Indicio Proven™ Finance is a complete verifiable credential solution for banks, financial service companies, and payment providers, providing seamless customer account authentication, consent-based data sharing, data privacy compliance, and reusable KYC, AML, and KYB.
By Trevor Butterworth
Banking, financial services, and payments are entering a period of intense digital transformation around new platforms, seamless processes, data democratization, automation, and personalization.
Combined, all these trends will deliver dramatically better financial products and services to customers, drive financial inclusion, eliminate inefficiencies, and provide more convenience and better customer experiences. This isn’t just top-down innovation, digital natives who have grown up interacting with the world through their mobile devices expect digital interactions to be seamless.
But to achieve this kind of digital transformation, banks, financial institutions, and third-party providers will need to overcome three powerful, trend-killing, obstacles: Data privacy, data security, and data trust.
This is why we launched Indicio Proven Finance. It’s an application of our award-winning open-source verifiable credential technology, designed to deliver privacy, to provide consent to data sharing, and to verify identity and data in a seamless, secure way through the use of open-source digital identity technologies.
Indicio Proven Finance launches with:
- A verifiable bank account credential — for bank account holders to prove that they are the owners of their bank account.
- A verifiable KYC credential — for reusing costly, time-consuming identity assurance.
- Verifier software—so that bank partners, and third parties — including retailers — can seamlessly verify financial data with the consent of the customer, including payments.
Why verifiable credentials are a powerful way to transform finance
Verifiable credentials remove the need for usernames and passwords, or sharing other personal data in order to securely access a bank account. With a verifiable credential, a customer can create a direct, encrypted communication to their bank and the bank can know that this communication can only come from this customer.
How does this happen? In simplified terms, verification uses the metadata in the credential to find and check the public cryptographic keys related to the account credential which are stored on a distributed ledger network. And this happens over an encrypted communication channel that can only come from the account holder.
This means that a bank can immediately and authoritatively know that their customer is their customer; the account holder can also immediately and authoritatively know they are talking to their bank. Seamless login to an account is also faster and easier for the account holder — passwords do not have to be remembered and changed and there are no multiple authentication steps.
But this kind of verification can be easily extended to bank partners, third-party fintech providers, and the marketplace at large. If someone trusts your bank, they can use the same verification process to trust that you are the owner of your account, which means onboarding can be simplified and online payments can be verified. Only you can verify a payment.
And then, because verifiable credential technology allows people to hold and prove the authenticity of their own data, there is no need for a third-party to involve itself in this process. This radically simplifies data privacy compliance. Customers can consent to share their data and they can share their data in special privacy-preserving ways, such as selective disclosure or predicate proofs (where data can be validated by “yes” or “no” answers).
The value proposition goes even further when it comes to replacing or enhancing APIs (see our article, The DIDComm Economy), but the bottom line is this: a verifiable account credential is the gateway to digital transformation.
How can you get started?
The goal of Indicio’s Proven product range is to give you everything you need to quickly start issuing and verifying credentials. This isn’t a technology that requires you to start over or take months to deploy: it can be integrated into your current identity and access systems and workflows in weeks and scale at a pace that meets your needs.
Indicio provides all the components—along with the support, training, and continuous upgrades needed to deliver success. Critically, Indicio Proven Finance is a fully open source product that you fully own. There is no vendor lock-in. We’re happy to customize it to your needs but you are free to do this on your own.
Intrigued? Excited? Discover how Indicio has helped dozens of companies implement seamless verifiable credential solutions and ask us how we could help you. The future is now!
Watch a demo to see how Indicio Proven Finance works or get in touch with us today!
