ARTICLE 2 - PAGE 7 | BLOCKCHAIN INDUSTRY REVIEW
DAVID HARNEY PRESIDENT AND CEO EUROPE, GREAT WEST LIFECO. by Jilian Godsil
David Harney is a lifer at Irish Life, literally. He joined the company at 17 and has stayed ever since. His rise has been of the meteorite-quality and in 2007 he was made Head of Corporate only to face into devastating loses the following year in the global financial crash. Despite or perhaps because of that, he was promoted to CEO of Irish Life Group in 2016, following its bailout by the Irish government and subsequent sale to Canadian Insurance giant, Great West Lifeco. Then just three weeks ago, he was promoted to President and CEO Europe of Great West Lifeco. The loose coalition working alongside Irish Life are household names such as Vodafone, ESB, An Post, A&L Goodbody, Deloitte and FEXCO. Notwithstanding his promotion since the presentation, David assures me he is staying on as champion of the Identity project – codenamed Emerald. “The project is a national one, hence the other companies involved, and the government is interested in it too. Once we figure it out, we would like to share our solution internationally,” he says. First of all, Emerald needs to sort out definitions of identity – and credentials. “Identity is who you are. You are born and you exist as a unique human being. Then credentials are the things that you present to prove that you who you say you are”. “The Emerald project is to create a digital credential or set of credentials that you own and carry with you in an electronic wallet which you can share as you need.”
Currently, the situation of proving who you are online is messy with duplicate requests from company to company and even from different government departments. The holy grail is to evolve a solution that allows the individual to digitally share their data and to have it trusted. “It’s mad because when the internet was invented no one thought about digital identity. It’s a problem that is only being addressed now by coalitions such as Emerald.” It’s certainly true that the internet did not address these issues, in fact anonymity was a benefit where no one could tell who you were – you could even be a dog online as the New Yorker cartoon from Peter Steiner famously showed.
