Carol Coye Benson from Glenbrook Partners is giving an old fashioned, stand-up, Powerpointed talk. And she’s very good.

She says:

People say that they want to be the “Visa of the identity business.” But there’s no equivalent in the identity business of the way the credit card system motivates merchants and issuing banks Also, transactions that are clear and simple with credit cards become unclear and complicated in the identity management world.

And, Carol says, there are no obvious non-transaction-based models.

Carol presents a second “bad idea”: “The compulsive consumer fantasy” in which customers have complete control over the information disclosed in different contexts and will pay for the privilege. But this appeals only to the obsessive minority of users, so it’s not going to happen on a scale sufficient to build a business.

So, where is money to be made? In the enterprise market. And there may be some opportunities for intermediaries, along the credit bureau model.

By the way, Carol says we’ll have a variety of identities, not one clean, aggregated single identity. We’ll have government-issued identities and employer-issued identities, ISP/bank-issued identities, etc. It’s going to be messy. And that’s a Good Thing.

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