Kantara Initiative wishes to thank the Open Identity Framework Joint Steering Committee (OIF JSC) for providing us with a copy of the RFI.

• We are pleased to provide this preliminary response and thank the members of the Kantara Assurance Review Board for their efforts to develop a thoughtful, detailed response on a tight timeline during a US-holiday week,
• We see significant synergy between the Kantara Identity Assurance Program and the OIF program, as we understand it from the preliminary material provided,
• We agree that technical interoperability is an essential enabler of an overall trust framework and rely on the Kantara interoperability programs (based in part on the Liberty Alliance Interoperable(TM) Program) to provide assurance of independently verified interoperability between products and services,
• We welcome discussions with representatives of the OpenID Foundation and Information Card Foundation’s joint Steering committee so that we can better understand your proposed program and explore meaningful avenues of cooperation, and
• We believe that by working together we can produce and deploy, in a timely fashion, one or more high-quality trust frameworks that serve the needs of a broad marketplace.

We welcome the opportunity to provide our response and hope to engage in meaningful and fruitful discussions shortly.