promise you, now that you have heard of it, you're going to see application in all facets of life and work.
Speaker 1:I bet so many use cases, it's hard to tackle them all. One that I'm looking at on your website is tackling fraud in HR. You know bad actors passing off counterfeit degrees or skill certificates, certifications that's rampant in the industry. So how does the platform work? How would it detect, prevent that kind of fraud? For example, to trust you know a resume or achievements?
Speaker 2:So, evan, we work with issuing organizations. So we would work with, for example, the Stevie Awards. They are recognizing their jury members, who bring in their expertise and help find the right winners, as one example. So we work with them. They certify who the jury members are. We have a seamless process where they issue the certificates and with one click they get distributed. With another click the recipients can claim it and share it across social media.
Speaker 2:And even if you go to LinkedIn, even if you go to my LinkedIn, there are a number of different things that it's really hard to verify, you will see.
Speaker 2:For example, it says you know RJ Miller, scholar against Stanford Business School. No one has the time to verify that, and so a lot of decision gets missed. And so whoever knows if it's really true or not? It really is true, but it will take your time to find that out, and what we want to do is to make that instantaneous and really bend the cost of verification so that people who have the credentials can really bubble up to the top and the bad actors do not do that, and you can make the distinction between the two. So on LinkedIn, then you will see this extra button that says show credential that lets you verify what the actual credential is. You can actually change the text on LinkedIn to say whatever, but the show credential will pop up the ledger entry on blockchain that says who it has been issued by, who it has been issued to and all of the specifics of what that certificate entails. Evan.
Speaker 1:Wow, brilliant. And this can have really meaningful even gosh life or death consequences easily to share, particularly when it comes to healthcare credentials. That could be really impactful. I assume lots of industries like healthcare could use this kind of portability and shareability as well.
Speaker 2:Evan, such an important point. This really impacts both livelihoods and it impacts various aspects of how these certificates are used, including in healthcare. The beauty, by the way, of what we do is that people can print out these certificates, and even the printed version has a QR code that leads to your digital avatar, and so, even in its physical version, you can authenticate and validate and make sure that it's not just another beautifully printed PDF. Evan, actually, if you go today to Google and if you type in fake diplomas, if you go today to Google and if you type in fake diplomas, you will get a few 4.9 rated companies that let you get your fake diploma within a day. It lets you choose Harvard, stanford, whatever university you want, lets you choose your GPA, and so that is where things are, and with what's happening, with the ease of design and with AI, that pace of how that is being used is only increasing.
Speaker 1:I bet yeah, I've always wanted to go to Harvard. They wouldn't have me, but maybe I can, you know, get that diploma after all. That's such I didn't know that that's actually pretty terrible. The other use case that I'm seeing on your website that looks really interesting is, you know, making recognition and awards feel more personal, impactful across different environments, particularly for remote workers, Like you said, moms working from home. How does that work and how do you see that being adopted in the enterprise?
Speaker 2:Evan, that's a personal favorite of mine, evan, that's a personal favorite of mine. Recognition is so important and the workforce overall is seeing a huge recognition crisis. So that's one factor and the other, especially when you think of Gen Z. Gen Z really needs that ongoing input, feedback of how they are doing, and then you add in the vector of hybrid work, but you can't give that context on an ongoing basis. So leaders, managers, hr professionals across the world have to take that extra mile to fill that gap.
Speaker 2:And where Verix beautifully comes in is with the ability to have these immutable, permanent blockchain certificates that you can share with employees. One example, evan, I know how you stress on real-world use cases. So Amdocs, an incredible company. They used our solutions for both recognizing professionals who were being trained for being Gen AI ready, so recognizing both the skills that they had gotten, the work that they were doing. But they also recognized what Asaf Jacobi, the SVP of HR, said are skills that are only recognizable by people like people management, leadership and the like, and these were then issued on Verix, given to these employees.
Speaker 2:They announced it in a town hall. The employees could then share it with one click on LinkedIn, any social media and, evan, as you use this phrase, we are not the old, boring, fakeable static certificates. We are dynamic. It can be animation. There are some companies that partner with us and say they want a red carpet like feel, so we can do that as well, and what you can do is also attach a whole bunch of engagement capabilities. Think of a congratulatory video that comes from the CEO or from the manager. It's a beautiful event to see that people take this home and they share it with their family and their friends, and so it really allows you to amplify the recognition and make it lasting, visible and verifiable globally.
Speaker 1:Oh, so exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Anyone thinking about resident sales club? Anyone thinking about recognizing their recruiters, any kind of recognition? We have companies like DBSync that are using it for year-round recognition. It's a personal favorite use case of mine, Evan.
Speaker 1:I love that and that's really fun. Let's geek out for a minute. You know tech professionals understand how you know Bitcoin and crypto is based on the blockchain, and you know you understand about immutability and tamper proof and transparency of transactions. So talk us through how you leverage the blockchain for credentials and how it works sort of on the back end of your system when it comes to trust.
Speaker 2:Totally so. We are built on. Polygon was the first blockchain that we were built on. Polygon is also an investor in the company and we, over the past year, we also went multi-chain and also support scale. So we now have multiple blockchain protocols that we support. We are based on the open badges protocol, which also makes things completely interoperable and globally verifiable. So that's the core technology stack, evan, which then makes it again at some level, independent of us. We are the issuing organization and these protocols make it such that it can be trusted, verifiable, immutable, even independent of Verix.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, it sounds like a really great approach. You mentioned patents earlier. Maybe you can talk about your patent application in the works and what's the patent for and what other intellectual property are you investing in right?
Speaker 2:now, evan, we have done a whole bunch of work to make blockchain really invisible to the user. In fact, one of the first inbound that we got was from an incredible organization, women in Cloud, that was aiming for a Guinness World Record and they wanted to be able to batch their winners of the Guinness World Record, and they told us that they had evaluated a bunch of other platforms. Every other platform required a very high degree of technical knowledge from their user to know what a wallet is and a bunch of other acronyms from Web3. And for the first time, they saw a platform that abstracted all of that. Given where Saurabh and I come from, scale and simplicity are what we think about and obsess about, and so we have completely abstracted all of that. People can log in with their regular handles it could be Gmail, it could be LinkedIn and be able to claim these certificates, be able to showcase them wherever they want to showcase them and have it be globally verifiable by employers, by anyone who wants to verify their credentials.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And what's next? What are you excited about as we head into 2025? You must see more opportunities and use cases and advancements in the technology. What's on your radar?
Speaker 2:Evan, the biggest thing that we're working on is being seamlessly integrated into a whole bunch of different enterprise workflow. I spoke about the event use cases. It's so transparent to a user. The user just logs in through their event management tool and they get these certificates issued that they can then go share out. We have an integration with Zoom, so if you were doing a Zoom session, at the end of it you could get blockchain credentials and, by the way they're living, so you could also track the engagement across the year and the years. Integration with Salesforce, with the mom relaunch example.
Speaker 2:How is it that whatever they're doing in their system triggers the right updates on RN? So think about us as being that system of record of credentials that captures things across a whole bunch of different systems. If you may, I'm calling in from India. I just visited Shri City. I met with universities like Kriya. They have a number of different systems, from their academic credentialing to who's volunteering, who has gotten the entrepreneurship award. How can you tie in all of these systems into one set of credentials that gets updated on an ongoing basis? So that's one big area of innovation. Another big area is actually design. We are. If you look at the designs. They truly are geared for the next gen. And if we step back, evan, if you think about how credentialing has worked, you know grandparents, parents, my children, all it's largely been the same and we are bringing much needed disruption and bringing them into this digital, immutable, permanent world.
Speaker 1:Evan, Love it, love the partnerships. I know Eric Wan from Zoom personally and he's a follower, and Mark Benioff as well on social media, so hopefully he's listening. Michael Dell from Dell. So all of these companies could leverage you in just incredible ways on the front end or back end of the business. What's next for you personally? Do you have any travel or events coming up? I'll be at CES, I don't know if you're heading there.
Speaker 2:I'm at CES on the 6th, and so I look forward to catching up while we're there, evan and it'll be great.
Speaker 1:Uh, we have some big news coming at ces me personally and one of our mutual business partners, so I won't spoil the news. But, uh, lots of going on, uh, around awards and credentialing and achievements, so look forward to some big announcements at CES.
Speaker 2:Very exciting and I look forward to toasting to all of your big accomplishments.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you, and likewise.
Speaker 2:And into the next year.
Speaker 1:It's going to be a fantastic year and a fantastic CES, probably the best one ever, and congrats on all the success, onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Evan, everyone who appeared on your shows. You should give them a credential and a badge, and it would be very meaningful for them.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, why didn't I think of that? That's the best brilliant idea ever. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:And with a video for it, so people can badge their partners, the users of their platform, the admins of their platforms. Again, I promise you, you will see these use cases all over.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, I hope Joe Rogan doesn't steal this idea first, but if I can get to it first, I'm all in. So thanks so much, Kathiga. Really amazing work, and thanks everyone for listening, watching and sharing, as always. All right, Take care, Thanks.