BEntrepreneur Magazine sat down with Cyril Ghanem, Head of Customer Experience, Middle East at Pikcio to talk about how their work affects large numbers of people, how data is the oil of the modern world and their tips for emerging tech startups.

Business: Please tell us more about Pikcio and how the work you do affects or could potentially affect hundreds of people?

Digital Identity as a Service is the near future of a positive customer journey, wherever and whenever consumers need to have an interaction with a private or public sector entity. From Onboarding into any new website, e-commerce platform or face to face service to maintaining and sharing their own records, consumers and corporations handle, replicate and try more or less successfully to secure data. These are all painful and costly processes that lead to poor customer experience and high costs for companies and governments. eKYC, eGov services, Health data services can all be taken care of in a single platform as a Service solution.PikcioChain is the secure blockchain- based, data ecosystem that saves time, reduces costs and increases customer satisfaction with any process that requires the collection, certification and exchange of personal data. We help connect public and private sectors; banks to insurance providers to medical services to Telco. We bring value and relevance to consumers and their service providers.

Data: Data is the currency of the modern world. How does Pikcio use data and to what ends?

Pikcio architecture consists in providing consumers with a digital vault, available on mobile, tablet or desktop and accessible only to its owner. This vault is connected to multiple sources of data information; these are any public or private institution the individual does business with. They will constantly enrich the dataset of the wallet, ensuring therefore the most accurate and up to date data sharing.

Personal Data: With the influx of “sharing” in today’s social media, how can consumers protect their personal data?

Data is the oil of modern economy. Our approach at Pikcio is to give consumers control of their own data. It is their own right and responsibility to have a complete and consolidated situation of their data. They decide who they wish to share it with and ultimately, get rewarded for it. The Pikcio ecosystem is fully GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant by construct; we do not store any data on our servers nor on our private blockchain (or permission based open blockchain, depending on selected architecture). Thanks to this architecture, we prevent massive data breaches. Thanks to the blockchain and our “Matrioshka” security protocol since accessing hashes of the data without consumer consent has become much more challenging (Matrioshka are these Russian wooden dolls; when you’ve managed to open one, it is only to realize there is another one inside and so on.)

Innovation & Disruption: What do you think Pikcio does differently?

Digital Identity as a Service (DIaaS) is a relatively old idea but a fairly recent concept; it is only now that we witness the right technology allowing transformation of this idea into a reality. DIaaS can be tackled through multiple angles; from banking e-KYC to medical and health data, insurance, education, employment, pension, payment, loyalty etc. Pikcio allows utilization of all public and private sector services in a consumer centric fashion.

While consumer identification and data security are not major hurdles anymore, companies can focus on their core business and deliver the best possible service to their customers.We see this positive disruption filling a gap in the current economy and solving several pains incurred by the consumers as well as the private and public sectors.

Tips- what is your advice to tech startups especially those who want to work with emerging data?

New technologies will allow more innovation in the upcoming 5 years than in the last 50 years. To tech startups, I would recommend teaming up with other startups around a common problem faced by companies, find the right orchestrator to work with and together, build the right symphony with and for their first customers. This is how they’ll transform their MVP (Minimum Viable Product) into an MVP (Most Valuable Product).
For more information:
https://pikciochain.com/