In this week's episode, I interview Lyall Cresswell, Founder of Trustd.
Trustd is the first ID and credentials verification app designed specifically for the transport and logistics industry. Lyall shares how his experience founding Transport Exchange Group over 20 years ago eventually led to building Trustd.
We discuss the evolution of digital KYC & KYB and how business identity plays a critical role in our global transport infrastructure - and ultimately our world's economy.
RESOURCES:
Connecting with Lyall Cresswell
Lyall Cresswell’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyallcresswell/
Trustd’sWebsite: https://trustd.net/
Companies & Resources Discussed
Trustd is the first ID and credentials verification app designed specifically for transport and logistics.
Secure Collect is a, soon to be released, product being launched by Trustd that will further enhance security in the transport and logistics industry and related payments.
Transport Exchange Group is a company established more than 20 years ago by Lyall Creswell to deliver innovative, digital solutions that serve the transport and logistics industry.
FMCSA or the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is a part of the US Federal Highway Administration, the FMCSA’s primary mission is to prevent commercial motor vehicle-related fatalities and injuries.
W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, develops standards and guidelines to help everyone build a web based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy and security. The W3C has many working groups including identity-related groups such as the Federated Identity and the Distributed Identifier Working Groups.
Marketplace Risk is the world’s largest marketplace conference. It is being held May 14-16, 2024 in San Francisco. Jeremy Gottschalk is the Founder and CEO of Marketplace Risk.
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Steve Craig: Welcome to the PEAK IDV EXECUTIVE SERIES video podcast, where I speak with executives, leaders, founders, and changemakers in the digital identity space. I'm your host, Steve Craig, Founder and Chief Enablement Officer of PEAK IDV. For our audience, this is a video first series, so if you're enjoying the audio version, please check out the video recording on executiveseries.peakidv.com, where you can watch the full episode, read the transcript, and access any of the resources or links discussed in today's conversation. I'm thrilled to speak with this week's guest. He is Lyle Cresswell, Founder of Trustd. Trustd is the first ID and credentials verification app designed specifically for the transport and logistics industry.
Trustd provides operators with the ability to generate, request, and share verified business credentials in real time, removing hours of repetitive admin and manual process. Lyle is a serial entrepreneur. In addition to Trustd, he founded Transport Exchange Group in the year 2000 and leads it today as its chief executive.
Transport Exchange Group or TEG is an advanced freight exchange platform used by over 8,500 transport and logistics businesses in the UK, Continental Europe, and North America.
Welcome, Lyle. Thank you for being on the podcast.
Lyall Cresswell: Thanks, Steve. It's great to be here.
Steve: Let's get started. Can you share more about Trustd? What's your typical elevator pitch for the company?
Lyall: Yeah, great. So thanks for having me on the podcast, Steve; it's been pretty much about a year since we first met back in San Francisco. So Trustd really is setting out to verify the entire supply chain. We're bringing the concept of digital identity and verifiable credentials to transport, to freight, and really looking to set out to verify the credentials and also the capabilities of every actor throughout the supply chain.
Steve: Well, the Trustd story really begins with Transport Exchange Group, so I'd love to double click on the history there, how you got started with TEG going back to the year 2000.
Lyall: Yeah, wow, okay, so that's a few years ago. So, let's rewind, about 24, nearly 25 years ago now. I started Transport Exchange Group just after the .com boom, slash, crash, for those of your viewers that remember, that it was a pretty painful time. But we were started with a-- a completely kind of green slate for those of, you know, that cast your mind back to that time. There were a lot of marketplaces and especially B2B marketplaces and they all set out with the objective and intention to revolutionize the industries that they served.
We set out with a very simple, powerful proposition, which was to make better utilization of assets within the transport industry. So we were servicing couriers hornets and trucking companies, third-party logistics businesses, freight forwarders, anybody essentially who was servicing and participating in the transport and freight industry.
Steve: And how has TEG evolved from that time when you got started to the past few years,
Lyall: It's a lot of years to kind of encapsulate in a few words, but we pretty much stayed very true to our original intention. So we're still servicing exactly the same industry. We have a lot of businesses who are still with us you know, over the past 20-plus years and I guess that the evolution of the business really is encapsulated by technology that has come along, especially in the past four to five years -- and I'll come to that in a bit -- that has enabled us to realize some of the products and some of the solutions that we're now delivering. We pretty much invented, I think it's fair to say, digital freight matching back 20-odd years.
And we've evolved the order execution part within Transport Exchange Group within the platform such that now we're handling millions of transactions every year from start to finish. So, typically, the businesses on the platform will post freight, will match that, they will then make a selection of the carrier or the driver that they want to work with. And then the order will actually get executed in the platform right the way through proof of delivery, creating an electronic bill, electronic invoice in the platform, an electronic POD. And the piece, which I alluded to just a couple of minutes ago, is that we're now entering the world of pay and finance.
So the missing piece, if you like, Steve, which I've wanted to do for 20-plus years, but the technology frankly didn't exist at that time is to bring pay and settlement and finance into the platform. So that we can see, really, the order right the way through from inception to end piece, including settlement.
Steve: That's interesting. Can you go deeper into the role TEG plays in that money exchange?
Lyall: Yeah. So what's really important? I spend half my time explaining this to people that kind of, aren’t that necessarily close to the industry or have a different view of B2B marketplaces and online marketplaces, is we don't come between the buyer and the seller. I think that's really important and that differentiates us from a lot of other platforms. We are not -- to put it into kind of technical speak -- we're not the merchant of record. The contracts that are agreed on our platform are between the two participating businesses. We're there to provide the platform for all of this to take place. We set the governance and the policy and indeed we mediate sometimes but we don't come between the two parties and that's a key differentiator and it allows us to stay neutral and independent and run a fair marketplace.
So when it comes to the role of the money exchange, that really follows the same principles.
So we're there to facilitate, we're there to make sure that when a buyer comes to approve and then pay a seller's invoices on the platform; again, all of that happens in a neutral, totally independent venue, and we provide all of the data. We provide all of the conditions and the solutions for that to take place as accurately and also with the least amount of friction possible.
Steve: For the payment solution, is this specifically within the UK or continental Europe, North America?
Lyall: As of today it's a UK specific solution, but the intention is that we will actually then roll that out because I fundamentally believe there's a gap in the marketplace, which is -- and we'll come on to this when we talk about the role that Trustd plays of course -- but to enable these payments to take place at any scale, whether you're paying just a few invoices a month or whether you're paying several thousand invoices a month, we believe that we can deliver a lot of efficiency in that process.
Steve: Excellent. Well, perhaps we segue into Trustd. what's the relationship, if any, between TEG and Trustd beyond you being the founder of both?
Lyall: I must be crazy. I mean, I'm kind of on my third startup. So I started my first business when I was 24 or something like that. And I'm a bit older now, clearly.
So Trustd is a business, which is informed and born out of Transport Exchange Group. We've got that deep domain expertise, understanding of the transport and logistics industry. And it's a completely separate business. We did that quite deliberately because we want to service the whole of the supply chain.
The tech stack is different, different development team, different commercial team. The first client for-- for-- for Trustd has been Transport Exchange Group. And what we're doing there and what we're seeing is that we are upping the standard within the freight exchange, within Transport Exchange Group.
And we're very, very genuine desire to really increase the level of confidence in the marketplace and provide a holistic identity for all of those businesses, which are participating from very small businesses, right, the way, you know, through to larger businesses. That's what businesses want. They want to be confident with whom they're transacting. They can't take the time, necessarily, to do what you and I would describe as KYC, know your client, KYB, know your business. You know, a lot of these transactions are happening in, you know, in not necessarily in real time, but in, in a very quick space of time, short space of time. But that's what Trustd is set out to do.
Steve: So if I'm hearing you correctly, TEG long standing mature business, you were trying to solve a problem within that group and you didn't so -- or you couldn't find a solution -- so you created Trustd as a new company. Is that a good summary of how that progression happened.
Lyall: Yeah, it's -- and in fact, a lot of the a lot of the design and a lot of the-- the data points that we think are relevant have been born out of our 25-odd years of running Transport Exchange Group and also observing, you know, the things that were systemically wrong in the industry. Whether it's to do with identity of the participants in the marketplace whether it's to do with managing to keep on top of the, you know, the documentation, especially in our industry, it's quite highly regulated. The smallest business has a surprising number of artifacts, three or four different types of insurance, maybe an operator's license. In the US, obviously, you'd be regulated if you're in the trucking space, you'd be regulated by the FMCSA. There's a surprising amount of regulation, even for very, very small businesses and that-- that understanding, that knowledge, as I said, is born out really of our operation of the Transport Exchange Group platform.
Steve: Okay. Can you take me to the moment you had the ‘aha’ or the eureka moment for Trustd? What were some of the challenges that you were facing and why did you decide, you know -- what, can't find what I need, I'm just going to build a second company to serve that need?
Lyall: One of my ‘aha’ moments, as you describe it was actually seeing what was possible in terms of digital identity verification. I'd always wanted to digitalize the compliance piece. In fact, we had actually done that partially, especially within Transport Exchange, where you can imagine… I mean you can't manage that kind of scale without digitalizing some part of the process. But the ‘aha’ moment, as I say, really came about when I could -- when I saw for the first time -- I'm going back now about probably five, six years ago -- when I saw a digital identity for the first time opening a bank account with my son, strangely enough.
So, pretty much like every bank account anywhere, whether it's in the UK, the US, pretty much the same. How did you open a bank account, Steve? How did you open your first bank account? You walked into a branch, I'm assuming? [Steve: Many years ago. It was a branch] Many years ago, okay. So when I was standing -- my son was about to go to university for the first time -- And I said, “Oh, you know” -- he said to me -- “Dad, I need a bank account.” Okay, fine. Well, my father took me into, took to, into a branch of a, you know, of a major bank many, many, many years ago. And you sat down, you'd made an appointment and sat with the bank manager and they had a nice chat and, maybe even gave you a cup of tea, right?
So, here in the UK, there are fewer and fewer branches and they've-- they-- the banks -- not just the neobanks, but the legacy banks -- largely now onboard the majority of their new business remotely. So I saw that, I saw identity service verification for the first time… I can't remember now whether it was a selfie or a video or whatever it was but that was when I first realized, oh yeah, we can actually understand much more about the key individuals who are directing and owning and running the businesses that we're serving. And that was my ‘aha’ moment, if you like.
Steve: Excellent. I'm always fascinated by founder origin stories and that one, where you're being influenced by a consumer experience, which probably during that time there was a lot of innovation going on to reduce the burden of going into a branch and probably to save money on all the cups of tea that they're not providing to consumers when they can just push them through a mobile or digital channel. So that's that's great that you saw the consumer side and then you thought wow I could apply this to entirely other business.
I'd love to learn a little bit more about the Trustd team today. So you’re founder -- what -- do you have an executive level role? What are some of the other team members that are in the company?
Lyall: Sure, so we've got a completely separate technology, completely separate technology stack. We've done a very close integration with Transport Exchange Group, obviously, it's been done quite deliberately because we've -- Trustd now has other standalone customers. And in transport and logistics, that's our, you know, that's our core competency, if you like. It can serve other areas, but yeah, it's a completely separate team, complete, as I say standalone tech team as well.
Steve: And those are based in the UK or a global workforce?
Lyall: Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a typical kind of SaaS business. So yeah, we have a lot of competency in the UK, and yeah, other regions as well. I mean, you know, with the talent that we require, it's very blended type of approach that we require. So, as well as all the standard platform type of skills that we need we also need expertise in digital identity as well.
Steve: That's great. How would you describe the core pillars of Trustd as a solution? Can you talk through kind of the highlights of the technical stack.
Lyall: We take data sources from wherever is most appropriate and best fit. We're bringing our… our job as I see it is to orchestrate all of these different technologies, but especially all of these different data sources. Some we have done, which are quite unique to us. I'd have to say in terms of tech stack, I mean, it's kind of -- it's all cloud based. It's typical, you know, AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes. And then of course, we're using what, you know, what we're seeing in the marketplace to be the best of breed when it comes to identity service providers. There's a lot going on in that area now. Everything's built as, you know, microservices and lambda functions Java, and a front end, which is in Angular. We're just about to launch for the first time, a mobile app, and that will be headless as well so that it can actually be available, made available within third-party apps. But as I say, we're very much the part of the tech is proprietary to us. But also our job is to find the best data sources in any given region basically.
Steve: Great. So there's a component of aggregation and perhaps orchestration in play, for Trustd?
Lyall: Part of our role and also a challenge to Trustd is to make sure that we keep abreast of what those best of breed are. Because you know, I mean, you're obviously an expert in identity service, so you know that that's rapidly changing all the time and it's a bit like a kind of arms race, isn't it?
Steve: Yeah, the industry has evolved from a lot of on premises through core system deployments where large banks would only take software that can go into their data center to now managed services, cloud service, APIs, SDKs, and it continues to evolve. I'm seeing more and more orchestration layers.
What I found really fascinating about my deep dive into Trustd and preparing for this conversation was that you have this unique vertical focus on the transportation ecosystem. And I think companies that are looking at verticals and looking at specific use cases can better adapt their solutions to their customer needs. I'm not too familiar, myself with transportation and the ecosystem. Can you walk me through the players or the actors, so to speak, like the drivers and carriers and shippers? I saw 3PL which I don't even know what that is. Maybe you could start there, what 3PL is and how all those pieces work together.
Lyall: Yeah. Okay. So looking from the outside, it's darn complicated.
Steve: I'm intimidated. I'm like… 3PL, it reminds me of Star Wars, C3PO. Don't mean to joke, but tell me more about what those pieces are and who are the components.
Lyall: I'd start off by saying that each region has some of the similar terminology, but different meaning to it. So, probably the best way to say it is, there are businesses which are asset owning, yeah? So effectively they run sheds, warehouses, and they run transport, and then there are asset light businesses, just like in other industries.
3PL is a phrase, which means actually slightly different things between the North American market and the UK market. But typically a 3PL is arranging, is managing freight. You can actually step it up to a 4PL and even a 5PL, but we won't go there on this interview. So here in Europe, typically a third, a 3PL, which means a third-party logistics business, may run some of their own assets, but they will also outsource some of their requirements or some of their customer requirements. In the US, a 3PL typically means or is deemed to refer to a brokerage, so they are managing freight. They don't have any of their own assets. They're acting as an intermediary between the shipper who owns the freight and the carrier who actually delivers the freight.
What is interesting about Trustd, and again, you mentioned the fact that, we're dealing with a vertical and it's a huge vertical, and we could talk all night about that. What we're focused on is actually delivering value and pragmatic solutions to every actor in that whole ecosystem, because it's a very interconnected ecosystem.
So I think that's the main thing to recognize about supply chain and especially the transportation part of supply chain. There's a lot of connectivity, businesses work with one another. There's a lot of -- I hate the phrase, but I'd use it again -- there's a lot of ‘coopetition’ where businesses compete, but they also cooperate. And what Trustd is doing, it's focused on bringing verification of identity and then also the ability to create some kind of standardization between the 3PLs. So I've just kind of defined the shipper who's the end client, the carriers, and the drivers. So we're going right away down to actually being able to verify and understand, but in a privacy enhancing way.
And I will always stress that part but effectively, Steve, we want you to be assured that the driver, maybe who's delivering your freight or your package to your door, whether it's your residential address or your-- your business address actually is verified, is qualified, carries the right certification. Maybe they're carrying some kind of specialist freight, we're attempting to-- and that's our focus -- is to really bring some verification standards and transparency to the whole of that supply chain.
Steve: Across those various actors in the supply chain, who is buying Trustd, like who has the vested interest in building that trust?
Lyall: Typically it will be the arranger of the freight, the third-party logistics business, the carrier, but also the shipper as well. Sometimes depending upon their relationship with the supply chain, will also have an interest in that, especially if the commodity that they're dealing with is high value or theft attractive. It's important that they know who's carrying their freight and that's one of the-- that's one of the key questions that Trustd answers is, who's carrying my freight? And, are they qualified to do that? We also see a lot of value, in fact, and being able to deliver efficiency to the drivers and to the carriers, because they're always getting asked, you know, to present their insurance, to present their documentation, and to re-verify themselves in some way with their customer, who could be a trucking company or a haulage company, could be a third-party logistics operator, could… so there's something in this for everybody.
Steve: You touched on the concept of KYC or know your customer, which is a term used in regulated financial services. I think the audience of this podcast is really familiar with that as well as person identification. But we're seeing more and more around businesses, you know, how do you verify a business entity? And then -- the process to be able to verify a business is very different than an individual -- how does this intersect between the personal identity, perhaps, of the driver all the way through to the business entity of the trucking company or…?
Lyall: That's a great question. So first of all, when I look at what identity service providers do with an individual, I know that it's pretty complicated. But it's not nearly as complicated as verifying a business, as we found. I mean, it's very difficult, and especially when you then bring in all of the other artifacts, which a business is expected to have in a specific domain like supply chain and transport. So what we do is we set out to verify and understand who the key people are, or either people or a personnel people. It depends on the number of individuals involved with the business in terms of ownership and company directors. In the US, obviously, the president and any other kind of authorized individual and then we're marrying that together with the business identity. So in our specific industry and or in road transport there are certain identifiers, operators licenses here in the UK. In the US, you've got motor carrier licenses, you've got department of transport qualification and a license as well, plus a whole lot of other data sets. Data that are brought in to prove that business identity.
And then what we do is we're saying bringing in all of this data, bringing in all of the verification that we can do, to essentially… we're trying to end up to say the end point, as I say, not just the onboarding, but throughout the lifetime of that business is to ensure that we know who we're dealing with. So that's the intersection of the natural person, as we call it in the industry, with the business or in fact, plural businesses, because many people have, you know, have involvement with several businesses so we want to make that as efficient as possible as well.
Steve: Having conducted the business analysis or the know your business steps, what are other parts of the transaction then that Trustd could be used beyond sort of that just initial onboarding?
Lyall: I described how, especially in Transport Exchange Group, we handle the whole of the order execution right away through presenting the order, acceptance of the order. I mean, you want to make sure that the, you know, that the entity that's accepting your order is, you know, the business that you think you're transacting with through to the collection of the freight.
So we've got a solution which we're just rolling out now into beta here in the UK, but then that'll come into the US as well, where we can actually prove and give evidence and auditability to who actually collected my freight, right the way through to transaction. through to the delivery, through to the presentation of the electronic bill. And most importantly, actually, through to who am I paying? Because there's a lot of fraud, as you know, around payment. We don't need to necessarily spell it all out, but trust is part of the solution to ensure I'm paying the right business.
Steve: What are maybe, just like one example of a payments fraud scenario for this industry? What, what have you seen out in the market?
Lyall: It's no different in transport and supply chain than it is in any other sector. But one of the things that you're probably familiar with is push payment fraud, where a fraudster will change the bank account. They will send a genuine looking email to accounts payable saying, “Hey, you know, we changed our bank account, please pay this account, you know, from-- for our invoices going forwards.” An unaware, unsuspecting accounts clerk will change that banking information and pay the wrong party. That's, you know, that’s very typical. It's only one of the areas, but that's something that Trustd protects and secures that.
Steve: One of the other big challenges that I've heard from the market, and I've talked with a few founders in the business verification space, is the business information, licenses and insurance, and bank account details that changes, that degrades. What are you doing to keep pace with kind of change of the business over time?
Lyall: So that's a fascinating topic for me. So typically, as you know, a bank will do a KYC refresh, maybe, I don't know, what do you find every two to three years?
Steve: It's often not, you know, probably about a, maybe a year to five years, depending on the bank. it's not too often.
Lyall: So what Trustd is attempting to do, bearing in mind that we have transactional authentication going on, on a daily basis in Trustd. We're-- we're actually… first of all we're -- as we talked about a little bit earlier -- we're taking all of these different data signals and data sources to make sure that Trustd is as up to date as possible. There's also, and an incentive, I should say, on the Trustd entity to keep that profile as up to date as possible.
But when it comes to basically, what you and I would probably call in the identity space persistent KYC, that's very much something that we're focused on. And because of the transactional nature of the industry that we're serving we think we've got a fairly good solution there to make sure that, you know, John Smith, John Doe's profile of him and his business is as up to date as possible.
There are other integrations, which we're just implementing at the moment, for example, on the insurance side which will ensure, you know, that those documents are in place still. Maybe they were in, you know, they might have been in place three months ago when you, when you onboarded that supplier, but they're still current today. So that's something that we're very focused on.
Steve: Is there a proactive alerting mechanism to let the business know when the data is no longer correct, or maybe the…
Lyall: For sure, for sure. I mean you'll get alerts every time that a document or an artifact or a data point in your profile is, that has an expiry date, is about to become out of date. And therefore you can go and rectify that. Yeah, for sure, that's a big part of the industry. But as I say, the industry is very, very transactional. So it's almost like a bank in terms that the entities that are enrolled to Trustd are actually transacting with other businesses every single day.
Steve: I'm curious, Lyall, about the implementation process. Let's say I'm one of these actors in the ecosystem and I've decided to move forward with your solution. What are the first steps that they're taking to deploy and to leverage Trustd?
Lyall: So taking the Transport Exchange Group example, but now we got other customers who are now onboarding their own suppliers to Trustd, as well. They'll be enrolled. They'll receive an invitation to Trustd and depending upon what level of verification that business the, we call them a tenant, who wants to employ their suppliers or enroll their suppliers, should I say, into Trustd decides on.
We've tried and it's a continual part of our product iteration is to make that as frictionless as possible. There's various different things that we have in our roadmap to make sure that, you know, the system, you know… you don't have to upload documents, for example because they will be there or we'll take those through an API but typically they'll go through that and then the compliance officer within that tenant organization will go through the process of verifying, not the identity so much because that can be done in an autonomous way, but they'll go through the process of ensuring that new supplier meets the standards which they have set in Trustd. And then they become compliant
Steve: When I introduced Trustd earlier in the podcast, there was a line that I got from your website about reduction in admin or manual processes, be interesting to hear about before and after scenarios where prior to Trustd, there was perhaps X, and then the deployment yielded Y. What are the benefits that companies have seen, or the return on their investment in using the service?
Lyall: You know, their compliance standards should certainly be raised. A lot of businesses are doing this either in a manual or a semi-manual way at this moment.
We're trying to move towards, certainly semi-autonomous, but even kind of like full automation of this process. And a lot can happen, as you know, from the ident… especially in the identity piece, it can happen automatically. On the supplier side, this is so that business that actually has created a profile it's pretty much as I just mentioned before we built it in such a way that they can actually share, they can take that profile, and then they can share it with other customers, with other businesses that they're trading with.
It's portable, you know, part of our concept is it should actually be a lifetime profile. There's a lot of emerging technologies which are still, I think, frankly, in discovery. Not just discovery for ourselves, but also in discovery for the industry as a whole. There are standards which are still being worked on but we see this whole concept of-- of a lifetime identity, which is reusable, can be shared with other businesses. That whole concept, as you know, you're probably familiar with Web3C (W3C), which is being able to share elements of your -- not just of your personal identity, because we're dealing with business identity -- but selective disclosure I guess is the way that you would describe it. And that means that we can deliver value to everybody in this ecosystem, not just the buyer.
Steve: When it comes to value curation, I'm always interested to understand a company's business model to capture that value and to ensure that companies have really good return on their investment using your service. How does Trustd make money? How does your system operate, from a financial standpoint?
Lyall: We're a typical SaaS model. It's pretty straightforward. And that will develop over time. The-- the-- the-- the vision for Trustd is frankly, I mean, you know, we think that we have, or we believe hopefully, we have fairly extensive and proven knowledge and a deep understanding of our domain certainly in transport and logistics and also in the wider supply chain industry. And I think if we, you know, if we follow the fundamentals… and also, you know, we're a very ethical business. You've heard mentioned on this-- on the interview now, you've heard me talk about privacy enhancing, you know, two or three times. That's an essential component of what Trustd delivers. And we will, you know, keep abreast of the new technologies especially, you know, decentralized identity is something that we're keeping a very close eye on as time goes forwards.
Steve: A lot of the solution providers, in the space, they leverage a similar SaaS model, but it varies depending on what they're doing. So some cases, it's a transactional event where you've onboarded this customer business, and then there's a transactional charge others as they get connected to authentication. They look at the identities under management, or they look at some sort of per seat fee or per organization fee. Where does Trustd fall across that spectrum?
Lyall: Yeah, so when I say SaaS, I mean, I don't really differentiate between all of those models because whether it's yeah, any of those you've mentioned three or four different kind of commercial models there, and they're all appropriate to Trustd. We're just about to launch, I think I mentioned earlier in our call, a solution that we've built here called Secure Collect. And that proves to everybody's satisfaction the driver who's turning up at your dock, you know, your loading dock or your, you know, your premises, your depot to come and collect that freight is, you know, is authorized to undertake that transaction.
And if they're not we'll let you know, any stakeholder, whether it's the shipper or the broker or the-- or, you know, anybody else that's connected to that shipment. We'll let them know about that in real time. Because a lot of fraud, by the way, happens at the point of origination in freight probably about 95%. So yeah, I mean, all those different commercial models, I consider it to be kind of a SaaS-based, a SaaS-based solution not just a subscription, but certainly we think that we can add value on a per transaction basis as well.
Steve: Excellent. Well we're coming up on time. I have just a few questions remaining. You mentioned some of the investments you're making in terms of product functionality. Is there anything you can share roadmap wise for 2024? You just mentioned Secure Collect. I think you talked about more self service. Anything that you could publicly put out there?
Lyall: We're doing a lot of innovation at Trustd. I think one of the things that fascinates me about this whole market is that the tech is changing, the regulatory environment is changing. A lot of things, you know, still haven't been decided especially when it comes to standards. We're acutely aware of what's the market -- and I guess I see it as our role really -- is to assimilate all of that, decide what's relevant, what's not relevant, and what adds value, to be frank. And then bring that into Trustd to the benefit of all of our, you know, all of our clients across the spectrum. So, yeah, I mean, proving who… and I when I say who, I don't just mean at the individual level, I mean, at the entity level, at the business level, at the organizational level, who you're dealing with. authenticate them and then secondarily, you know, are they authorized to undertake that transaction, whatever that transaction is within the business. That-- that's what we're focused on and the technologies that we use to do that are evolving all the time.
Steve: Yeah. As you've been describing Trustd in this conversation, I think about your business ID, your credential app itself fits into this broader category of portable identity, reusable identity, and verifiable credentials. There are a lot of different companies emerging for different markets and for different problems they're solving, but understanding your solution, do you foresee going to other verticals or other industries outside of transport logistics?
Lyall: Yeah, yeah, we could do… that's certainly potential for the future. But you've got to remember that our industry that we serve is first of all, we have the, you know, we understand the industry that we serve. We've got 25-plus years and a lot of now, you know, a lot of experience in that.
So, yeah, you know, supply chain is huge. I don't think I ever particularly realized how huge supply chain was, but remember the supply chain isn't just about transport and logistics and depots and sheds and freight. It also touches on many other areas including the, you know, the financing of supply chain which is, you know, an adjacent area.
Supply chain as a whole as we understand it, and we get more and more traction in that area, it becomes, I think something that we’ve become a specialist in, and I'm, you know, quite happy to own that. Whether we could deploy Trustd to other areas, yeah, sure. I mean, the technology and the platform we built could-- could certainly be deployed in those. But that remains…
Steve: What's your big picture vision, Lyall, for Trustd? Is it to be the dominant trusted platform in transport or…
Lyall: You know, I'd love to be, and I see ourselves being a trust registry within transport and logistics and the wider supply chain. I certainly think it, you know, the industry needs it. It needs somebody to come from a very certain perspective. It needs to be neutral. It needs to be independent. It needs to have an understanding of governance and how to write the correct policies. How to marry the tech and also the regulatory environment, which exists, you know, outside of supply chain and bring that in to inform what we do and what we can do in our industry.
Steve: When I have looked at different solution providers in the market and consulted with some and worked at some in the past, there's this process of adding verticals or use cases. And some companies, they want to serve them all because identity and digital identity is such a universal problem to solve, but you really need deep subject matter expertise in the industry you're going to serve. You need to speak their language, understand the complexities. And so I find it fascinating that you're building, for what is the backbone of commerce for the globe, which is how we get our goods, physical goods. And we saw with the pandemic and when that all got shut down, how it affected us all. So I think that is a very worthwhile vision and mission, so thank you for sharing that.
We're just at time. I've got two more, maybe three more questions for you. Lyall, if you've seen any of the episodes of EXECUTIVE SERIES, I like to go just a little bit further than the LinkedIn profile, the person behind the press releases. When you're not crisscrossing the globe and building multiple companies, what are some of your hobbies or your important personal causes that you could share with the audience?
Lyall: Yeah, sure. So at the back end of the pandemic, I started cycling, become quite a keen cyclist on my-- on much of my wife's… I'm now on my third bike. So yeah, I've done quite a bit of riding, hoping to do a five-day trip around France in the summer. That's become pretty cool.
And actually, I know it sounds terrible, but I've, this whole area, which obviously, Steve, is your, you know, is your-- it's your domain about identity is actually become very absorbing in itself as an intellectual exercise and understanding all the potential and the possibilities. It's stretching, it really is. And myself and my colleagues, you know, think about it pretty much all the time. So if I was to call that a hobby, I think that might also be true.
Steve: The digital identity spaces is the hobby, hey, that's a-- it's a passion project. It’s…
Lyall: It's a, yeah, it's a serious undertaking. That's not, let's not be too flippant about it, but it's interesting from both the business and also from an intellectual point of view.
Steve: Well, as we close out, Lyle, for those that are watching or listening to this, what type of conversations would you like to have with the market and how should they reach out to you?
Lyall: Two aspects to that, really. So first of all, any providers to the market whether they're interested in detecting fraud signals we're always interested to talk to those guys. Same on the identity service provider angle. There's so much movement in that market, especially to, you know, try and push back and to challenge generative AI in particular.
So we're always interested to have those providers talk to us and because as I say, we're, you know, our businesses basically, to being the best solution to our customers and to our marketplace.
Steve: Excellent. Well, Lyall, we're at time. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. I find your background really fascinating because you've been on the practitioner side with Transport Exchange Group, and then you created a company on the provider side. And so you're using that deep domain expertise to further the mission of the industry. So thank you for sharing that story and everything about Trustd.
Lyall: And thanks, Steve. And yeah, we'll carry on talking and I look forward to seeing whether you're in the UK or in London or in-- in the US.
Steve: Absolutely. Perhaps we all see each other again at a Marketplace Risk in San Francisco this spring.
Lyall: Oh, that, by the way, let's, yeah, let's give a plug to Marketplace Risk. I mean, that is a fabulous conference. Anybody that's watching this video, if you haven't been to Marketplace Risk and you're involved in marketplaces or trust and safety in some way, that is a must attend event.
So they do an event in San Francisco and then they have an edition in London, which is kind of in the fall. And the people and the attendees at that are excellent. So yeah, if you're involved in trust and safety, that is a must. And Jeremy Gottschalk, who founded that along with some other folk they-- they've done a great job of bringing that community together.
Steve: 100% agree. Well, thanks again, Lyall. We're going to wrap up here and enjoy the rest of your day and evening.
Lyall: Cheers. Thanks, Steve.
Supply Chain Security with Founder of Trustd, Lyall Cresswell