Most teams treat identity like plumbing: invisible, unglamorous, and someone else’s problem… until something breaks. Eve Maler has spent thirty years proving that’s the wrong mental model, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.
As the co-creator of SAML and User-Managed Access, former CTO of ForgeRock, and author of the forthcoming Mastering Digital Identity: From Risk to Revenue, Eve introduces a sharper lens: identity is a product. The teams that own it intentionally ship faster, convert better, and lose less to fraud. The ones that don’t are one incident away from finding out why it mattered.
Eve shares her Four Ps framework: Protection, Personalization, Payment, and People, and explains why fraud is a design problem long before it becomes a detection problem. She also makes the case for why decentralized identity isn’t a future trend to monitor. It’s a present-tense decision your team is already making, whether you know it or not.
Topics Covered
Why identity is part of your technology strategy
What “identity strategy” actually means for developers (not just CISOs)
The Four Ps framework: Protection, Personalization, Payment, and People
Why identity and payments are inseparable, and what’s at stake when they’re not designed together
Fraud as a design problem: modeling happy paths and unhappy paths
The cost of separating fraud teams from development teams
What changes when your org has a dedicated identity product owner
Decentralized identity: why it’s happening now, and what developers need to know
How to make the case for identity investment to a CEO or board
Baking identity in from the start vs. scrambling to fix it after launch
About Eve Maler
Eve Maler is President and Founder of Venn Factory and an award-winning Digital Identity Strategist, whose work has influenced how people, organizations, and technologies establish identity, exchange data, and operate securely at scale. From early Internet standards such as XML to identity-defining protocols including SAML and User-Managed Access, Eve has helped build the underlying systems that enterprises around the world rely on every day.
Her career in identity spans 25+ years, from Technology Director at Sun Microsystems to Chief Technology Officer of ForgeRock, where she brought identity innovation strategy to dozens of Global 5000 brands. As a former Forrester Research security analyst and now founder of Venn Factory, Eve transforms companies’ digital identity strategies from a cost center into a growth engine by reducing friction, optimizing security and privacy protection, and unlocking new revenue opportunities.
Her influence can be seen across global initiatives, including UK Open Banking and U.S. and Canadian health IT efforts.
An author, speaker, and board member, Eve is known for connecting technical reality with business outcomes and for showing why, when identity is done right, it becomes one of the most powerful levers of competitive advantage.
Connect with our guest Eve Maler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eve-maler
