Ontario SSI Leader Northern Block Partners with esatus AG, European SSI and IAM Solutions Leader

Toronto, Ontario -

As global demand for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) continues to grow, Northern Block and German-based esatus AG announce a strategic partnership that will be very beneficial for Governments and Large Enterprise.

The purpose of this partnership is to help organizations exploring the deployment of digital wallet and verifiable credential solutions. The partnership enables organizations to continue reaping the benefits of their Identity and Access Management (IAM) investments, while parallelly moving certain processes towards SSI.

esatus has worked in the SSI space since 2015 and has contributed to many publications about SSI. They have developed their own identity and access management solution SOWL, based on Self-Sovereign Identity technology.

More recently, esatus has helped build the IDunion consortium, a public-private partnership of companies and institutions, which implemented and governs the Hyperledger Indy-based IDunion public identity utility. IDunion’s aim is to establish one of the leading and most secure identity networks in Europe, in harmony with the European legal framework (especially eIDAS and GDPR).

As Canada itself moves towards the use of Verifiable Credentials within their digital identity strategies, being able to leverage learnings from real national use cases in Europe are important things to take into consideration.

“More and more countries are moving towards user-centric digital identity solutions. That means that global partnerships like these are crucial to ensure compatibility between various trust ecosystems. We’ve been long collaborators with the esatus team. They bring a wealth of IAM knowledge and expertise, which is a phenomenal use case for SSI,” says Mathieu Glaude, CEO Northern Block.

Through their NB Orbit SSI Platform, the first commercial-grade verifiable credential platform in Canada, Northern Block has been focused on facilitating the deployment of trust ecosystems, while enabling organizations and consortiums to build decentralized business models. NB Orbit is a scalable way to build ecosystem solutions with authentic data, with the onboarding of Verified People and Verified Businesses built into the core.

“Northern Block has a great platform for creating ecosystem solutions. They’ve built a large network of credential issuers in North America that make it easy to kick-start an ecosystem solution focused on authentic data. With this partnership, we will now be able to conduct quick pilot projects demonstrating how SSI and existing IAM investments complement each other and can bring value,” says Dr. André Kudra, CIO at esatus AG.

Northern Block will leverage esatus’ proven technology stack that connects SSI with standard authentication and authorization sources. This means that Verifiable Credential and Digital Wallet solutions can seamlessly be deployed with workforces and customers, while integrating with SAML, AD, oAuth2, OIDC and more.

esatus remains focused on the European market, while Northern Block has a strong focus on the Canadian and North American market.

Both companies are founding members of the Trust over IP Foundation, and share a common goal of enabling digital trust in our everyday lives. For details about the Trust over IP Foundation, visit: https://trustoverip.org/

About Northern Block - Northern Block is a Toronto, Canada based technology provider developer with a long track record of customer implementations. A leader in the SSI space with active positions on leading industry bodies like the Digital Identity and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC) and the Trust over IP Foundation (ToIP), Northern Block is at the forefront of delivering on the Secure, Privacy by design and Verifiable world.

About esatus AG - The company has been a passionate driver of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) in Germany and one of the global technology leaders since 2015. esatus designs digital-first processes to be future-oriented and offers solutions from a single source - from conception to individual software development to operational management. It also focuses on information security (InfoSec). esatus advises companies from a holistic perspective on everything to do with Identity & Access Management and supports them in the implementation of compliance and data protection requirements (GRC).