We’re excited to announce that Evernym has been accepted into the fifth cohort of the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Regulatory Sandbox.
The Financial Conduct Authority is the conduct regulator for 58,000 financial services firms and financial markets in the UK and the prudential regulator for over 18,000 of those firms. Its regulatory sandbox seeks to provide firms with the ability to test products and services in a controlled environment with real customers and support in identifying appropriate consumer protection safeguards to build into new products and services.
We’re joined in Cohort 5 by two of our partners: machine learning identity verification specialist Onfido and KYC expert Deloitte. Together we’re running an experiment to demonstrate how decentralized identity can make it easier for customers to sign up for financial products while maintaining a high level of fraud and anti money laundering (AML) protection.
As part of this project, we have already integrated the Onfido SDK into our Connect.Me mobile wallet app — an integration we just demonstrated live for the first time at Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA.
“We’re very pleased to be partnering with Evernym and Deloitte to pilot portable identity in the FCA sandbox,” commented Husayn Kassai, CEO of Onfido. “We’re looking forward to jointly moving the identity debate beyond theory and whitepapers to pragmatic delivery of a solution that protects the privacy and security of individuals, whilst making it easier for them to get access to the financial products and services they need. We are excited about the opportunity to work alongside the regulator to inform forward thinking policy in the identity space, and hope to contribute to shaping a future where identity truly is the key to access, and where convenience and security are held in equal weighting, without compromise.”
Derek Ryan, Partner at Deloitte, added “Deloitte is excited to be working alongside Evernym, Onfido and other industry participants to demonstrate the practical applications and business relevance of portable identity within the FCA sandbox. We believe that the emergence of a portable digital identity provides a unique opportunity to build an open and scalable ecosystem which can help improve customer experience and protection, solve institution’s onboarding challenges, and also create new and scalable business models. We are focused on bringing the distinctive yet complementary capabilities of our firm with those of our collaborating partners in bringing this ecosystem to life.”
Evernym, Onfido, and Deloitte join the cohort as partners of the Fintech Delivery Panel, a network of fintech and financial service leaders united under the mission of ensuring that the United Kingdom continues to be the intellectual, technological and financial capital of the world for fintech.
We look forward to sharing news of our progress together over the coming months.
