In this Q&A for FinCrime Report, Enveil CEO Ellison Anne Williams explains how she has worked to make homomorphic encryption commercially practical for anti-money laundering and data protection.
Excerpt from the interview:
What is the most challenging thing about your role?
The most challenging (and interesting) part of my role is helping businesses embrace and understand the transformational power of Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
Customer needs are constantly evolving, as are regulations, priorities, and the broader global business climate. There has been a seismic shift in the global privacy market over the past several years as we’ve seen accelerating regulations and a growth in consumer understanding.
Businesses are looking for sustainable ways to keep up with it all, driving a growing interest in Privacy Enhancing Technologies which can enable organizations to perform critical business functions while ensuring the privacy and security of sensitive data assets.
Since our technology isn’t making something better, it’s making something entirely new possible, our initial interactions with financial institutions begin with some education on this technology category and how it can help them securely share and collaborate with third parties or across privacy jurisdictions.
What part of your role do you enjoy the most?
I like digging into the challenges our customers are facing and figuring out how best we can help. Financial services is such a fast-moving market and it’s impressive to see a willingness to embrace new technologies that can provide more security and efficiency which will ultimately lead to better customer experiences. We’re excited to be playing a role in these evolving changes and look forward to expanding to more inter- and intra-bank use cases in the months/years ahead.
How do you see your role/industry changing in the next few years?
Despite the increasing regulations we’ve seen put in place in recent years, we are only now seeing the tip of the privacy iceberg. Consumers expect financial institutions to protect and control how their sensitive data assets will be viewed and shared — especially when it involves third parties.
This will lead organizations to expand their privacy preserving and enhancing capabilities, and Privacy Enhancing Technologies will be a foundational element of these privacy and security strategies. We’ll also continue to see these efforts led by cross-functional teams representing the risk, privacy, and security interests within an organization.
Read the full interview at GRC World Forums.
