12 global banks sign on to create the foundation for corporate self-sovereign identity in financial services

Synechron, Inc, the global financial services consulting and technology services provider, has today announced a distributed ledger technology (DLT) collaboration with R3, the enterprise software firm.

The collaboration will work toward developing a KYC solution built on Corda; R3’s financial grade distributed ledger that operates in strict privacy in an open, global network. The solution will build upon a point-to-point, secure and self-sovereign vision toward digital identity and verifiable corporate data. This project is a critical step towards reducing the cost of KYC processes and achieving the long-term vision of digital identity.

The project, known as LEIA 2, is one of the largest collaborative DLT efforts this year and includes 12 banks located across 4 continents. The project kicked off in July with a three-month sprint to identify objectives and business requirements, define a roadmap, and develop a functional prototype on top of the Corda platform. At the end of the project, Synechron will demo the solution in their Financial Innovation Labs (FinLabs).

The project aims to solve the problems around data collection, data validation, customer experience and data privacy that plague current KYC processes in Corporate Banking. The solution would fit within the existing framework of in-house and external data providers, but also build towards a more disruptive vision for bank processes and the customer experience. DLT has inherent features that allow it to address KYC requirements for validated, trusted data without the risk of tampering or fraud. The technology also enables self-sovereign distribution models that enable the data owners, the Corporates, to control the distribution of their own identity data.

Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron said, “Distributed ledger technology will improve current processes and improve experiences for both banks and customers. The work R3 is doing to provide a trusted platform and bring together the ecosystem of players for such a robust use case is incredibly significant to the future of KYC and financial services.”

Todd McDonald, Co-Founder of R3 commented, “This project builds on the success of LEIA1 with a use case that will be foundational in many other financial services use cases that rely on identity. Corda’s handling of identity is unique for a DLT platform and was designed to meet the specific needs of the financial services industry.”