Each year, large Financial Institutions spend hundreds of millions completing Know Your Customer (KYC) checks on new and existing customers, however, no framework exists to collectively mitigate risk through the sharing of customer risk intelligence across privacy jurisdictions or between entities. This lack of access to existing intel often forces institutions to make risk-rating decisions based on incomplete information. Enveil was recently asked to examine how this collaborative gap might be overcome by leveraging advancements in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Utilizing the data security company’s breakthroughs in homomorphic encryption, Enveil developed a flexible and adaptable trust framework capable of facilitating secure and private KYC and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes to enhance intelligence-led decision making.

The effort validated how homomorphic encryption can uniquely enable intelligence-led risk decisions to address key challenges in the financial sector. Analysts were able to securely and privately cross-match and search regulated data across privacy jurisdictions in a business-relevant timeframe while ensuring sensitive assets remained protected during processing in accordance with regulatory requirements. It also validated Enveil’s capabilities as a foundational component of a trust framework enabling Financial Institutions to expand data inputs in order to better understand customer risk and make faster, better informed onboarding decisions, and laid the groundwork for future intra- and inter-bank applications of these innovative cryptographic techniques.