Customer Identity and Access Management, Technology
Trust technology to revolutionise customer identity management
Customer Identity and Access Management, Technology
The Challenge
Trust has been an integral part of our society since the dawn of time. Throughout history, humans have found various ways to trust and protect each other, ranging from verbal agreemwhat_we_dide by due to the complexity and diversity of the networks we rely on for our daily lives. Decentralized technology has recently emerged as a potential solution to this problem, offering revolutionary new ways for individuals and organisations to securely and efficiently establish trust with one another. The Founder of CentraPass was evaluating how to commercialise their proprietary Trust technology. He turned to And Now to help unlock this opportunity through a new product and a compelling investor narrative.
What we did
Product, Brand and Marketing strategy
Architecture strategy, Back-end and Front-end Development
Venture Partners
Services
Product Strategy, Architecture Strategy, Front-end Development
Copyright © 2025 And Now Partners Limited
Key insight
The first step was an in-depth immersion into what trust means today by applying the principles of Lean Product Development and Human-centred Design. We conducted over 75 hours of primary research into customers and observed behavioural patterns around "trust" when travelling, paying, proving identity, and applying for products and services. We also incorporated research into decentralised technology and meta-trends that drive investor engagement in the sector.
We unpacked the knowledge of the founders, who opened our minds to how a decentralised identity ecosystem is the future of trust online. A vision started to take shape of a future-state industry where service providers can enable secure customer onboarding and access with less effort, identity verification, and complicated password requirements. We locked in on the idea of "Trust Technology" as a single organising idea for the brand and product, a concept that focused feature development and communicated our unique selling point.
We helped CentraPass articulate their vision and values and laid the foundations for growth with a new purpose: ‘build a digital village where everyone can trust each other again." We brought the development team into this process to ensure we were all aligned with the common intent and aspirations of the team.
Several months of development and customer testing resulted in a go-to-market strategy that included a consumer product in the tourism and hospitality sectors to "prove the technology worked" and a core enterprise product enabling the public and private sectors to embed "trust technology" into their customer experiences. We chose this approach because we believed we needed to "make a market"—prove the concept can add value in a popular sector—then use this awareness to stimulate demand. After successfully launching the product and proving the technology can work, we handed the consumer product to a partner to develop further, then doubled down on the development of the enterprise product.
Key Insight
By 2022, CentraPass had found a niche in the customer identity and access management sector and was gaining traction in the market. This took tenacity and patience from the founder, Andy Higgs, who never stopped believing. We had become a business all about making transactions online easier and reducing the risk of fraud or identity theft. After securing additional funding, we developed the most comprehensive digital enterprise identity toolkit for the New Zealand public and private sectors. Our products are now helping customers bridge the gap between physical and digital identities, where no correlative signatures are shared by their end users and their digital identity is truly under their control and for their eyes only. The net result is better privacy, a better customer experience (i.e., no passwords), and time savings from smarter KYC compliance processes that are streamlined.
By 2022 CentraPass now provides the New Zealand Public and Private sector with the most comprehensive Digital Enterprise Identity Toolkit — Part of New Zealand’s only Decentralised Identity Ecosystem.
CentraPass partnered to launch a digital ‘Proof I am 18 or Over’ Card in New Zealand — one of only 3 forms of passport grade identification.
In 2022 CentraPass was part of an 8-company rollup into a new offering called Futureverse in an effort to create a user-controlled metaverse. The total investment in all of the companies is in excess of $100 million at undisclosed valuations.
And Now became a venture partner with equity in CentraPass and continued to support CentraPass in focussing product and technology development on their Enterprise Product.
