Navigating the Digital Age: Privacy Challenges and Solutions with Frances Zelazny

Welcome to the Wisdom of Women Show.

We are dedicated to amplifying the voice of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here to amplify the voices of women leading the way.

I am your host Coco Selman, five time founder, impact investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

Thank you for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises by amplifying the voice and wisdom of women.

Today we have a privacy pioneer in our midst.

Francis Zalanzi is the co founder and CEO of Anonybit, a pioneering decentralized biometrics company transforming how we protect identity and privacy in the digital age.

With over 25 years of experience scaling enterprise SaaS across cybersecurity, FinTech, digital identity and analytics, she has built a reputation for turning complex technologies into market defining businesses.

She has shaped international policy on biometrics working with governments, multilateral organizations and the private sector to ensure responsible and impactful adoption.

Recognized on the Women In Fintech Power List 100 SIA Women Insecurity Forum Power 100 and as one of the 25 most influential women leaders in Biometric Digital Identity, Frances is a fierce advocate for building innovative privacy first technologies that also advanced social and economic progress.

Welcome Frances.

Thank you so much Coco.

So excited to be here.

Pleasure.

You are a total rock star and I cannot wait for you to share your journey and your story and your kick ass place in the world right now.

But before we go there, what is a book written by a woman that has significantly influenced your life?

So I am a history buff.

I love historical fiction and my answer was Kristin Hanna.

Two of her books, the Nightingale and the Women.

The reason why I gravitate towards those books is that it changes the way people think about the role that women play in significant historical events.

We don't often think about women being at the center of all of the sacrifice and the survival methods people had to do to survive those times.

We don't hear about these quiet forms of heroism and resilience in the history books.

I love the those books for calling out the role that women play in those significant times.

I hope the listeners and us play our role in what's happening today and making our own history.

Oh my goodness, yes.

And you certainly are making history.

We'll come back to that.

But I first want to just acknowledge these two books are so wonderful.

These are two of my favorite books of all time and it's Nightingale.

When I first read that I had the same reaction of like Holy crap.

How is it that we have just not been hearing about what women were doing in World War II?

Right.

Like you're living in, in this case, Nazi occupied France and like there's nothing to hear about it.

Right?

Crazy.

Tons and tons of small stories.

Yeah, it's true.

And so I hope everybody goes and listens to them.

And now you are playing a big part in the background.

People probably don't know this.

You, you have a big role in what's happening in cybercy.

Privacy is your area and you are moving mountains and doing things really, I would say you're really at the cutting edge and you're doing things that are daring and courageous.

So before we get to that whole story, I'd like to understand a couple of the moments of your life that have led you here, that have led you to being this courageous in the room with only yourself being the woman, the person who overcomes, the person who keeps getting up and trying and doing it again.

What are three moments that articulate who you are and help us understand the place from which you walk today?

Well, that's a great question and very few people actually ask that.

I think first and when I have the opportunity to say this in one other public forum, but really, I'm a daughter of a Holocaust survivor and that frames a lot of my thinking, my being the way I look at the world and try to understand the world around me.

When you look at the world through that lens, it creates opportunity and perspective of what's important and what people ultimately care about.

I'd like to start with that and acknowledge my late father.

Another defining moment for me.

I had two defining moments.

One was right before 911 when I first got involved in the biometric and identity space.

Nobody really knew what this stuff was.

One of our competitors had deployed facial recognition in a public place and there was no announcement or anything about what was actually happening.

To make a very long story short, which I'm sure we'll get into later, the privacy organizations got wind of this and I ended up with a death threat.

And that also shaped me significantly because the point of the technology deployment was to find bad guys to protect us.

And yet there was this tsunami of antagonism against what we were doing because of the privacy aspect.

It really affected me because I realized that even though something could be used for such good, it could have significant implications on the other side and we should not shirk from that responsibility.

Even though it was more than 20 years ago, it definitely led into My work today.

But that was a defining moment.

And the third defining moment was when I was involved personally in a project in Uganda.

And we talk a lot about, like, women and women roles and women's entrepreneurship.

So I don't know if that's the top.

We'll get into it today, but I did have involvement in a major project in Uganda which promoted social and economic development in the western part of the region.

The first time I went there, the project was really in the villages, and we were driving in the car.

And actually, there were two defining moments on that trip.

We were driving in the car, and I saw a school, and girls were skipping and jumping, and they were just being like.

It was.

You know, it was school.

And I just looked around me, and everybody really wants the same thing out of life.

People want peace.

People want prosperity.

People want people to get along.

People want something good for their kids.

I saw these kids, and then I looked down and saw they were not wearing any shoes.

And it really struck me all at once, the opportunity that exists, the desire of humanity to make the world ultimately better.

Ultimately, most people, that's what they want.

And then the disparity in what we take for granted.

So that was.

That was.

The driver paid for the gas by transferring money on their phone.

All I could think of is, I'm in the middle of nowhere, Uganda, and these people are doing mobile money.

So what does that tell us?

So these are, like, so many.

You know, there's lots of things that shape me and define me and, like, you know, and today the world is so interconnected, and these experiences just highlight more and more the importance of the work that we're doing.

No, I just want to acknowledge your father.

That's a big thing to survive.

That must have been very present in your household.

Yes.

Yes, very much.

And that's a story for another time.

The survival is not a typical survivor story.

So it definitely was very powerful in terms of quick thinking, decision making.

The will to survive, the will to keep family together, definitely shaped me totally.

And, you know, to be in a business where there could be a death threat, that puts you in a pretty stronghold for being responsible.

It's pretty scary to think about.

And I love that you were in Uganda and you saw the joy of kids and girls in particular, being able to learn even if they didn't have shoes.

There was mobile money happening with the cab driver.

So it's, it's such a mixed bag that we're living in right now.

And Right, so you've worked across all of these areas of fintech, payments, biometrics, cybersecurity.

What led to you being the founder, creating, launching Anonymous.

Tell us what it is and what your mission and purpose is.

So Anonybit is a privacy preserving identity platform.

We secure the user life cycle from account origination through logging in, fraud prevention, recovering accounts.

And what I wanted to emphasize is that identity is really a part of all of these interactions.

Today we're more and more online, but there's still physical interactions.

AI is making things a lot worse in terms of trying to figure out like if somebody who they claim to be, are you talking to me right now?

Are you talking to an avatar of me?

Am I talking to you?

Or is this a deep fake?

So we're living these questions all the time.

And these questions are becoming very fundamental to how we establish trust with each other, how we interact with each other.

I read a headline this morning that scams are growing much faster than any other form of fraud.

And these are all kinds of scams, romance scams, crypto scams, working scams.

All of these things have the threat of disrupting and breaking apart our society if we can't trust who we're dealing with.

What does that mean for all of our interactions?

What does it mean when I got defrauded and my bank won't pay me back because they said it was me and meanwhile there was a scam on the other side?

Am I going to do work with that bank?

Where am I going to go?

What happens when I'm interviewing somebody for a job and it turns out it's not really them, it's somebody else?

Or I hire someone and they take the job, they work one hour a day and then there's like 15 people actually doing the real work?

These are fundamental questions, right?

What happens when AI agents are coming into play?

What happens when I authorize an agent or a robot to do something on my behalf, but then an attacker, a criminal or a malware takes over this agent and this agent starts going rogue?

Who's responsible?

These are fundamental questions to our society.

And the only way they get answered is if we do identity right.

And the only way to do identity right is, is to do it in a privacy preserving manner.

Otherwise we can't trust that identity.

Complicated.

We used to think of cybersecurity as an endpoint thing like, was there a malware on My computer at home, we'll just run an antivirus and everything will be okay.

But that's not where the threat is anymore.

And you, you use the term privacy preserving, right?

I mean, I don't even think I know what that means.

I mean, all the different ways that my privacy could be encroached upon.

Right.

And that's a growing threat all the time, every day.

Right.

So when you build this, what makes anonymit unique to the others options out there?

So when I talk about privacy, I talk about the way data is stored, the way data is managed.

Today we understand data management to be sitting in some kind of a database using some kind of encryption technology that masks the data.

And only certain authorized people will have the key to unmask the data.

But we know this is not working.

Security into that data hub sitting up somewhere in the cloud.

Our Social Security information has been leaked.

There are government databases around the world, like the government of Argentina, for example.

Their whole national registry was compromised and is available on the dark web.

Our driver's license systems in the US have been compromised.

We must operate under the assumption today that all of our personal data is available on the dark web.

And if you operate under that assumption, then the question becomes, what should you rely on in order to recognize or identify something?

Because it's certainly not what your mother ate for breakfast and what favorite toy your dog has and you know, what street you grew up on.

Those are meaningless in terms of identifying who we are.

So we need to operate under this assumption that all of this data is available and instead go back to something very basic but very sensitive.

And that is your biometric.

Your biometric is your, is a mathematical representation of a physical or behavioral attribute of you.

That means your face, your finger, your iris, your voice, your palm print.

These are things that nobody can steal from you.

And an attacker can't steal that and then say, the way they can say what your dog had for breakfast.

But that also means that if we're going to use that technology, we must secure it, because we don't want that technology.

You can't replace your face, you can't replace your iris.

So we need to make sure that data is protected.

There are laws that talk to this, guiding the principles of data protection today.

This is what Ananavit is solving for.

Our platform is protecting this kind of data for people like you and me to safely use this data to identify ourselves to the systems and people we're trying to interact with, for things like.

Our bank, and being able to get a Mortgage or access credit.

I mean, any number of things.

But those are the ones that come to my mind.

Those are the places that you would find in on a bit.

So it would be when you apply to open a bank account, when you are trying to access your bank account, when you want to do a wire transfer, when you're at work and you want to get a new machine, when you want to make sure that somebody who's calling the help desk is really the right person.

That is actually the number one vulnerability point.

Attackers call the help desk, and they pretend to be me and you using data that is stolen.

Most of the data breaches, most of the ransomware attacks, most of the losses that we hear about come from the use of stolen credentials like your Social Security number, your date of birth, all this stuff.

And chances are it happens at the help desk because that's where the attackers go.

They don't need to steal your phone.

They just call the help desk.

Unbelievable.

So how is your now without.

You know, I'm not super technical, but explain to us how you're able to keep the biometric data safe when my Social Security number is already out on the Internet.

So today, to safeguard information, it sits in a database which we know is not secure.

Or you can put it on some kind of a device.

You can walk around with a token or a phone, but ultimately that might be secure for you.

But if that device or token is not available, compromised, or shared, then you don't know who's behind that device.

So this has been the traditional conundrum and why we are in the situation that we are in today.

What Anonymous does is take the data and we split it up.

Imagine we take a glass and break it into pieces.

These pieces represent derivatives of personal data that you're trying to protect, but it's not that data.

We destroy it, and all you're left with are these shards.

So you can't put the shards back together again.

If you break a glass and try to put it back together again, you can't.

It's the same thing with the way we do the.

Yeah.

So once we break it, it's broken, and you can't put it back together again, and you can't compromise it.

So even if you find one of these pieces, you don't know where the rest of the pieces are.

Even if you did, you couldn't do anything with it because it doesn't work if you try to put it together again.

So that's the most simple way that I can explain what we do.

We have a patent on it.

And it's much more complicated to the layperson.

We explain it by breaking a piece of glass or taking a piece of paper and ripping it into shreds.

If you find one piece, chances are you don't know where these other pieces are.

And you can't again put the paper back together again, end up with pieces of tape and gaps in between.

It will never be exactly the same.

Right.

One of the things we talked about last time you and I met was how there really aren't others out there yet using this technology to its fullest extent.

And you really are that leading edge of digital identity.

Share a little bit about the ecosystem you're in and the unique challenges you are facing given that biometrics are not vastly already used.

We're in a very fast changing landscape.

If we had this conversation one or two years ago, the answer would be very different than it is today.

Today we take it for granted that we go to the airport and show our face to pass through security, AT T, say.

Today we take it for granted that when we open our phone, we can do that with our face or finger.

We go through concert lines and all these things.

So we're actually using biometrics.

We don't even realize it.

You go to Whole Foods and you see palm readers, you know, pay with your palm, that's a biometric.

So we're actually using them.

We don't think about it that way, which is great.

That's exactly what you want it to be, right?

You want it to be automatic, intuitive, simple, easy, and not require a lot of thought.

So I think the landscape today is very different than it was.

The challenge though, remains the same.

Most of the deployments of biometrics are either with government like airport systems, or in contained time and attendance or payroll systems.

What we're talking about now is really pushing it and using biometrics to get rid of passwords to solve the identity problems that we're seeing.

And we're absolutely getting there.

The trends are very clear.

With those trends come the privacy challenge.

Even though this is not a technical podcast, there are numerous legislation, regulation and guidelines.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology put out some guidelines just a few weeks ago for this area.

Privacy was mentioned 74 times in an 80 page document that just tells you that you really can't separate privacy anymore from digital identity and what we're doing.

So we are moving very quickly to center stage.

When it started, we were like trying to educate and telling people this is really important, but privacy is it now you cannot safely deploy biometrics and solve the fraud and identity problem without dealing with privacy.

Even though there's not a lot of competitors in this space, the ones that are in the space we, I think we banded together.

I think competition is good in my book.

You know, we, I think we've really showed that there are absolutely ways that you can quote unquote have your cake and eat it too.

It doesn't need to be a trade off between convenience, user experience, privacy and security.

It's all available there.

And as a practitioner, as a provider, it's actually really frustrating when you see what's happening with the scams like we were talking about before and that adoption is not happening faster.

But I see I've seen a sea change in the last six to nine months.

The acceleration both in terms of people calling us to partner with us to integrate our technology into their solutions is dramatically different today than it was a year or two ago.

There's absolutely a sea change and it will be good for all of us.

Totally.

How are you managing all of those challenges?

There is regulatory to keep track of the need for your technology to continue to grow and innovate, need to partner and each partner has their own set of needs.

How are you managing?

So I think this question speaks to what makes it none of it.

There are definitely other folks that have tackled the biometric privacy problem.

We're not the only ones.

But I think our philosophy in terms of being a platform in being able to not be a one trick pony to really be open to supporting many different use cases and allowing people to use our platform.

From the beginning my vision was to enable anybody who needed to deploy biometrics to use our platform so that it would be privacy by design and to create this groundswell of a paradigm shift for how we deploy these technologies.

And I want anonymit to be the go to for that as opposed to just using the technology for one particular use case.

Use case, yes, you were told me we talked a little bit about that before and how that puts you in a good position to be the brand that lasts right exactly where everyone else can kind of fold in.

So how are you funding this endeavor?

So we are VC packed and we are in the middle of a raise now.

We have very interesting investors and a lot of groundswell now in the last six to nine months we're seeing interest coming from all different areas, some expected and some unexpected.

It's really exciting to see the idea turn from a concept to a technology to a product to customer Deployment at scale.

We have millions of identities that we're protecting.

It's humbling, but it's also super validating and super exciting.

Oh my goodness.

It's a really big deal, Frances.

There's so many founders doing interesting things, but I feel like you have a really unique product and you're in a total bro planet world.

How has that impacted your journey?

Like being the woman in the room.

So we started this whole thing about my father.

I was in a male dominated family.

I was the first girl in a string of boys.

My father only had brothers.

I think his father only had brothers.

It was sink or swim.

I didn't really know any better.

So I just did what I had to do.

I didn't really have an option.

I try to be authentic.

I try to be real.

I try to, you know, work hard and focus on things that matter and resonate.

That's really been my playbook.

Yeah, you do.

You're kicking serious butt.

I remember the first time we really sat down and chat about your business.

One of the things that I really thought about a lot was the incredible weight and responsibility.

If this goes wrong, this is going to be a big mess to deal with.

I used to have those worries in healthcare because you know, something could go wrong and somebody could perish.

But this could really bust more than just one person's life up, right?

I think it takes total overase to do this with such confidence and zeal.

Just knowing that you have the answer and having faith in your creation, your intellectual property and your ability to solve whatever problems come down the road.

Can you talk about this?

It's really not the same as most companies.

You've taken on a really big mountain and a fair amount of risk.

There are many businesses and many things that have to do with life, death and impact.

I think healthcare is in a category of its own.

Thank you for acknowledging that.

Because people lose sight of the responsibility they have putting together products and solutions.

And I'll talk about it in how I look at it, but I'm just going to use the opportunity to say that one of my goals with this is to really make people understand that when they build products, there's fintech products today, health tech products today, so many products today that an identity is at the center of it all.

It's not just amount of its responsibility, it's all of our responsibility to understand that when you send someone code to log in, chances are a fraudster is going to have that code.

That is not security.

We all have this responsibility and we all need to do better because it could be your mother, father, kid, grandfather, teacher, and it's all of us today.

So I feel like we're doing our part.

We're very careful on how we design and how we deploy and how we talk about the use cases.

We are in a very technical space.

So I don't want to go too deep in the weeds.

But there are other solutions in the market where they claim to do what we do and then when it doesn't work, they go back to one of those codes.

People are just looking for easy fixes.

And this is a complicated thing.

We spend a lot of time and this is why it took us time to build the product in a way that can scale responsibly, that can work across geographies.

Because there are laws that say that if you're dealing with this information, the information cannot leave that country.

That means that how you develop and deploy a system needs to accommodate for that.

We are living in a cross border world today.

So we have technologies that are able, our system, anonymous system is able to deal with these cross border or geographic limitations.

We have technologies that are available.

We've architected the system to work with different kinds of personal data because not everything is the same.

We make it so that we only work with biometric technologies that deliver the very highest levels of performance.

I'm talking about dealing with aging, gender, all kinds of demographics and skin tones.

This is part of responsible deployment.

We also ensure that if somebody doesn't want to be in the system anymore that they can be deleted from the system.

These are, you know, ensure that if you are interacting with the system, you provide consent.

These are all really important fundamentals that we've put in to the design of how we deploy.

We know biometrics are sensitive, but they are critical.

It's like going to the doctor.

Nobody wants to go, but you know, you have to do it.

If you're going to do it, you want to make sure you have the best doctor.

It's the same thing here.

We need it, it's really important.

But we can't shy away from how to deploy it responsibly.

I feel grateful that you are leading the charge on this and on such an impactful technology that any of us that give any thought to what's going to happen with our security over the coming couple of years, it's just gotten so complicated and it's way beyond most of our capacity to understand what those risks really are.

I'm just really grateful that you're focused on them.

Honestly.

And I think you know the most the thing is is that nobody's immune.

So whether it's education, health care, insurance, whether it's banking, whether it's government, whether it's social media, whether it's our workplace, there's no one and nowhere and no entity that is unaffected by these issues.

That's why we all need to step up.

We're all interconnected.

A data breach in one place will affect security in another place.

We're all in this together.

So you have shaped policy built companies and now with anonybit at the frontier of digital identity, what is the impact you most want to see over the next decade?

Not just for nautabit but for the way society handles and values identity.

I think that identity is fundamental to social and economic development.

I've seen it firsthand on many different levels in the developing world.

I mentioned my work in Uganda but in many, many parts of the world identity is broken and that really hinders progress.

I know you're involved with a lot of projects overseas.

Things we take for granted here are just not available there and that hinders the infrastructure needed to promote progress on mobility.

A lot of it is identity related.

What we're starting to see here is that not taking identity seriously can erode social and economic progress.

If you see how many victims of scams of fraud are out there, people's life savings are being wiped away literally because we are not taking this seriously.

Banks, fintechs, crypto, insurance companies are folding.

This is not theoretical anymore.

Companies are folding, people are folding, people are committing suicide.

This is really, really serious.

My mission is to stem the tide.

That's really my mission.

Well, I'm grateful for it and I am cheering you on, Frances.

This is something that certainly keeps me awake at night.

I just had my credit card replaced this week.

I had somebody last week get a hold of a board I'm on pretended to be somebody on the board reaching out to me asking for this or that.

I figured it out but it was really thoughtful.

I have another friend who recently somebody was able to get into her line of credit and half a million dollars gone and so and they can't replace.

There's nothing.

It's the same kind of thing where they called in and they had all the answers.

So this is real and it's not just hypothetical.

I do think the world's going to change quickly.

We're going to see your product everywhere really soon.

I am excited for you.

So let's move to the fast fire round before we close out five questions in five words or less.

What's the first word that comes to mind when you hear Privacy?

Security.

Trust.

Innovation.

What's the boldest decision you've ever made as a leader.

To embark on this journey?

The hardest misconception you've had to fight about biometrics.

One ritual daily that keeps you grounded amidst high stakes work.

The spelling bee on the New York Times.

A single piece of advice you'd give your younger self starting out in this industry.

It's not a straight path, so just go with it and do your best.

Love that.

Brilliant.

So how can we support you?

You're raising money, right?

Open for business.

So tell us about how to get in touch with you if our listeners are interested in investing.

Tell us about how to get in touch if there's a client.

What's the perfect client for anonymit and how do they get in touch with you?

So mostly LinkedIn.

I am on the speaker circuit so you can find me on a bunch of different events.

I do a lot of travel.

I'll be in New York and D.C. over the next month.

LinkedIn is probably the easiest way.

I'm pretty responsive.

We also host roundtables once a month called Bagels and Insights where we touch on very specific topics.

We are raising money and we have almost a million people on our platform today.

So we are scaling and we work primarily with banks, fintechs and enterprises to protect both consumers as well as workforce.

So we're really, really excited and very, very bullish about where we are and the possibilities because they really are endless.

So really welcoming anyone who wants to join us on their journey as an investor, client or a partner.

Thank you.

Coco.

Oh, Frances, thank you.

I'm just thrilled that you could be here today.

Thank you for joining us on the Wisdom of Women Show.

You really are a transformer.

You're changing the world.

You're making the world better and you know, that's what we're all about.

I do think that women have a unique place and our sense of responsibility as yours is intact with our securing identity is so important.

So I just thank you in every way and for everybody listening.

Be sure to check out an on a bit and if you're interested in investing, the links below in the description of the show notes you'll find all of Francis's information and how to learn and certainly if you know anybody that's in finance, chief compliance officers and the like are probably good leads for you, I would think.

CFOs.

So yeah, we generally deal with heads of identity fraud authentication people that are responsible for securing the front lines both on the consumer side and on the workforce side.

Great.

So let's all think of an on a bit and holding the space for a future brighter world for us all.

The world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world a better place.