On Exponential Trust with Debbie Gamble and Senator Colin Deacon

Debbie Gamble: I’m Debbie Gamble, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Interac, and you’re listening to Everyday Trust. We are witnessing a period of accelerated digitization in Canada. With this comes new opportunities and increased efficiencies. It also highlights one of the most important questions innovators face today. How can we give Canadians the confidence they need to participate fully in our emerging digital economy? The answer that I come back to over and over again is trust. Trust unifies our families, our communities, and even the way that we’re governed. Trust can take years to build and a singular moment to break. And in a digital world, the way we build and maintain trust is constantly evolving, and we need to stay ahead of the curve. In this series from Interac, I’m talking to leaders about what trust means to them.

DG: I’m really excited to be talking today to the honorable senator, Colin Deacon. Senator Deacon is an entrepreneur and was CEO of a number of technology companies in Nova Scotia prior to his appointment to the Senate in 2018. He’s an avid champion of all things Canadians need for Canada to improve its competitiveness. He’s a strong advocate for entrepreneurs, for innovation, for the digital economy, and for modernizing Canada’s privacy legislation. Senator Deacon is deputy chair of the senate standing committee on banking, commerce, and economy. I’m honored to get to speak with you today, senator.

Colin Deacon: Great to be here, Debbie, and thank you for the invitation.

DG: You’re very welcome. I like to start these conversations with the same question. How would you define trust?

CD: Trust isn’t different today than it ever was. It’s, the only difference is we build trust now not necessarily with a look in the eye and a handshake. Often trust has to be built through entirely virtual relationships. And so, the other element that we have is that technology is presenting us with deep fakes. It’s presenting us with ChatGPT and Bing. We don’t know what is real, what’s been verified, what is automated, and whether or not what we’re seeing is actually what we wanna see or what someone wants to show us through a social media platform algorithm that is choosing what we wanna see for the benefit of the platform. So, there’s a lot of ways in which the digitization of our economy has transformed, the need to enable Canadians to build trust in one another, in the institutions that they work with. Trust is the same, but it’s a lot harder to establish in today’s world.

DG: We know at Interac from some of our recent surveys that Canadians are worried about protecting, their online privacy in particular. In one of our recent studies, seven out of ten Canadians want more control over their online information. So, we know that trust is a key enabler to how we actually deliver that. But there’s a lot of misunderstandings out there around the interpretation of verification, of trust, and that kind of whole complicated engagement process around digital enablement. What are your thoughts around what people really tend to misunderstand and interpret, the notion of trust online?

CD: I’m amazed that I’ve received probably at my office eight thousand or more emails, I don’t know how many of these people are real, but Canadians apparently telling me that they do not want to have digital identity implemented in Canada. What they’re asking for is to have more control over the use of their data and their identity. They wanna know who’s using what data about them and when they’re using it. So, they actually want the control that digital identity digital identity will deliver to them, but they don’t understand what it is. There is disinformation and misinformation, problem around digital identity that’s really troubling because what Canadians want, and what I hear from these emails or what I read in these emails is people want what you and I want. We wanna have control, a greater control over our identity and to prove quickly that we are who we are, and to be able to say, yes, you can use this information about me, but you can’t use that information about me. It’s not an all or nothing situation, which today, very much, it is. And organizations ask for the same information over and over and over again. Every time I get asked information again, I go, well, how much control do they have over what they already have? Because they’re not using it appropriately. So again, I go back to these eight thousand or more emails, I get more every day. I just think that’s a huge communication challenge that we have to overcome, to show people that having greater control is not about controlling them. It’s about giving them control over the organizations that they interact with.

DG: Indeed. We see a lot of that too, right? We see, as you said, the irony of people saying they don’t want something, but they want to be enabled. So maybe this is an opportunity for us to perhaps change the narrative: instead of looking at it as big brother ID, it’s about how do we equip society or how do we equip Canadians and Canadian businesses to actually more securely, more easily manage and control their own flow of information, especially given the advancements in technology. You know, we’re all carrying around a mobile device. We’ve got the capabilities to be able to engage in ways that we didn’t have before. But I think there is possibly that dynamic of changing the narrative and certainly, the need for broader education around how Canadians can actually take control of their own information and do so in an easier, more trusted way. The term trust comes up all the time here, right? Engagement into the growing digital economy. One of the things I’d love to get your thoughts around is how this plays into the role of innovation and in particular, the need for Canada to step up, from a competitive perspective. So how does the question of trust impact the Canadian dynamic around how we need to be more competitive, more innovative in the market?

CD: Well and how does it affect the ability of Canadian businesses to function, into the future if we don’t, enable them to establish trust quickly and easily with their customers who they can deliver the most benefit to. We’re in a digital economy where by the minute, more and more data is being pulled off of us and today than was yesterday. It’s literally happening as you and I are speaking right now. There is data, being gathered and stored to figure out how to sell things to us, to figure out services that we might like. But we don’t have control over it to the degree that we need to today. So, we need better privacy legislation for sure, but we need the tools that allow us to have access to, actually controlling the portability of our data between organizations that we trust. For me, in terms of providing innovation and competitiveness, it’s absolutely central in the digital era. These are foundational building blocks. If we don’t have them, we can’t start to address the real risk that we have, which is the OECD sees us at the back of the pack of the thirty eight member states in terms of our ability to grow and compete relative to other nations, prosperous nations in the world, over the next thirty or forty years, because of the fact that we’re not getting these foundational elements in place quick enough. For me, that’s the big worry. I worry about the economy we’re passing on to our grandchildren if we don’t start to deal with this issue. I’ll go one other bit. I live in Nova Scotia, in rural Nova Scotia. The ability for governments and for financial institutions and others to serve people directly, through health care, through other areas of government services is diminishing in rural areas. Over forty percent of Canadians live in places with less than a hundred thousand people. We’ve got to find ways to have really good digital services available to folks if we’re going to be relevant in their lives in an era when people being pulled apart so easily, we’ve got to be very cautious about that as a government.

DG: For sure. I mean, we’ve just come through three years of a pandemic where that need to be able to engage virtually was a top priority, right? Some of our conversations on this topic in the Everyday Trust series also touch on some other industries. So you can start to see the value and the benefits to the economy when we truly have an engaged society and population that trusts those interactions that can breathe life into different solutions, perhaps in the health care industry, as you said, in travel, in education, in transportation, in lots of different, industries. Now you and I have talked about this a fair amount and been at various sessions where we’ve heard from other players around the world that are embracing the idea of, digital engagement and digital verification and authentication in a different way. So where do you think Canada stands in relation to some of the other players around the world?

CD: The UN reports that we continue to fall in terms of, e-government development. And if you look at it on any scale, Canada is an analogue government. Most provinces are analogue governments. Most municipalities are analogue governments. They may have one or two digital services, but we’re nowhere near digitizing. The challenge of digitizing it rapidly enough, I mean I’ve got a saying that I use a lot, it’s you can’t have an innovative economy if you don’t have an innovative government. We’ve got to address that issue: innovative economies demand innovative governments. They’re created by innovative governments. Europe has been moving very strongly in this area. One of the things that I’ve studied in the last year is Ukraine. You know, they’re very much in the news because of the heinous Russian invasion. But what isn’t this well known is during the last three years, they’ve developed effective mobile app for accessing government services that’s been developed anywhere in the world. It’s being promoted by United States and Estonia started implementing it almost right away. Seemed to be the top country in that regard, Diya app in Ukraine is leading digital transformation that economy. Over half the adult population access government services through the Diya app. It was developed with the intention of having the most convenient government for its citizens in the world. Over seventy government services are available online in a mobile first app, mobile first field, or service. They took starting a business from a sixty-four-page handwritten form down to a few check boxes that can be dealt with in less than ten minutes. In Canada, on the other side, on the federal level, we have over two hundred and seventy individual login points in the federal government. Yeah, each one has its own password and user ID. There’s no integration with provincial, municipal, and commercial efforts at this stage. So, to say we’re behind, we actually aren’t even at the the starting point. We can be, but it has to become a priority.

DG: I love your point about the analog to digital because you can’t exploit all the benefits of digital if you’re still in the kind of analog space. So perhaps the first stage is move from the analog to the digital, and then you can actually start to breathe life into some of those great experiences that some other markets have already been able to deliver. I think we’re starting to appreciate that at the private and the public sector level. So, this takes us to how do you get there?

CD: Let’s start delivering the benefits. Then people, if we just stop talking about it and start doing it and deliver the benefits to Canadians, then they’ll spread the news. They’ll tell other people, this is really easy, and the user experience is what will drive adoption. Why not have a whole bunch of product managers from across different successful software companies in this country and have them advising government in how to execute on this. Because the reality is, we’ve got really good experts in how to deploy software in this country, how to deploy innovative solutions, but we’re not utilizing them from a public service standpoint in helping us to drive innovation into government.

DG: I’m hopeful that, you know, we can help change that analog to digital movement and, really deliver some value added services to the market, so that Canadians can decide for themselves what services they wanna use and how that might improve their businesses and their lives, on a day to day level?

CD: I think we’re gonna start with where trust exists. Partner logins at the CRA, the kind of revenue agency site, I have to believe dominate total logins, which means you’re already choosing Canadians, already choosing to go through a partner. To login to their income tax portal with, Canada Revenue Agency. We are already comfortable doing online banking. So, build from those points of trust and comfort and start to grow out. It cannot be done without big business, smaller businesses, technology enablement, and government all working together.

DG: And one of the things certainly in the technology space and the software industry is standards, right? So, you need to have some standards so that you get interoperability and, you know, the headaches start to be addressed by some very clever engineers who design fabulous experiences through some software. So how do we embrace that from your perspective?

CD: I think the big thing is we’ve gotta stop it. It would be really great if our federal government would stop thinking that their job is to control the Canadian economy. Their job is to catalyze the Canadian economy. And so, if government starts to see itself as a catalyst, then the opportunities are endless. So, standards are a great example. You and I first met through the Digital Governance Council, the standard setting body in the digital sphere in Canada, and many of its standards are being adopted globally now, which is fantastic. A leader in the adoption of the digital, identity standard in this country, ethical AI standard. I mean we’ve got some great leadership here, but we haven’t been leaning into it. You know, the opportunity here is significant. The Pan Canadian Trust Framework has existed for seven years.

DG: Yeah.

CD: And we sit there on the starting line. There are people who know how to move this forward, and standards are the key. And I’ll tell you one reason why they’re key. Our regulatory reform process is too slow in Canada. It’s not agile enough to keep up with the business model and technology changes that are going to continue to accelerate. And so, standards, codes of practice, certifications are gonna prove to be crucial if Canada’s gonna have an economy that protects Canadian citizens on one side and gives them control but enables innovation and global competitiveness on the other side. What do you see from this industry start?

DG: Certainly, we believe in the need for collaboration across the public and private sectors. That’s the only way that you can really catalyze some of these things. You can’t wait for the government to do everything, and you can’t wait for industry to do everything. It has to be a a collaboration. And I’m hopeful because I think, as that is starting to happen and we are, certainly at Interac and myself, firm believers that you have to move forward. You have to do it, and you have to provide real examples of what value this kind of technology can bring, because that’s the only way people are gonna change.

CD: And improve user experience.

DG: Right. Trust builds confidence. And then from confidence, you get comfort, and that’s how you change consumer behavior. So, you have to instill new experience. It works the same way every time, it adds value, t’s relevant to your day to day, activities. Canadian businesses, the backbone of our economy, need the tools and capabilities so that they can leapfrog and address some of the friction, burdens, and digital enablement. I’m hopeful that we can do that. I think the ingredients are there for us to make some serious advancements. And at Interac we’ve got a stake in that ecosystem to try and do that in both the payment space, but also in the authentication and verification space. And our goal is to do that alongside players in the ecosystem. We don’t believe one size fits all, but we have a privileged role and a trusted brand, that we believe can catalyze the market. But a lot of this is gonna depend on policy, regulations, and ultimately legislation. So, senator, how do we move forward with that?

CD: The reality is that there’s so much that can be done by the private sector to enable, deploy and scale technology solutions that are gonna help Canadians have trust in greater value-added services provided by government and the private sector. But the reality is, all of the buttons to press go exist in government. So somebody in government, for example, the Treasury Board, president, Mona Forte, has got to push the button on the federal government being involved in deploying, digital identity to give Canadians greater control over the services that they interact with federally and how they interact with federal services, and have that in a centralized controlled way that is deployed collaboratively with the private sector and potentially provinces and municipalities as well. So that the federal government is in a position of control there. As it relates to open banking and payments modernization, If the government does not prioritize these issues, we’ve got a problem. The reality is that in order for Canadians to have data portability, the right to move their data safely between organizations and in these frameworks that have been developed and using controls like digital identity that can exist. Citizens must have the right to be able to say to their bank, I want my financial data to go to this organization. It’s a certified or accredited organization using an accredited process that we’ve all agreed to and is supported by the regulations and legislation. But, again, that button has to be pushed by somebody to get that done. Now currently, C27 is in the house at second reading, but it’s got a long way to go to get royal assent. So that’s the job of our legislation, that’s the job of our regulations: to protect Canadians, and we’re falling behind in that regard. So, the interconnectedness between all of these different elements means that this government has to prioritize these elements in order for us to gain access to the benefits. Let’s just say start saying yes, at these senior levels. I dream that minister Freeland’s budget will prioritize some of these items as she put a down payment on competition reform in her last budget. This fits very much in empowering Canadians and moving forward. But the reality is, government has to lead in all of these elements.

DG: I think just supporting that, in addition to the work that the government needs to do. Building trust and better experiences and enhance security and control, for Canadians to make their own decisions in how they share their information is also a good business. It’s just good business for our private sector. So, there are lots of things underway that the private sector are also embracing because this makes sense from a business perspective.

CD: Yeah.

DG: So, I’m looking forward to that continued collaboration and hopefully some of the legislation, coming to fruition that will help catalyze some of those activities.

CD: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree with you more.

DG: So, on that point, I’d kind of switch the conversation a little bit to the future and what the future holds in terms of the future of trust in Canada. We all know this. We use this term trust a lot, certainly in my world, it’s important to society, it’s important to the economy, it’s how many companies’ reputations are defined, it’s how society and democracy, really works. So, I’d love to hear your thoughts around the future, and what we need to do to protect, and grow our kind of democratic rights, and put the control of data in the hands of Canadians. From your perspective, what does the future hold?

CD: What I worry about in the future is that we’re not actually making the strategic investments necessary, the strategic choices necessary to fundamentally shift towards a digital environment that Canadians can trust more than their current relationship with government. Because we can’t aim for what we have. We have to aim for better. And that collaboration is gonna prove to be essential in my mind as we look forward. You know, you and I have spoken an awful lot in the past about open banking and payments modernization. Those are two areas that when you combine those two with digital identity, Canadians, all of a sudden, are gonna start to find out a whole bunch about themselves that they didn’t know financially in ways that they can save a lot of money, ways that they can improve their credit score that were not available to them before. The opportunities just start to unlock at a pretty exciting pace when they get start to get control of their financial activity and are able to share it with organizations that are really targeting delivering benefits to them. I look at Rent Advantage as an example of a tremendous innovation through Borrowell. It’s a yes. You know, private, fintech. What I love about that is it gives new Canadians the ability to use their rent payments to start to build a credit record, a credit score in Canada. That is a service that’s really hard for them to access because of how data is shared today. But with digital identity and open banking in place, they all of a sudden have to access to this empowering tool that allows them to build credit through an activity they’re already doing today that they get no benefit from. And we’ve gotta stop talking and we’re gonna start delivering the benefits. Because when we deliver benefits to Canadians, they’ll talk about that. They’ll tell people, this was easy. I feel comfortable. I receive value. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. That’s why ratings go up. And the other side is why ratings go down. And right now, we’re still on the other side of it. For me, that’s what the future demands. We’ve got to start moving forward, and then we’ve got to be prepared to iterate. And, again, where standards play a role is that we can iterate standards a lot more quickly than we can ever iterate regulations and legislation.

DG: So, here’s to a digitally inclusive, digitally enabled, digitally competitive, and ultimately, digitally prosperous Canada. I’d like to really thank you for the rich conversation and for everything you’re doing to champion this at the government level. You’re a very active voice, in the private sector too.

CD: Thanks for your kind comments, Debbie. And it was my pleasure, and I hope it’s useful.

DG: Thank you.

DG: As senator Deacon says, relationships of trust used to be built on a look in the eye and a handshake. Today, many relationships are built virtually. Yet, as technology iterates, some are left wondering if the technology we’re using to build trust with each other is, itself, trustworthy. Today’s digital world runs on data, and it’s paramount that the data we use to fuel innovation, provide access to services, and improve processes is collected and used in a responsible and secure manner. As senator Deacon and I discussed, seven out of ten Canadians polled by Interac want more control over their online information. They want to know how and by whom their data is being used. As our economy has digitized, we have truly transformed the need to enable Canadians to build trust in their institutions that use their data. If Canada can successfully accomplish this move from an analog system to a digital one, we have the opportunity to improve the user experience across multiple industries: finance, health care, travel, and education, to name a few. So where do we start? For senator Deacon, this starts with innovation at a government level with privacy legislation. As he says in our conversation, an innovative economy needs an innovative government. We have the technological means to accomplish a shift from analog to digital. And as Senator Deacon believes, once we put control back in the hands of the user, Canadians will spread the word to drive adoption. Adopting open banking is a foundational building block for this trust relationship. In late 2023, the framework legislation for open banking was announced to be included in the 2024, signaling a strong step forward towards change in Canada and putting customer data back in customers’ hands. Thank you for listening to Everyday Trust. If you found this conversation valuable, please take a moment to subscribe to the show and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.