For more than thirty years we've been building the digital economy. We built networks to move information We built cloud platforms to provide computing power, and we built payment rails to move money.
There are many identity systems vying to prove who—or what—is on the other end of a connection. Each became shared infrastructure because rebuilding it inside every organisation eventually stopped making economic sense.
Consider that nobody generates their own electricity. Nobody builds their own payment network. Nobody constructs their own internet.
Trust never made that transition into infrastructure.
Every bank performs its own Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, often verifying the same people against the same government records and reaching the same conclusions.
Every supplier onboarding process repeats due diligence and another organisation may have completed only weeks before.
Every insurer performs its own risk assessments, KYC, validations and trust scoring.
Every consent record sits in a database that only its owner can rely on.
Every organisation develops its own interpretation of the same regulations.
This isn't inefficiency at the margins but duplication in information, risk in false processing and opportunities for abuse.
It's the same trust decision being made thousands of times. Every duplicated trust decision increases cost, delays transactions and creates new opportunities for fraud. Shared trust is not simply a security improvement—it is an economic one.
SABRIC recorded R2.7 billion in confirmed financial crime losses in South Africa during 2024. Although lower than 2023, it remains a recurring cost of trust decisions being made independently and imperfectly.
The telecommunications industry has already recognised that fraud cannot be solved by banks, operators and vendors working in isolation.
Through GSMA Open Gateway, South African operators have introduced standard Number Verification and SIM Swap APIs that allow banks to verify customer information directly with mobile networks. Instead of every institution solving the problem independently, they are beginning to rely on shared capabilities.
Today we use shared infrastructure to verify a phone number. Tomorrow we'll need shared infrastructure to verify trust itself, because trust, once established, should become reusable rather than rebuilt.
We industrialised computing, communications, payments, and even identity. We never industrialised trust.
Commercially : with trust, companies can validate data against trusted parties. Data is validated, transactions verified, processes protected. All of this whilst no data should ever be shared openly. Legitimate interest and privacy support economic growth in this process.”
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