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Trust1Team was selected to represent Luxembourg in the cybersecurity category at the StartUp Europe Awards 2017.  In addition, they are also competing in the #StartupWorldCup @SWC2018.  They have every intention of succeeding (and winning) and CEO Thibaut Delhaye says the key is “interoperability”.

Companies need to digitalise, and simplify, if they want to remain competitive, or in most cases, survive. Why? Because the end user, the customer, does not care about the underlying technology, they want a simple interface, a simple solution, consistency and security. They want all processes to be easy and not face a new onboarding process/technology each time they are asking for new services.

“End users want a flawless digital experience in their interactions,” agrees Trust1Team CEO Thibaut Delhaye.

Trust1Team is an integrator company that has been nominated to represent Luxembourg in the StartUp Europe Awards in the cybersecurity category.  They offer three main “own developed” products – Trust1Connector, Trust1Gateway and Trust1Vault – all based on different open source frameworks which, in combination with their self-developed software, provide the opportunity to governments, enterprises and organisations to easily digitalise their processes in a secure and trusted way. Cybersecurity is the hot topic in Europe thanks to new regulations and standards upcoming all across the continent.

Secure, compliant and free of complexity

Their motto is, “Security, Compliancy, Interoperability: all embedded and free of complexity“.

“When we started up Trust1Team,” explains Thibaut, “based on a successful project in Belgium, our ambition was no less than to offer the solution of interoperability. This is a big problem and yet we chose a small country for our headquarters to face the interoperability problem swiftly and enrich the portfolio with relevant use cases.”

In fact, the concept of interoperability seems to run through everything they do. The company and its founders Thibaut Delhaye (CEO) and Michallis Pashidis (CTO) are born from a spirit of open collaboration.

“That is our origin“, says Thibaut. “The name of our company reflects how we (the other co-founders) were working for two companies and they were focused on monolithic technology, so we said why should we not trust one team to solve this problem of interoperability. Therefore, we created an environment of open collaboration.”

They seem to have quite important references across (and also outside of) Europe already and when asked what growth stage they are at Thibaut explains: “We don’t stick to the classical start-ups model because we started with an European spirit and we have already implemented inside agencies, companies and governments that realise the added value of interoperability. We validated our proposition during our three years of existence and by having this type of customer, we are a success but we are still a start-up in terms of revenue. We have created the technology. We have tested everything. Now we are looking for investors to move into a fast distribution model.”

This is why the team recently went to the European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO) Startups Event in Paris. There they pitched Trust1Team to showcase their technology and introduce themselves to industry leaders and investors, which is a new experience for its founders.

Thibaut states that their advantage is that with integration products, interoperability is embedded and this approach is quite innovative compared to the current market solutions.

“Instead of applying the burden on the user, we take it off the user. What we do is build an abstraction layer such as an ecosystem and make it secure. This layer is integrated in core applications and doesn’t impact the usability. The classical Silver bullet approach around technology is not working in Europe. The only way to go is to respect and support local identity and standards in a global framework to guarantee interoperability “by default” between public and private sectors, and even cross-border! Countries and companies outside Europe are already very interested in this new approach to an interoperability framework.

So really we are directly addressing the operations people inside a company or a public organisation because we offer a cost efficient solution: supporting a new technology or a new standard has never been so easy.”

Simplified Solutions for Digital identity and GDPR

Two big challenges currently are Digital Identity and GDPR. 2018 is set to be a year of major regulatory change in Europe.  In May of this year, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation will come into effect, in a drive to harmonise data privacy laws across Europe.

What Trust1Team wants to solve is quite ambitious: the interoperability problem in Europe.  Digital identity is an important issue for all people and digital biometrics are the system all countries will eventually move to by default including Luxembourg.

As Thibaut puts it, “Everybody across all sectors has the need to identify/authenticate the citizen/user/themselves. Our products, besides doing it securely, are compliant with the legislation, do not carry an extra burden for the user, have a short time-to-market and we have already real proven implementations. Essentially, Trust1Team is privacy by design.”

“In our solutions we are not asking clients to buy something extra and we are supporting the local provider. So for example in Luxembourg, people who prefer to use their original citizen ID can do so. If people want to use the LuxTrust system or their bank cards that is okay as well. They need only one solution to plug & play new means of identification. It is an identity broker!”

Luxembourg, Luxinnovation and making connections for start-ups

Thibaut says Luxembourg was a good move for them. Luxinnovation and Jean-Paul Hengen, its ICT Cluster Manager, have been supporting them since the very beginning of Trust1Team. “It is thanks to Luxinnovation that we have opportunities inside Luxembourg. Because even though the country is small and it is easy to quickly make good contacts, you still need someone to make the introductions, especially the links between start-ups and the big players.”

As for the Startup Europe Awards 2018, Thibaut says, “quite frankly, we still cannot find a serious competitor that offers what we have: products that do not require extra hardware investment, are not vendor lock-in, are open source and have security, privacy and EU regulation built in from design. We want to have the Startup Europrize in Europe as we have our sights set on no less than Europe; in fact, we see the entire world as our market. We were born global. Our model is global and now we need to have the confidence to show the world what interoperability can achieve. Our solution can work in any situation.”

About Trust1Team Group

Several countries, Trust Centres and Trusted Service Providers and banks have requested Trust1Team´s insights about the future concept of signature and signing methods. Trust1Team Group was born in Belux. Founded in 2014 with active companies in Belgium, Luxembourg, and reach new markets in Europe, Middle-East and Latin America.

About the Startup Europe Awards

StartUp Europe Awards is promoted by the European Commission and supported by the President of the Committee of the Regions, several members of the European Parliament as Ambassador and is implemented by the Finnova Foundation in collaboration with StartUp Europe.

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