An expertly curated executive forum that explores the complex, rapidly evolving threat landscape of deepfakes, synthetic identity, and agentic-AI.
Building on the discussions and insights from the inaugural event in March 2026 in Houston, this follow-on Summit begins with the challenges identified as critical-path priorities that can to accelerate the deployment of identity-centric frameworks and solutions that deliver Resilient Trust™.
8:00 AM (60 min)—NETWORKING BREAKFAST
9:00 AM (30 min) WELCOME KEYNOTE
Anchoring Trust in Identity in the AI Era—Alignment, Coordination. Governance.
Deepfake-associated fraud has crossed the majority threshold of relevant fraud transactions. Synthetic identities are already embedded in financial, government, retail, and across all digital commerce and information systems, quietly building the profiles they will eventually weaponize. Agentic AI is executing tasks without adequate governance. And the coordination gaps—within institutions, between institutions, and across sectors—remain wider than the technology gaps they leave exposed.
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This opening keynote takes direct stock of the issues and challenges highlighted in Houston and sets the agenda for the day's discussion. The Resilient Trust™ framework that guided the inaugural summit has sharpened into a strategic imperative: organizations that treat identity as foundational digital infrastructure, coordinate fraud intelligence across institutional boundaries, and build governance frameworks for agentic AI before they are mandated will be the ones that can operate with confidence in the AI era. Those that don't will remain calibrated for yesterday's threats. This session frames the work ahead.​
9:30 AM (30 min) FIRESIDE CHAT
Overcoming Obsolete Threat Models—Can We REALLY Build Trusted and Resilient Identity Ecosystems?
Most organizations are still defending against last year's attacks. The Houston summit made this painfully clear: deepfake-associated fraud rose from 20% to 40% to nearly 70% of relevant fraud transactions in just three years, yet institutional defenses remain anchored in threat models that predate AI-driven impersonation. The question is no longer whether the threat environment has changed. The question is whether the will to change with it actually exists.
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This candid, practitioner-grounded, and unfiltered fireside conversation moves from diagnosis to accountability. What does it concretely take to replace obsolete threat models—and who in an organization has the authority and the mandate to drive that change? Have we seen any progress in the 6 months since the Houston Summit? The discussion examines the real organizational, cultural, and incentive barriers that prevent institutions from acting on what they already know—and explores what alignment, coordination, and governance look like when they're working.
10:00 AM (40 min) PANEL
Proactive Fraud Detection Throughout The Identity Lifecycle—How to Break Down Silos and Achieve Genuine, Reliable, Compliant Internal Identity Alignment.
One-and-done KYC at onboarding was never designed to withstand AI-era fraud. Synthetic identities pass verification with clean profiles and build trust inside digital ecosystems for months or years before the eventual extraction. The structural failure isn't the technology—it's that fraud teams, identity management, AML, cybersecurity, compliance, and audit are operating from different data sets, with different risk languages, asking different questions. The adversary sees the whole picture. Defenders only see their silo.
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This panel addresses the organizational design challenge that practitioners at Houston identified as the most impactful single change available: building genuine cross-functional alignment around a continuous, lifecycle-wide identity assurance model. Panelists examine what it takes to move from sequential departmental handoffs to an enterprise-wide, shared-data operating model—covering behavioral biometrics, device signal analysis, transaction pattern monitoring, and periodic re-verification for high-risk actions. What does the governance structure look like? How do you build the business case internally? And how are regulators increasingly expecting institutions to demonstrate this alignment? The discussion translates the principle of continuous identity assurance into operational and organizational reality.
10:45 AM (45 min)—COFFEE, SNACKS & NETWORKING BREAK
11:30 AM (40 min) PANEL
Are AI Agents Your Best Friends or Worst Nightmare? Leveraging Rapidly Evolving Innovation to Secure Identity Infrastructure.
More than 50% of all online activity is already non-human. AI agents are executing transactions, managing accounts, and taking consequential actions on behalf of individuals—and the governance infrastructure required to verify that those agents are genuinely authorized by real humans does not yet exist. At the same time, the same agentic capabilities enabling sophisticated fraud automation are also driving advances in fraud detection, signal orchestration, and real-time response.
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This panel refuses the false choice between fear and optimism about agentic AI. Both are warranted—and neither is useful without governance. Panelists examine where autonomous systems are creating genuine new attack surfaces: agent collusion, token drain, live-coding of agent-spawned agents, and the near-zero barrier to deploying sophisticated automated fraud operations. They also examine where agentic AI is strengthening defenses: orchestration across layered signal types, real-time pattern synthesis at a speed no human team can match, and continuous monitoring that makes post-hoc fraud detection look primitive. The discussion centers on what governance frameworks, identity anchoring requirements, and risk guardrails must look like to capture the benefits and contain the risks—before the regulatory mandate forces the question.
12:15 PM (60 min) HOSTED WORKSHOPS
Turning Controls on Their Head: Reimagining Governance as a Security & Efficiency Enabler, Rooting Out False Identities and Strengthening Authentic Ones. ​
The conventional framing of governance as friction—a compliance cost imposed on legitimate operations—has become a liability. In an environment where 15–20% of some institutions' databases—customer, partner, staff—may already contain dormant synthetic identities, and where fraud and compliance teams are incentivized to block suspicious activity rather than accurately distinguish fraud from legitimate customers, governance designed primarily to say "no" is leaving money on the table and real harm undetected.
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In this session, attendees break out into pre-selected, facilitated workshops for 45-minutes of focused, peer-driven conversations on the governance questions most urgent to them. Each table takes up a distinct dimension of the central challenge: what does governance look like when it's designed to empower verified identities rather than obstruct all of them?
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WORKSHOP TOPICS INCLUDE:
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From Fraud Signals to Authenticity Signals: What does it mean in practice to shift institutional controls from reactive fraud detection to proactive identity verification? This table examines the conceptual and operational distinction between fraud signals—probabilistic, backward-looking, triggered by suspicious behavior—and authenticity signals—cryptographic, deterministic, verified before action is taken. How do you build an institution's risk architecture around the latter?
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Cryptographic Credentials in the Real World: Mobile driver's licenses, digital wallets, verifiable credentials issued against government systems of record—these are the strongest available authenticity signals for online transactions. This table examines the practical barriers to integrating government-issued digital credentials into fraud and identity workflows: acceptance infrastructure, issuer registries, interoperability gaps, and the equity challenge of serving customers without them.
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Fixing the Incentive Misalignment: Fraud and compliance teams are rewarded for blocking, not for accuracy. False positives—legitimate customers denied service—are a real harm that current incentive structures make invisible. This table examines what it takes to redesign governance incentives around a more accurate objective: not minimizing suspicious approvals, but maximizing correct ones. What metrics change? Who owns the false positive problem? And how do you make that case internally?
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Governance Frameworks for the Full Identity Lifecycle. One-and-done KYC at onboarding is a structural error, not a calibration problem. This table focuses on what governance frameworks must cover across the full account lifecycle—enrollment, authentication, transaction authorization, account recovery, and agent delegation—and what continuous, authenticity-anchored monitoring actually requires to be implemented at scale.
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Workshops conclude with brief reports to the full room, surfacing the sharpest insights and most urgent unresolved questions from each conversation
1:15 PM (75 min)—LUNCH & DEMONSTRATIONS
2:30 PM (30 min) AFTERNOON KEYNOTE
Becoming the "Buldozer Parents" of Identity— Forging the Path to Mass Adoption
The technology required to build resilient, trusted digital identity ecosystems exists. Biometrics, behavioral analytics, cryptographic credentials, device intelligence, verifiable credentials, mobile driver's licenses—these are available, maturing, and in many cases already deployed. The gap is not invention. The gap is adoption. And closing that gap requires something the identity industry has historically been reluctant to do: advocate with the urgency and determination the moment demands.
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This keynote makes the case for aggressive, proactive, unapologetic leadership in driving adoption of the identity infrastructure that the entire digital economy depends on—in procurement requirements, in regulatory engagement, in cross-sector coalition building, and in the institutional cultures that still treat identity as a compliance function rather than a strategic asset. The passwordless, continuously verified, biometric-anchored identity future is not waiting for a technology breakthrough. It is waiting for decision-makers to prioritize it. This session examines what that leadership looks like in practice, what the first mover advantages are for organizations that get ahead of the mandate, and why the institutions that bulldoze the path to adoption will define the security posture of the entire ecosystem.
3:00 PM (30 min) AFTERNOON FIRESIDE CHAT
Implementing Enterprise-Wide Identity First Security Transformation—Cautionary Tales From Real World Deployments​
The strategic case for continuous, biometric-anchored, identity-first security has been made. The harder conversation is about what happens when organizations actually try to build it. Enterprise-wide identity transformation touches every system, every team, and every vendor relationship an organization has—and attempted implementations are littered with projects that stalled at organizational boundaries, technology choices that locked institutions into fragile architectures, and governance frameworks that looked comprehensive on paper and collapsed under operational load.
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This fireside conversation draws directly on practitioners' experience navigating real-world deployments—including the things that went wrong, the assumptions that proved false, and the lessons that only emerged under pressure. What does the path from siloed, reactive fraud detection to continuous, cross-functional identity assurance actually look like, and where are the traps? How do you sequence the transformation when everything feels urgent? What does a realistic timeline for injection attack hardening look like, and what interim controls matter most? And what do organizations that have done this well know that organizations attempting it for the first time typically don't? Practical, unvarnished, and grounded in operational reality.
3:30 PM (40 min) PANEL
Privacy, Anonymity, & User Control—Evolving Models of Data Ownership & Management Can Enhance Security, Increase Profitability, and Improve Customer Experience.
The Houston summit reached a clear conclusion that is gaining urgency: identity and behavioral data must belong to the individual who generates it, not to the intermediaries who collect it. This is not only a privacy principle—it is a fraud defense. The institutional model that anointed financial intermediaries and other relying parties as identity arbiters is structurally exploitable in ways that user-centric architectures are not. And organizations that demonstrate genuine user sovereignty over identity data occupy a differentiated competitive position in an environment where institutional trust is declining.
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This panel examines what it looks like in practice to build privacy-first frameworks without sacrificing fraud prevention efficacy—and to discover that the two objectives are more complementary than they appear. Panelists explore the maturing toolkit of user-centric identity: digital wallets, verifiable credentials, decentralized identity architectures, and the governance models that enable individuals to permission access to their own data rather than ceding it by default. What does this mean for profitability models built on behavioral data? What does a genuine consent architecture look like at scale? And where do the Estonia-model lessons apply—and where does the US context require a different approach? The discussion reframes privacy from compliance obligation to strategic asset and competitive differentiator.
4:15 PM (45 min)—COFFEE, SNACKS & NETWORKING BREAK
5:00 PM (45 min) COMMUNITY DISCUSSION
​Envisioning a Future Without Constraint.—Prioritizing Identity Evolution
The day's final session belongs to the room.
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This is not a panel. There are no designated speakers, no prepared remarks, and no stage. Every person in this room has spent the day engaging with the most consequential questions facing digital identity, fraud prevention, and trust infrastructure—and every person in this room has something worth saying about where we go from here.
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The facilitator opens with a single provocation drawn from the Houston summit's closing principle: if we build systems safe enough for children to navigate confidently, they will be resilient enough for everyone. What would it actually take to build that? Not the two-year roadmap constrained by vendor contracts and regulatory timelines—but the five-to-ten-year architecture the industry needs to be building toward now, even if it can't get there immediately.
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From there, the conversation is yours. Bring your sharpest insight from the day. Name the assumption you think the industry most urgently needs to challenge. Identify the standards gap that no one is owning. Call out the equity imperative—because the entire ecosystem is only as resilient as its least-protected participant, and community banks and credit unions are not an afterthought. Push back on what was said this morning. Propose the collaboration that didn't exist before today.
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The facilitator will track the threads—continuous verification, authenticity over fraud signals, agentic AI governance, democratic access to advanced defenses, the role of regulatory mandate versus voluntary adoption—and weave them toward a shared set of commitments the room can carry back to their organizations.​
5:45 PM (15 min) WRAP UP: KEY INSIGHTS
The closing session distills the day's most consequential insights into clear implications for decision-makers across technology, policy, and governance. Rather than a recap, this session focuses on what the discussions demand: which assumptions must be re-examined, which capabilities must be immediately prioritized, and where cross-sector collaboration is the non-negotiable prerequisite for progress. The session reinforces the summit's central message—that Resilient Trust™ is not a product to be purchased, but a trench warfare strategy to be built, sustained, and continuously innovated and defended—and challenges attendees to carry these insights back into their organizations with the urgency the threat environment requires.
6:00 to 7:30 PM—COCKTAIL RECEPTION