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.

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.