The event “How we imagine the bank of tomorrow. Banking seen through the glasses of blockchain and digital identity” was held in Rome on November 10, 2016, organized by the International Chamber of Commerce Italia as part of the work of the Digital Economy Commission, which was set up this year and is coordinated by Luisa Monti, Head of Regulatory and Innovation Developments at CRIF. Speakers at the event included representatives of the European banking sector and companies operating in the digital identity sector, as well as the Bank of Italy and the European Commission. Delegates discussed the implications, challenges and opportunities that digitization is bringing to the financial sector. There was specific focus on subjects including Blockchains, Digital Identity and their interrelationship.
One of the speakers at the event was Luisa Monti, who talked about digital identity and how the possibility of unequivocally tracing back a person (or company) to a digital identity that is able to perform valid digital actions on a legal and financial level (electronic signature, payments, etc.) and can be used across national borders will profoundly change business models, enabling end-users to act more directly as protagonists in their online choices.
Starting from the main reasons why Italian banks do not currently invest in a national digital identity system, already highlighted by other speakers (financial factors and reluctance to open up their customer base), Monti showed how this increasing power in the hands of consumers and companies could over the coming years lead to a gradual reduction in the information held in CRMs and in large corporate databases.
Citing a passage from Opinion 9 of the European EDPS, Monti suggested that this trend is supported by the regulators. The passage is unequivocal: “Our vision is to create a new reality where individuals manage and control their online identity. Our aim to transform the current provider centric system into a human centric system where individuals are protected against unlawful processing of their data and against intrusive tracking and profiling techniques that aim at circumventing key data protection principles.”
Today, this vision is supported by digital identity and blockchain technologies, which together enable the creation of a P2P system of reliable and verifiable digital transactions, as reliable as notes, carried out between physical subjects that can be unambiguously identified.
“As CRIF, our aim is to develop a tool which enables users to use their digital identity, improving the characteristics and protection of information, for its correct and safe use within the environment it is then shared in. It is for this reason that we are committing ourselves to developing a blockchain infrastructure which better responds to the need for Privacy-preserving cryptography and Secure Multiparty Computation, where information coming from a number of sources allows correct and accurate analysis, but the sources and/or parts of the data are protected and not made available to those without the necessary authorizations”, concluded Monti, underlining how in this rapidly evolving global context, expecting to stop certain trends is impossible: there will always be a company, not necessarily Italian or European, that will pave the way and the others will follow.
