Protecting your personal data 

Alum Seema Khinda Johnson builds 'super wallet' to block breaches

Photo courtesy Nuggets

Seema Khinda Johnson is co-founder and COO of Nuggets, a London-based financial technology company.

By Brad Broberg

When digital pirates plundered a credit card belonging to Seema Khinda Johnson’s husband, little did the bad guys know the couple would retaliate with technology designed to deny them the information they need to do their dirty work.

Frustrated by the burdensome fraud recovery process, Seema and her husband, Alastair Johnson started Nuggets, a decentralized identity and payments platform that takes data security to the next level.

The duo started Nuggets in 2016 at a time when data breaches – and the fraudulent credit card charges that follow when personally identifiable information is exposed – were occurring left and right. They decided that if no one else was going to tackle the problem, why not them?

“Every day, customer data was being compromised,” Seema said. “Privacy was becoming a huge growing concern.”

Seema – a Microsoft alumna – and Alastair are both tech veterans, their backgrounds are in marketing and product management. The more they examined how organizations store the personally identifiable information they use to authenticate credit card charges and other transactions, the more certain they were the standard approach was inherently flawed in terms of protecting personal data during a security breach.

“I’d been around enough tech and worked around enough engineers to understand this was something that could be solved by technology,” Seema said. “We are problem solvers at heart and this was just a huge glaring problem that we felt no one had fixed.”

Convinced they could build a better mousetrap, Seema and Alastair assembled a team and went to work.

“The problem was that data was being held in a centralized way that was only really protected by things like usernames, passwords and e-mail addresses,” Seema said.  “We realized that to really solve data breaches going forward, you needed to have a trusted digital identity.”

That is what Nuggets provides.

“We essentially built a super wallet,” Seema said.

The technical term for their super wallet is verified self-sovereign decentralized identity. Instead of storing personally identifiable information in the equivalent of warehouses – where the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people can be compromised by a single breach — Nuggets relies on the equivalent of individual storage units to hold the information and provide the basis for establishing verified digital identities through blockchain technology that allows only the individual user to access any personally identifiable data.

The advantage of Nuggets to consumers is that their personal information cannot be stolen if an organization they interact with is hit by a security breach because the organization no longer stores their data.

The advantage for an organization — bank, merchant, payment processor, telecom — is that they are no longer responsible for protecting the data because — you guessed it —the organization no longer stores the data. What’s more, all parties can be certain every transaction powered by Nuggets is legit because every transaction is tied to a verified digital identity that includes biometrics.

“From my perspective, what’s not to love?” Seema said.

Albert Hitchcock is one of several early-stage investors in Nuggets.

“I was very inspired by what they had achieved in such a short time,” Hitchcock said. “I love what they have created and the passion, energy and belief they have in the space of decentralized self-sovereign identity.”

Based in London, Nuggets rolled out an alpha version of its product in 2018. Today, the platform is being used by approximately 20 organizations as a business-to-business tool — with more customers in the wings — but will soon be available to consumers as an application in the vein of PayPal or Apple Pay.

Looking back, Seema never thought that bringing a new digital identity/transaction solution to market would be “such a tough nut to crack.”

Developing the technology was one thing, but gaining traction in the market was another. After years of introducing organizations to verified self-sovereign decentralized identity and explaining the benefits, Seema believes the market is “finally catching up with us.”

Nuggets has won several industry honors, including Consumer Encryption Solution of the Year from the CyberSecurity Breakthrough awards program in 2022 and a gold award for Best Mobile Authentication Solution from Juniper Research in 2023. Seema serves on the technical advisory committee of ID2020.

After many years of leading go-to-market efforts at numerous other companies, Seema can draw on a wealth of experience in her duties as co-founder and COO at Nuggets. Her resume includes two years with Skype and two more with Microsoft – from 2013-2015 – after Microsoft acquired Skype.

“I loved my time at Microsoft,” Seema recalled. “I learned a lot around how you take a product to market.” She also learned how to navigate a large global corporation, which comes in handy when she meets with large organizations on behalf of Nuggets.

Two key lessons: There are no silly questions and never make assumptions. “As I launch products here at Nuggets, we ask all the questions … and we make no assumptions unless we’ve established them (intentionally),” she said.