Browsing by Author "AL SHAMSI, SUAAD SALEM YOUSEF"

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    Developing a Digital Trust Framework between Government and Private Sector in the Financial Sector
    (The British University in Dubai (BUiD), 2023-07) AL SHAMSI, SUAAD SALEM YOUSEF; Professor Sherief Abdallah
    COVID-19 accelerated the transformation to a digital society. It created a necessity for an ecosystem trusted by all parties to avail services, which requires identity to be verified and information to be exchanged. The trusted digital identity of individuals and organizations is a fundamental block in such an ecosystem. Services in critical domains such as finance, health and travel heavily rely on identity verification. This process is known as “Know Your Customer” (KYC). Despite the need for a digital service offering, regulators mandate the physical verification of individuals and their documents. This process is usually lengthy, inefficient, costly and inconvenient to the customer. It mandates the customer to visit each service provider at least once to conduct customer identification and verification prior to availing the service or obtaining digital credentials. Regulators requirements need to be identified and addressed in a digital mean which is accepted and trusted by all involved parties, service providers, customers, and document issuers, in order to transform KYC process to a digital process which is trusted and efficient. The physical identity of individuals must be mapped to a digital identity that can be trusted and verified by all service providers. The physical documents of individuals representing their identity or any claim they make about themselves or their ownership must be transformed into trusted and verifiable digital credentials. This would enable an end to end digital service offering without the need for customer to physically visit service providers for customer identification and verification. This paper develop a Digital Trust Framework between the government and private sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that aims to enable service providers to offer an end to end digital service through the development of a unified trusted digital identity and credentials that eliminate the need for the initial physical identification and verification, and imporve the continuous KYC monitoring of the customer therefore improving the efficiency and the user experience, reducing the cost, and increasing the transparency of the KYC processes. The framework uses decentralized identity and verifiable credentials (VCs) as a layer on top of blockchain technology to address the challenges faced in KYC processes while adopting Privacy-by-Design principles. Hence, this research paper follows a design science research methodology (DSRM) as research method to develop the framework. The focus is on the financial sector in the UAE. The DSRM research method integrates existing theoretical knowledge and insights from industry practitioners obtained through semi-structured expert interviews. The proposed framework to imporve the KYC process was successfully implemented as prototype system and it was evaluated through a case study evaluation with real users to verify its feasibility. The results of the demonstration were used to evaluate the prototype system through different performance metrics. The results of the evaluation showed satisfactory performance across various metrics indicating the system stability and reliability.