Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 3 June 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 June 2025.
Members present: Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; Dr Allison Gardner; Kit Malthouse; Steve Race; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Adam Thompson; Martin Wrigley.
Question 17
Witness
I: Dion Price, Chief Executive, Trustonic.
Witness: Dion Price.
Q17 Chair: Welcome to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovators and what more can be done. To inform our work, each week we ask an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session.
Today’s innovator is Dion Price of Trustonic, a Cambridge-based international cyber-security company that has registered 120 patents since it was established in 2012. Its device-locking technology is used in over 280 million smartphones in more than 30 countries. This is particularly relevant, and indeed he will be joining one of our panels in our main session of the day on phone theft. Dion Price, tell us about your innovation and the barriers and opportunities you have met.
Dion Price: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak this morning and to tell you a little bit more about the work that Trustonic does.
As you have probably picked up, we lock a lot of smartphones. We have smartphone-locking technology in, as you said, 280 million-plus devices. We do that all over the world. Probably more important than what we do is why we do it. Generally, there are two reasons why we lock smartphones all over the world. Quite neatly, one of those reasons sits within developing markets, such as sub-Saharan Africa, south-east Asia and parts of Latin America. The other reason why we do it is on behalf of developed markets like this one and the US.
Starting with developing markets, what is going on there? Unfortunately, although I have said this perhaps 100 times, it still shocks even me. About half of the world does not have access to a smartphone. About 3 billion people still do not have access to a smartphone. It is something that we take hugely for granted in the west. Clearly, it is the central remote control of all of our lives.
The question is: why don’t 3 billion people have access to a smartphone? To take a market like sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are approximately 900 million people. It is the world’s youngest population. It is the world’s fastest-growing population. Affordability is the biggest challenge that you have in sub-Saharan Africa. The average consumer there generally makes about $3 to $5 per day, depending on which part of sub-Saharan Africa you are talking about. Once you take out food, clothing, lighting, housing and so on, even an entry-level smartphone that is maybe $70 or $100 is still far too much of a stretch if you have to save up for it and buy it all in one go. Getting hold of a smartphone is a pipedream. People are still banished to using talk-and-text devices that you would be more familiar with from the days of Nokia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That is ultimately where they sit.
How do you solve that problem? Unfortunately, economies of scale are not the answer. As an industry, we make about 1.4 billion phones in a given year. If you are making 1.4 billion of something and you still cannot get the economies of scale to a position where it is affordable for one half of the world, it is never going to get there. It doesn’t matter if you make 2 billion, 5 billion or 10 billion. Unfortunately, you are basically hitting the lower edge of a smartphone at about $70, which, as we mentioned, is unaffordable.
The only answer is to spread the cost of the devices. What you need are financiers and money people to come into those markets and acknowledge that there is a huge market opportunity not only for the individuals in the market but also for the mobile phone carriers, the retailers and the financiers. You need a really good way of spreading the cost of the device in equal monthly or quarterly instalments, bite-sized chunks.
When financiers look at that market, the risk is simply too high. Unfortunately, there is no credit rating system in those markets; there never has been one. The populations are largely unbanked in developing markets. Work history is sporadic at best. You may be working on a building site one day; you may be working in a field the next day; or you may be helping out the family on that day. There is no real kind of history of employment. Therefore, creditworthiness is exceptionally difficult to get a grip on.
As a result, traditional financier companies look at it and just say, “There’s no way that we can provide somebody with a $100 smartphone for only $10 or $15 and allow them to walk out of a store on the promise that they will come back in a month’s time with the next $5 or $10 instalment.” That trust-based system unfortunately simply doesn’t work. As a result of that, any efforts to finance devices in those markets leads to acceptance rates of usually only about 3%, 4% or 5%.
However, the key is that if you can lock devices and communicate with those devices, it changes everything. If you are in a position where you can provide the device and then, through a series of on-board screens, tutor and explain to the user that you need to come back to the store that you bought it from, pay your next instalment of $5 and then come back again, you train a whole population in how finance actually works. The financiers then say, “Okay, if I can control the asset, then I’m in.”
You have to be able to lock the phone in order to do that. If somebody disappears into the ether and is never seen again, you need to be able to lock that phone and compel them to come back and make the next payment. That is where we come in. That is why we lock 280 million devices all over the world.
The results are actually astonishing. When you deploy locking in a finance community, you go from acceptance rates of 4% or 5% all the way through to acceptance rates in sub-Saharan Africa for several of our companies of 94% of all the people who walk into a store. All they need is a national ID. That’s it. They are not asked for employment history or a bank record—nothing at all—just a national ID. “Yes, here’s the phone. Please provide the deposit. We’ll see you next month.”
Secure locking unleashes the finance community to go into the emerging markets. Then you have an entire half of the world crossing that digital divide—a market that they have been excluded from for decades. They are now included. They can gain access to work with the smartphone. They can gain access to education for their children and medical support for their family when they are in rural communities.
With the other half of the world that we also work with, in the west, the problems are a lot more straightforward and are generally fraud, theft and delinquency. Even in markets like this one, somewhere between 7% and 14% of people at various points in the year decide that they are not going to pay their phone bill. You need a mechanism for compelling them to bring their bill current and get them back on to a locking path.
Crucially, we do not deploy any software on those devices. We use all the locking technology that exists on the phones today. There is no secret source. There is no back door. We orchestrate across all handset manufacturers on the back end. It is not a special version of the phone. There is no special locking technology that we have to deploy. We are using what already exists in the phone today. We have to do it extremely well because, ultimately, there are usually billions of dollars-worth of phones financed that are out in the field at any one time. We have relationships with all the handset manufacturers and with the operator system players as well, such as Google. We have been doubling the business every year for the last five years. We are very thankful for this opportunity to provide evidence and showcase the company today. Thank you.
Chair: Thank you very much, Dion Price. That was very interesting. One of my jobs before coming into Parliament was rolling out the first-year SIM network in Nigeria in the 2000s, when a standard phone—not a smartphone—was about $50. It is interesting that nowadays the smartphones are about $70 or $80 and that you are able to control them effectively without any additional software. I think that is something we will come back to in our session this morning. Thank you very much for sharing your innovation journey with us.