Shame that we didn’t invent SSI before we invented the @ symbol, then we would have known all along, who was @ the other end of the communication. If Fintech had of done it that way, then we could have saved the trillions of wasted dollars of compliance, by every bank and financial institution, as well as all government agencies and even the health services industry lost money on fraud.
In the beginning of the Internet, it was uncommon to know what an email address was, many people thought it was pointless and only computer geeks needed to have one. For some people it was the ubiquitous AOL email address, or Prodigy or Compuserve and in each case you needed to establish who you were in order to have an email address. Many of us in the beginning, just didn’t think or guess that anyone would want a fake account… what for? it just felt wrong.
…fast forward to July 13, 2018, from the Washington Examiner
Obama has higher percentage of fake Twitter followers than Clinton, Trump
Former President Barack Obama lost a greater number and larger portion of his Twitter followers than President Trump and Hillary Clinton following the technology company’s purge of fake accounts.
Obama dropped from 103.6 million followers to 101 million as of mid-Friday, a day after bogus and spam accounts were deleted. The 2.6 million drop cut out 2.5 percent of his followers.
Trump went from 53.4 million to 53.1 million. The 300,000 drop amounts to 0.6 percent of his Thursday following before the purge.
Forget about politics, the question that begs an answer is; who created all those fake accounts. If one fake email account is used to set-up multiple fake social network accounts, how many fake accounts exist in total? What percentage of all online profiles are fake? Who’s real and who’s fake?
FinTech was born out of need for compliance, both foreign tax compliance but also transaction compliance. Now the keyword is “data-integrity” which is nice to see the use of the word integrity alongside data but all your data is non-compliant if one individual in the equation is not who they say they are. In other words; fake identification and fake documents are causing financial loss to banks.
FinTech is the fancy word for blockchain technicians because realistically each and every bank in every country is investing in the new technology. The mandate had come from above when Swift updated it’s digital financial messaging platform to real-time, by tokenizing transfers, so money can be traced in real-time.
Mark Carney of the Bank of England has suggested ending the USD hegemony by adopting a “Stablecoin” (Libra-type basket of currencies). This is not a suggestion, it’s actually a statement of fact. Swift has already tokenized money and over 50% of all transactions, between 11,000 member banks, is in real-time and almost instant, just like Bitcoin. We have arrived at the future of money.
The Future of FinTech is Self-sovereign ID, as it replaces the KYC expenditure of due diligence and compliance that was costing the banks and service providers. The other aspect that’s becoming clear is that eco-systems are being born of the new security, in which commerce and online transactions become fast and easy. Also, an unlikely collaboration between Governments and FinTech is emerging as economic development teams from state and provincial Government foray into the Self-sovereign ID start-up promotion and incubation.
Many stakeholders benefit from an online environment with data-integrity but stop and consider customer-integrity. Imagine the ease of selling something to someone who is already qualified, and has all the necessary proof of identification?
FinTech Photo credit: seriykotik1970 on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA
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