Unlocking the Transformative Power of Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Every business wants access to timely, relevant data that can help drive intelligence-led decisions. In an increasingly regulated data ecosystem, challenges such as data localization, regulatory compliance, data privacy, and Data in Use security are limiting organizations’ ability to share and collaborate, especially when using sensitive data. In order to take advantage of the positive business outcomes that increased access to relevant data sources provide, analysts need to be able to securely and repeatedly search, analyze, cross-match, and derive insights from third-party data repositories.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are uniquely positioned to address these challenges. By enabling organizations to extract critical insights while ensuring the content of the operation and its corresponding results are never exposed, PETs are not improving current business practices — they are making something entirely new possible. While there are a broad and varied range of business-enabling capabilities made possible by PETs, the Financial Services sector is leading the way, utilizing PETs-powered solutions from providers like pioneering data security company Enveil for Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) use cases, as described in the case study below.

At its core, PETs is a family of technologies that enable, enhance, and preserve the privacy of data throughout its lifecycle. While the term has been around for decades, it is now experiencing a renaissance as the global awareness and demand for privacy increases. PETs allow organizations to securely pursue data sharing and collaboration practices, overcoming the very regulatory barriers that have in many ways spurred a renewed interest in their use.

Named a 2020 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer for its contributions to the PETs ecosystem, Enveil enables organizations to securely derive insights, cross-match, and search third-party data assets without ever revealing the content of the search/analytic itself or compromising the security or ownership of the underlying data. Customers use Enveil’s homomorphic encryption-powered solutions to extract critical insights without the need to move or replicate sensitive data. This unique, decentralized approach allows each contributor to retain positive control of its data assets at all times, a key factor in ensuring the privacy of sensitive data as well as regulatory compliance.

Putting PETs to Work: A Financial Services Case Study

Each year, large Financial Institutions spend hundreds of millions completing KYC checks on new and existing customers, however, no framework exists to collectively mitigate risk by sharing customer risk intelligence across privacy jurisdictions or between entities. This lack of access to existing intel often forces banks to make risk-rating decisions based on incomplete information. Enveil’s ZeroReveal solution solves this problem by enabling Financial Institutions to securely and privately leverage external and cross-jurisdictional data assets in a business-relevant timeframe. Delivered through an adaptable trust framework to facilitate secure and private KYC and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes, Enveil protects searches, watchlists, and analytics throughout the processing lifecycle to enable secure collaboration for intelligence-led decision making.

Using Enveil ZeroReveal, analysts at a large, global Financial Institution performed encrypted searches and analytics on sensitive data located on-prem and in cloud-based jurisdictional environments while abiding by regulatory requirements. The success of this effort validated the ability of Enveil’s PETs-powered solution to provide Financial Institutions with a better understanding of customer risk and allow them to make faster, better informed onboarding decisions. It also laid the groundwork for the company’s ongoing work in other intra- and inter-bank applications.

Proving the transformative power of Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Enveil’s privacy-preserving capabilities allow data to be securely used where it is and as it is today whether an organization is seeking information from a third-party data provider, supporting a decentralized framework of network collaborators, or driving revenue by securely monetizing data assets.