Singapore, 14th October 2021 – Communications Business Automation Network Limited (CBAN), an organisation set up by leading global ICT Service Providers to accelerate and oversee the adoption of automated settlement in the communications industry, announced today that it is launching a production-ready identity service that is able to verify partners for any use-case, on any de-centralised network to automate settlement between ICT Service Providers.
Establishing identity is a critical component in a private and permissioned de-centralised network. The challenge is that different DLT implementations used by the network participants or their technology providers frequently have different mechanisms to establish identity, increasing the complexity and raising barriers to adoption. To address this, CBAN’s identity service has been developed to be DLT agnostic, enabling it to provide unique identities to every organisation in the network and validate these across any number of DLT chains used by the network participants. This has a significant operational and financial benefit in that it eliminates the need of ICT Service Providers having to maintain multiple DLT infrastructures and identity service providers.
CBAN selected Aloaha Limited, a specialist in the development of de-centralised identity solutions, as the technology partner to provide and operate the identity service on CBAN’s behalf for a set period. The technology operating the identity service has been developed to be fully compliant with the CBAN Reference Architecture that is due to be published later this year. The CBAN Reference Architecture defines the elements that ensure interoperability between different OSS/BSS system implementations, in order to enable serviceability between different network members. Ultimately, the CBAN identity validation service through the technology by Aloaha Ltd will provide ICT Service Providers with the unique opportunity to automate settlement with their peers, as well as enable any system and technology developer to innovate and introduce new products and services to the ecosystem.
To enable the creation and operation of an interoperable, automated settlement ecosystem, CBAN has defined specific Core Services that are the same across every use-case. Of these, provision of identity is the most critical, as it is the enabler to all business use-cases. CBAN will offer the identity service to its members, as well as other organisations, allowing them to connect to the automated CBAN environment with applications that require identity verification, such as discovery of capabilities. The CBAN Identity Service is interoperable and able to link other federated identities connected to the CBAN network.
The CBAN identity services can be utilised for any de-centralised business process use case. It will be initially used by the CBAN members to enable the automation of the wholesale data-on-demand supply chain, and solution to identify and stop certain types of fraud in international voice business, with both products due to enter production in the coming months.
Franz Bader, Director Wholesale of A1 Telekom Austria Group and member of the board of CBAN said: “The identities play a central role in the digitization of business processes. Providing Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) services that can be based on different DLT in parallel is a milestone in the collaboration of telcos worldwide. We as A1 believe that the solution we have chosen in CBAN has many advantages over monolithic solutions due to its distributed architecture. In the medium term, we can well imagine offering this solution to other industries.”
Stefan Engelbert, Founder and CEO of Aloaha Limited said: “It is great that the collaborative journey of CBAN’s members to develop and interoperable platform for ICT Service Providers to automate settlement has led to this significant milestone. This will pave the way for CBAN’s ambitious goal to revolutionise the telecoms industry. We at Aloaha Limited are very excited to be the chosen technological partner at this innovative juncture.”
Commenting on the launch of the identity service, Paul Gampe, CTO of PCCW Global and the chair of CBAN Technology Committee said: “Distributed ledger technology represents an opportunity to dramatically improve the operational efficiency of the communication industry and create a whole new range of products and services across the entire Technology sector. As a membership organisation with a mission to unlock the value of automated connectivity, this identity service is of critical value to our membership.”