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PTI and Identity Systems

Identity systems answer who is this subject? Portable Trust Infrastructure answers what trust evidence exists for this subject, in which life-area context, with what provenance? They are complementary layers in a modern trust stack.

1. What identity systems are​

Identity systems maintain subject directories: registries of people, organizations, and devices with stable internal identifiers, attribute stores, and (often) deduplication logic. Categories include:

  • Customer identity and access management (CIAM): consumer onboarding profiles
  • Enterprise directory services: workforce identity (LDAP, Active Directory)
  • Customer master data management (MDM): golden records across CRM and core banking
  • Identity resolution platforms: probabilistic matching across datasets

Identity systems optimize for uniqueness, attribute freshness, and account lifecycle within an organization's boundary or federation contract.

2. What problem identity systems solve​

ProblemIdentity system response
Duplicate accountsMerge rules, deterministic keys, probabilistic matching
Attribute driftProfile updates, verification timestamps
Cross-application SSOFederated identifiers, token claims
Regulatory ID captureStorage of legal name, DOB, national ID number

Identity systems excel at account management. They typically do not maintain portable trust history, context-scoped credibility scores, or cross-institutional signal exchange.

3. What PTI adds​

Identity systems

  • Internal customer or employee IDs
  • Attribute profiles and verification status
  • Account lifecycle (create, merge, deactivate)

PTI adds

  • Portable pti_id, persists across partners and institutions
  • Entity linking, maps partner entity IDs to one subject graph
  • Trust signal orchestration, events become context-scoped evidence
  • Lookup at decision time, institutions consume trust intelligence, not raw PII

PTI treats identity resolution as an input plane. A verified identity assertion may become a trust signal; the PTI-ID becomes the anchor for all subsequent trust events regardless of which partner emitted them.

4. How they compose together​

Integration pattern:

  1. Partner completes identity capture through existing IdP or KYC flow.
  2. Partner emits a trust event referencing its entity ID and entitled trust context.
  3. PTI Trust Registry resolves the subject to a pti_id (creating or linking as needed).
  4. Institution consumers request trust lookups by pti_id, not by re-querying the partner's identity store.

5. When to use each​

ScenarioUse identity systemAdd PTI
Single-app login and profileYesOptional
Multi-partner signal ingestion with portable trustYes (per partner)Required
Cross-institution trust lookup at loan/rental/hire decisionPartial (subject match only)Required
Merging duplicate CRM records within one bankYesNo
Linking repayment history across MFIs and merchantsNo (outside scope)Required

Rule of thumb: keep your identity stack for authentication and account management; add PTI when trust must travel with the subject across institutional boundaries.

See also​