The Hidden Layer Is the Adoption Layer

By Michael Jackson

What has always interested me is the moment when a complex system finally behaves like something familiar and dependable. At Skype, we made it happen by stopping people needing to think about codecs or relays and simply think about what they were going to say. State of the art, bleeding edge engineering was still there, but it had slipped beneath the surface. That was the first time I saw what real adoption looks like. Technology only matters when it becomes invisible.

Fragmentation of Payments

That realization became even sharper when I moved deeper into payments. Anyone in this industry knows that the transaction itself is rarely the slow part. The delays happen in the metadata that follows it. Identity checks, sanctions screening, beneficiary validation, routing rules, compliance attestations, and the constant choreography between sending and receiving institutions. SWIFT is the perfect example. 

It’s a messaging network, not a settlement engine, and everything that gives confidence to a transaction sits outside the message. Banks run their own identity stacks, their own risk engines, their own KYB files, and their own reconciliation logic. Value moves in one direction, information in another, and the two meet days later in an operational back office that has to stitch everything together.

That separation of message and truth has shaped modern payments. It’s why reconciliation is a profession in its own right. It’s why correspondent banks still hold so much power. And it’s why liability allocation in cross-border payments is so fragmented. When the identity and the settlement don’t travel together, everyone in the chain has to compensate with their own controls.

Concordium and the Invisible Trust Layer

Concordium was built with a different philosophy. I’ve been close to it since the beginning, so I saw the design choices rather than the marketing. Here, the identity assurances and the transaction are not separate artefacts. They move together. A transaction carries embedded, cryptographically anchored proofs about the sender’s verified identity, without revealing anything unnecessary. For regulators or authorised parties, selective disclosure is built in. For participants, the trust signal is immediate rather than delayed. And because this sits at the protocol layer, applications can rely on it without reinventing a compliance stack on top.

For the payments community, this matters because it removes a whole category of friction that we’ve all simply accepted as normal. You shouldn’t have to wait on a payment because there is additional data required. That causes endless reconciliation because the payment rail and the identity rail don’t speak the same language.  

When identity and settlement travel together, these problems don’t disappear, but they shrink. A receiving party gains the assurances they need at the same moment the value arrives. Institutions can treat transactions as compliant-ready by construction rather than compliant by later review. And regulators get a framework that combines privacy with accountability in a way that maps cleanly onto their expectations.

Now that applications are coming online, you can see this design choice starting to matter in practice. These aren’t pilots. They’re real services where settlement finality, auditability, and counterparty confidence are prerequisites, not optional extras. The infrastructure isn’t trying to dazzle anyone. It’s just removing the operational noise that has covered this industry for decades.

I’ve spent my career watching technologies cross this line. When the complex becomes quiet, the adoption layer appears. We saw it in voice. We saw it in early mobile payments. And now, with Concordium ID and Concordium Pay, we’re seeing identity and settlement finally move in step. For anyone in payments, that alignment is not a theory. It’s the foundation that allows everything else to scale.

About the Author

Michael Jackson is a renowned engineer, entrepreneur, and investor known primarily for being the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Skype during its formative years from 2004 to 2007. He was responsible for driving operational growth and building revenue-generating services, helping to scale Skype into a multi-million dollar business with annual revenues exceeding €450 million within three years. He is a trusted advisor and member of the Governance Committee supporting Concordium.