Why I joined the FIDO Alliance

I’m back from an exhilarating, albeit tiring, week at the FIDO Alliance’s annual Authenticate conference. As you probably already know, I recently joined the Alliance as Chief Technology Officer, which made this experience a little bit different than years past. There is a lot going on in the digital identity ecosystem right now, which really drives why I took on this new role, a question that many have asked me over the last couple of months.

If you’ve followed my conference talks and blog posts, you know I care deeply about one simple idea: security should make people feel safer and let them get on with their lives. The FIDO Alliance has been driven by that mission for years, with passkeys being the result of that drive – phishing-resistant authentication that is user-friendly and now broadly available across platforms.

But the road from specifications to success has two lanes: adoption at scale and alignment with the rules of the road. Adoption means helping implementers make the right choices, smoothing out the rough edges of real deployments, and proving interoperability through strong certification programs. Alignment means working with policymakers and regulators so that what’s good security practice is also recognized in frameworks and guidance around the world. Both require patient, collaborative work. That’s a big part of why I’m here, and what I find exciting and motivating about taking on this new challenge.

My role at FIDO will be to help our membership guide the Alliance’s technical strategy, keep our specifications coherent and practical, and make sure they tie cleanly to certification and interoperability so relying parties can trust what they’re deploying. It also means rolling up sleeves with our members, other standards bodies, and the public sector to ensure FIDO technology fits naturally into the broader digital trust fabric.

That fabric itself is evolving quite rapidly. Authentication doesn’t live in a vacuum; it connects to how identities are verified, how credentials are carried, and how transactions move. As the ecosystem matures, we’ll continue doing what the FIDO Alliance has always done best: focus on pragmatic, widely adoptable building blocks that make it harder to phish people, harder to steal value, and easier for legitimate users to get things done. This will necessarily touch adjacent areas – identity verification, wallets, payments flows – where clear interfaces and strong assurances help reduce breach and fraud. The point isn’t to broaden the mission for its own sake, but to finish the mission we started: making the online world safer and simpler for everyone.