Launching the Priviti blog: decentralised innovation in an era of consent
4 September 2018
As CEO of Priviti, I’m delighted to write our inaugural blog post.
This is an exciting time for Priviti. We just announced we have joined the Temenos MarketPlace, which connects global banks with the best fintech solutions, to help leading financial institutions systemise and manage granular consent for data sharing.
We are also launching our Sydney office this week at Stone & Chalk as Australia prepares for open banking standards coming into effect next year.
For my inaugural post, I’d like to look at decentralised innovation in an era of consent. Typically when one mentions decentralisation in financial services, a discussion on blockchain and crypto assets ensues. At Priviti, we have a different focus: empowering individual lines of business to get things done and innovate without the delays, scrutiny and constraints stemming from rigid, centralised control and compliance.
I spent two years establishing and running the Lean Startup Summit in Europe and have chaired innumerable panels on collaboration between startups and incumbents and how big entities can innovate by adopting a startup mentality. Too often, these discussions are simply innovation theatre. Meaningful collaboration is all too rare. When it does happen, it is usually not long until the large entity infects and inhibits the small entity’s innovation, sometimes leaving the smaller entity dying on the vine as they wait for their partner corporate’s risk appetite, compliance teams, business case and technology roadmap to align favourably. I highly recommend you tune in to the awesome insights of Leda Glyptis every Thursday for a real world view into the challenges of startup-corporate collaboration.
The case for decentralised innovation: privacy and user consent as the new zeitgeist
Let me set the scene. I think we’d all agree that 2018 has been a landmark year for privacy. The confluence of new regulation (GDPR, PSD2) and recent market behaviour (Cambridge Analytica) created a paradigm shift in our attitudes to personal data. The history of the digital economy is a short one and new developments emerge every few weeks and months. It is difficult to identify a “zeitgeist”, or general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of our era, within that short lifespan. However, it can be argued that the digital economy is about to enter a new era with privacy and user consent as its zeitgeist.
So, what’s changed? Well, to start, gone are the days where individual business lines are allowed to self-regulate and make decisions on partnering for revenue opportunities where the need for explicit consent is unclear. Long-term brand value and customer trust will ultimately impact share price. Therefore, the temptation for large organisations to hide behind blanket consent must be avoided. This legal tool is becoming a blunt instrument. The need for flexible, clear and informed communication between organisations, customers and partners regarding how customer data will be used is important for companies across all industries to mitigate compliance and reputational risk.
At Priviti, we are committed to empowering decentralised growth and innovation. This can only happen when companies utilise technology which enables central management to have full oversight of, and accountability for, how individual business lines manage customer data, but also empowers individual business lines to innovate with new partnerships and collaboration.
In our model, each business line assumes granular control of obtaining consent for data sharing, transaction by transaction. Priviti enables any company to obtain, verify and match consent between multiple parties with audit trails for compliance, dispute resolution and analytics.
This model alleviates central concerns of the few (compliance, regulatory teams, board level) to unshackle the creativity of many across a complex organisation. The results are organisational and reputational peace of mind and the opportunity for teams across a company to get things done and collaborate with startups and other partners to drive innovation and progress.
Three steps to manage consent and empower decentralised innovation
From our experience creating a solution to help companies systemise and manage granular consent for data sharing, here are the three steps we suggest to manage consent and empower decentralised innovation:
- Commit to a company-wide consent policy for data sharing (here’s a template we prepared earlier this year with Pinsent Masons) that can serve your organisation’s data-sharing ecosystem. This will set the ground rules across your company and for your third-party partners.
- Implement a truly digital solution rather than digitising a paper-based process (that tip appears in pretty much every episode of FinTech Insider by 11:FS). This solution should enable you to implement your structured consent policy for data sharing and comply with your data sharing agreements and external regulations. This will empower your teams to innovate and collaborate with partners, safe in the knowledge that they auto-comply with your consent policy.
- Enable all members of your data sharing ecosystem to view, grant, revoke and renew consent using your digital platform, so you can share data and innovate with trust.
We love discussing these topics and shaping the future of data sharing, so we’ll be publishing a weekly blog post every Tuesday.
Please share your thoughts and connect with us.
Dave Cunningham is CEO of Priviti, a technology company that helps companies systemise and manage granular consent for data sharing securely in real time. He is co-founder of Galway City Innovation District and the Portershed, part-time yoga teacher and used to be really good at golf.
