Big Ideas: “Replace Paper ID Cards With Digital ID Cards” with Yoti CEO Robin Tombs

As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” I had the pleasure of interviewing Robin Tombs, a serial tech entrepreneur and investor. Robin is CEO and Co-founder of Yoti, the digital identity app. Prior to Yoti, Robin was Co-founder and Finance Director at Gamesys, one of the world’s leading online gaming operators. He is also a serial angel investor in a handful of technology companies and a trustee of Future First.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I worked at PWC as a Chartered Accountant from 1993 to 1997 in London before co-founding IDM, a web game business, with Noel Hayden. We sold IDM in 1999 and used some of these proceeds to co-found Gamesys, one of the world’s leading online gaming operators. Through Gamesys, I was involved in checking age and identity for over 1.5m UK customers in compliance with UK Regulations, so was well aware of the identity challenges businesses have to deal with.

Then in 2014 at a Spartan race event in California, I saw thousands of people proving their identity with paper ID documents. The process was long, outdated and a potential security risk, with people leaving valuable ID documents in a tent…