Enveil CEO Ellison Anne Williams spoke with The London Institute of Banking and Finance about using homomorphic encryption to help banks beat money-laundering.
Excerpt from the article:
Money-laundering generates splashy headlines and financial regulators come down hard on firms that break anti-money laundering (AML) rules. To fight money-laundering, though, banks must share data. What to do?
“Banks want to be able to reach out to peer institutions for information,” says Ellison Anne Williams, Founder and CEO of Enveil. “But the information given for functions like onboarding is very sensitive, so it can’t just be exposed to another organisation. Also, banks are competing for customers.”
Traditionally, firms have used a ‘perimeter of security’ approach. Selected data is placed in a secure environment where it can be decrypted, computed and re-encypted. The problem, Williams points out, is that if the perimeter is breached “everything is available, free and clear”.
There is another way, Williams says. “If that information is never decrypted, banks [sharing data] neither expose their customer base nor violate regulations.”
Enveil helps firms compute encrypted data by using ‘homomorphic encryption’ – the “holy grail” of data privacy, as Williams freely admits.
Read the full piece by The London Institute of Banking & Finance.
