Trust Stamp Inc said it is strengthening its presence in Rwanda with additional hiring as well as strategic partnerships and research initiatives to maximise the opportunities created by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
Trust Stamp (OTCQX:IDAI, EURONEXT:AIID), which established its Rwandan subsidiary in 2021, currently employs 12 people in its Kigali office. It is actively hiring to double the Kigali team to accelerate development of a unique Africa-centric, tokenised biometric solution that will facilitate digital and in-person transactions across the continent.
"Trust Stamp (OTCQX:IDAI, EURONEXT:AIID) is committed to delivering equitable, accessible, and secure identity technologies that power inclusion for all races and ethnologies, while prioritising privacy, equity, and security, and respecting cultural practices,” said Raman Narayanswamy, chief innovation officer for Trust Stamp, in a statement.
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Narayanswamy said AfCFTA connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries, but there is a pressing need to refine legacy biometric authentication tools to serve the diverse population of Africa equitably.
“We intend to do that in partnership with African institutions, and to protect the data generated by those tools by adding a secure tokenisation layer,” he said. “To that end, we have already agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding with a leading university in Rwanda, and we are inviting additional cooperators from the government, academic, and private sectors."
Meanwhile, Trust Stamp said its chief science officer Dr Norman Poh joined leading identity experts from around the world on December 15, 2021, for the third and final part of ID4Africa's 'The Dark Side of Identity: Mitigating the Risks' webinar series, which aims to start a diverse dialogue on the risks and harms of identity systems, and building responsible systems that are resistant to exploitation and abuse from potential nefarious actors.
Poh discussed innovations in data tokenisation that enable privacy-preserving biometrics, focusing on implementations of Trust Stamp's Irreversibly Transformed Identity Tokens (IT2), including biometric cryptosystems and large-scale identity authentication and deduplication in low-resource environments.
In all cases, the irreversibility and revocability of biometric tokenisation technology protects the privacy of individuals and mitigates potential damage due to data loss or compromise.
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