Financial

State of Financial Data Today

In today’s digital ecosystem, individuals often lack control over their personal and financial data. Financial institutions, credit bureaus, and various third-party services store and manage vast amounts of sensitive information, from transaction histories to credit scores. This centralized approach to data management has several drawbacks from a user’s perspective. Individuals have limited visibility and control over who accesses their data and for what purposes. This is due to centralized data repositories, making it difficult for users to share their information securely, such as for loan applications or personal finance management. Such centralized data silos are often susceptible to hacks given their single points of failure and precent users from transporting their information across institutions.

Are Financial Institutions to blame?

This situation arises from a traditional reliance on centralized systems. These systems are built around institutions acting as gatekeepers of data, which leads to inefficiencies, vulnerabilities, and a lack of user empowerment. Furthermore, the regulatory environment often emphasizes compliance and reporting from these institutions’ perspectives, not necessarily prioritizing user control or data portability. Lastly, most institutions have spent decades building customer trust and it is safer to prioritize blacked-out privacy than risk data leaks.

Gateway in Action. Fixing Data Interoperability?

Let us go with an example here. Mastercard is interested in creating a set of common standards and infrastructure needed to interact with its crypto payments network. This means that users could receive a “Crypto Credential” to make it easier to send payments to the right person, enabling personal financial information to be verified via metadata and to ensure that institutions/persons meet compliance requirements for cross-border transactions.

Where does Gateway fit in?

Gateway empowers Mastercard to join the Network and control their own data policies and ecosystem. This way Mastercard dictates how underlying data is being stored and define data rights (usage, verification, and information schemas).

The users part of Mastercard’s network would be able to generate a Self-Sovereign Identity, which can connect multiple different aliases (Google Account, Wallet, Social media etc) to a single identifier. Mastercard could then define what types of Personal Data Assets a user could obtain (KYC, Credit History, Proof of Banking etc) and who they can share it with. In this case, the applications/institutions part of Mastercard’s Payments network would be able to request and verify a user’s data asset to access specific products and services.

Given our focus on decentralized identity access management, we are excited to enable secure and private sharing of data across a regulated ecosystem. Enabling all participants to streamline compliance, security, and improve the overall customer experience without adding complicated proof and data bridging mechanisms.