Landscape

Golden
Cog
Methodology

We’ve established our own proprietary Golden Cog Strategy to unearth dominating forces that underpin nascent, fragmented, and emerging markets in order to capture unrealized opportunities and value pools. 
Digital Identity landscape

Definition

What Are Golden Cogs

Golden Cogs are solutions with a dominant position in the landscape. These solutions oftentimes are required to form a complete tech stack, difficult to build, and are in-market as enablers for larger platform players. Their market position provides a strong economic moat and incentives structure, but may lead to price compression overtime. Golden Cog opportunities can also be fleeting. As with many nascent, fragmented, and emerging markets, unique solutions are targeted quickly and the supply increases, reducing the long-term economic incentives. 

How we do it

With our proprietary methodology, we are able to help our clients identify demand-driven use cases, establish the technologies available, pinpoint where investments are flowing, and discover the spaces. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the Golden Cog Framework demonstrates how multiple digital identity market segments come together to address the “how might we” use cases that are driving demand in this space. 

To understand our Global Cog Methodology you'll first need to be familiar with how we build our landscape framework

01

Create landscape of solution segments that make up the market
Assess all solutions that exist in and industry individually by looking at product and service offerings, customer or client base and roadmaps

02

Discover dominating market forces

Identify the core elements that consistenly drive the change and evolution across the landscape

03

Measure relational value of adjacent solution
For each segment, identify how it is either impacting or being impacted by its surrounding segments

04

Identify platforms, enablers, and ubiquitous features
For each segment, identify if it is a platform offering a suite of solutions, or if it’s an enabler, offering a single solution that can be used within a platform

05

Measure solution segment influence over other segments
Identify how much, if any, influence each segment has over the surrounding adjacent segments

06

Identify resulting Golden Cog solution segments
The output of this methodology identifies the segments and information about those segments that companies can use to take action for growth, competitive advantage, and investment

Definition

How we do it

One of the biggest market forces in identity is data. So we categorize solution segments under one or more of the following:

Self-managed Data

Individual (usually consumer) created data that provides the user with increased control and autonomy of verifiable credentials

Probabilistic Data

Predictive insights that are inferred from behavioral events across a wider range of data sets. Statistical modeling is generally used to assess the probability that the data matches a specific person

Deterministic Data

First party data that is trusted and true. Deterministic data relies upon identity attributes that act as unique identifiers to create a match between one or several pieces of personally identifiable information (PII)

RESOURCES

Related Resources

Link Platform, Investing in Identity

Blog post

FinTech Reduces Abandonment Rates in Digital Account Opening
KYB Blog post

Past Landcapes

‘Golden Cog’ Product Growth in Mobile & Device Intelligence
Account Opening for Financial Services - Ofindo Webinar

CASE STUDY

Public-Private Trust Network Expands Consumer Reach

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