Board of Directors
IDEMIA
Matthew Thompson, Kantara Initiative President Senior Vice President, Civil Identity for North America at IDEMIA
Matthew Thompson, CISSP, is an industry-recognized thought leader in the area of Identity and Security Management and currently leads IDEMIA's Civil and Digital Identity Business in North America. Matt is an innovator in the digital identity space, having co-founded ID.me, which was named to the “100 Brilliant Companies” list in 2014 by Entrepreneur Magazine. Matt has spent years working in the public and private sectors to promote privacy-enhancing, secure, interoperable, and user-friendly ways to give individuals and organizations confidence in their online interactions, which garnered him recognition by One World Identity as one of the “Top 100 Leaders in Identity” in 2017 and 2018.
Experian
Eric Thompson, Kantara Initiative Director Public Sector Identity and Analytics Chief Strategist at Experian North America
He drives public sector go-to-market strategies for Experian’s Fraud, Identity and Analytics business. His responsibilities include aligning Experian’s solutions to government (NIST) standards, designing analytic solutions to solve major public sector issues, and representing Experian in the broader US Public Sector, including the Kantara Board and various industry working groups. Prior to his work at Experian, Eric has led security and risk management teams at top financial institutions, business consulting on fraud and identity for public and private sector and served in the U.S. Army. Eric holds bachelor’s degrees in both International Relations and Russian from University of California, Davis, a master’s degree in Business Administration from University of California, Irvine, and a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) certification.
Easy Dynamics
Maria Vachino, Kantara Director at Large Director, and Digital Identity Lead, at Easy Dynamics Corp (EDC)
Maria Vachino is the Account Manager for SSA (Social Security Administration) and GSA (General Services Administration), where she also acts as a senior ICAM SME providing support at the CIO and DI lead levels. She is also leading the architecture and development of EAZE, SSA’s Government to Business OIDC federation and entity which won a 2020 Public Sector Innovation of the year award. Within EDC, she leads the Identity Guild where her focus is on cross agency collaboration (SSA, GSA, IRS, NIST, USDA, and DHS), training ICAM analysts, and growing EDC’s ICAM practice. She supported EDC joining Kantara as part of her work as the DI Lead, and is encouraging their growing ICAM staff to participate in Kantara work groups. Previously, Maria was the Technical and Government Engagement lead for the DHS S&T Identity Management Research program while at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. In that role, she supported work done as part of Kantara’s KIPI program and informally participated in several Kantara Work Groups (WG), including the ID Pro launch WG and the Identity Assurance WG. Maria has an MS in Cybersecurity from the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and a BS in Computer Science from University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
WedaCon
Thorsten Niebuhr, Kantara Director at Large Managing Director and Owner, WedaCon Informationstechnologen GmbH
Thorsten Niebuhr is the managing director, and owner, of WedaCon Informationstechnologen GmbH, a company dedicated to Identity and Access Management he founded in 2001. He holds several industry certifications and has more than thirty years of experience in the field of Directory Technologies, Identity Management and Data Privacy. As a technical trainer, consultant and developer he co-developed one of the first Identity Management Solutions which was fully driven by Entity-Relationship functionality.
digi.me
Julian Ranger, Kantara Initiative Director Chairman and Founder of Digi.me
Julian founded his first business STASYS, specialising in the military internet, in 1987 and grew it to a major multi-national business before selling to Lockheed Martin in 2005. Julian is an angel investor (e.g. Hailo, DataSift, Astrobotic) and is the founder of digi.me, which is re-imagining the personal Internet.
2Keys
Andrew Johnston, Kantara Director at Large VP, Standards Development and Industry Relations at 2Keys Corporation, an Interac Company
Andrew Johnston contributes to standards development and industry groups related to Digital Identity services at 2Keys. In his 30-year career, Andrew has guided and delivered nation-scale API management and delivery capabilities, nation-scale identity and access management platforms, major portal initiatives, mobile computing solutions, email management and web application server products. He has consulted on information technology in the financial services, insurance, marketing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics industries. Andrew has contributed to the Digital Identification and Authentication Council (DIACC) Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (PCTF) since its inception and continues to support its development as co-chair of the DIACC Trust Framework Expert Committee. He is also a member of the DIACC Innovation Expert Committee, where he has previously held the positions of co-vice-chair, and co-chair. Andrew is a member of the Digital Trust and Identity Technical Committee of the CIO Strategy Council, where he had the opportunity to contribute to what became the first National Standard of Canada for Digital Trust and Identity (CAN/CIOSC-103-1:2020).
Airside Mobile
Peter Davis, Kantara Director at Large, Chief Privacy Officer, Enterprise Architect at Airside Mobile
Peter Davis is a distinguished leader in building identity management technology with integrity for over 20 years. His firsthand experience started with classical B2B applications, like extranets, then progressed to federated identity management applications, such as those enabled by Kantara Initiative (formerly Liberty Alliance), OAuth and SAML2. Throughout his career, Mr. Davis has focused his work on standards and public policy, resulting in several published papers related to the application of authentication and authorization mechanisms on linked data, including privacy and security white papers and other advisory documents for Neustar, the Respect Network, Kantara, Liberty Alliance, and OASIS. He also served as co-chair for the Technical Working Group for the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, LLC (DECE, UltraViolet). While with the Liberty Alliance, and in conjunction with his involvement in their Public Policy Expert Group (PPEG), Mr. Davis assisted in providing guidance to the EU Article 29 committee work and contributed to its ID-WSF/ID-FF standards. His contributions within the DECE Technical Working Group include portions of the underlying REST protocol design, the message security architecture, and the incorporation of existing security and identity standards, such as federation and delegation topologies, into the DECE specifications. He has also ensured that applicable privacy requirements and practices have become an integral part of the DECE architecture, in general, and DECE’s Coordinator architecture, in particular. Mr. Davis’ work at Airside makes him the heart of our “Privacy First. Human Always.” motto. Airside has great respect for Kantara Initiative’s efforts to establish standards and recommendations that are user-centric, consent-driven, and ultimately, built on trust. In his previous job as Chief Identity Architect and Security Architect at Neustar, Mr. Davis served on the Kantara Board of Directors in 2009.
Leadership Council Representatives
Ken Dagg
Kantara Initiative Treasurer
Ken Dagg is currently the chair of the Kantara Initiative IAWG. Mr. Dagg is an independent Identity and Authentication consultant who provides clients with strategic and tactical advice on how to improve their digital service offerings. Prior to his retirement from the Canadian Federal Government in December 2013 Mr. Dagg was the senior architect of the Cyber Authentication and Identity Management Program of the Government of Canada (GC). In this role he oversaw the replacement of the government’s proprietary cyber authentication system with a new open standards based federation of online credentials from both the private and public sectors that saved the government approximately $35m annually. Throughout the rest of his diverse thirty-nine year career in the government, educational, scientific and business sectors, Mr. Dagg continuously provided managers at all levels with high quality advice on how to use technology to transform their operations and realize improvements in their effectiveness and efficiency.
Andrew Hughes
Chair of Leadership Council
Andrew Hughes CISM CISSP is a digital identity strategist and international standards expert, working for IDEMIA on mobile ID technologies as an Identity Architect. He works with international associations and standards bodies developing standards and related conformity assessment materials. He is a member of the Kantara Initiative and contributes to industry evolution by volunteering extensively at Kantara, W3C, ISO, ITU-T, Rebooting Web of Trust and IDPro. He serves as Chair of the Kantara Initiative Leadership Council, setting the work programme for this global consortium which advances innovation and standardization of trustworthy use of identity and personal data. He is deeply engaged in the ‘missing model’ of identity verification; data processing authorization and consent; and W3C Verifiable Credentials evolution. He has been Editor for several standards at OASIS and ITU-T and has launched and Chaired several work groups at industry consortia. Andrew is an active national expert on the Standards Canada delegation to ISO SC 27 and ISO SC 17.
Executive Director
Colin Wallis
A contributor to Kantara from its inception in 2009, Colin relocated from New Zealand to the UK in 2016 to establish his consulting company with Kantara as its first client, reflecting Kantara’s global membership and the importance of Europe to its assurance program and emergent privacy-enabled suite of specifications and tools.Colin co-founded the Estonian based Kantara Initiative Europe, being one of the earliest examples of a non-profit trade association to be incorporated through Estonia’s eResidency program.His love of speed became apparent in his teens as a member of the NZ Ski Team and in later life, as an avid F1 motor racing fan. Colin was named in One World Identity’ s (OWI) 2018 list of the Top 100 Influencers in Identity