4 Ways Financial Institutions Can Use Sudo Platform to Quickly Build a Secure, Frictionless ID and Authentication Solution

Oct 19, 2023 | Product

Financial institutions want secure and frictionless onboarding and authentication processes and they’re finally seeing it from decentralized identity (DI) and verifiable credentials (VCs) technology.

While VCs have been a promise of identification and authentication technologies for decades, decentralization being the fabric through which VCs are established and communicated now makes the whole proposition more viable for FIs.

The decentralized nature of DI eliminates the need for a centralized authority to manage and control the identity certification process underlying current onboarding and authentication systems that are complex and costly for FIs, frustrating for consumers, and open to abuse.

In the DI ecosystem, issuing organizations conveniently and securely issue fraud-proof credentials, and verifying organizations can instantly check the authenticity and validity of those credentials to grant access to services. The customer accepts, stores, and selectively shares their credentials with unprecedented privacy, security and trust.

Early adopters in the financial services industry are using VCs as customer-controlled, open, standardized, portable, and cryptographically protected digital credentials to enable:

Continuous strong authentication of banking customers, whether they are accessing via web, telephone, or mobile
More streamlined banking functions, such as real-time loan approval because the applicant carries credentials such as KYC, credit history, employment history in their identity wallet.

The result is drastically reduced KYC and AML costs, vastly enhanced retail and corporate customer experience, and streamlined regulatory compliance.

Read Verifiable Credentials – the Killer Feature of Decentralized Identity

7 more use cases for VCs in banking

In addition to an FI issuing its own customers with a VC to prove they’re a customer and speed up onboarding and authentication (which some FIs are already achieving in seconds with the technology), DI pioneer Evernym (now Avast) lists 7 other potential use cases:

Enable the customer to use their credential across internal silos of the institution to reduce data lakes and allow them to provide the single view of their information.
Maintain a persistent, secure, and unique connection with each customer for all types of sensitive data communications (e.g. sending loan documents).
Leverage the credential exchange protocol to prove minimal customer data collection and maintain a verified data trail for regulatory compliance.
Leverage the interoperability of VCs to make the FI’s credential useful for consumers anywhere in the world (the “top of wallet” competitive advantage).
Leverage the open standards of DI to issue customers with an identity wallet for storing and managing their VCs, or build a wallet into an existing banking app.
Support customers’ need to back up and recover their VCs in a “digital safety deposit box” concept.
Act as “guardian” of a customer’s credentials in a similar manner to guarding paper documents or effects in real life.

Build your VCs solution quickly with Sudo Platform

Anonyome Labs’ Sudo Platform offers the key building blocks for a VCs solution with four licensable products and more in development:

White Label Mobile DI Wallet: A standalone mobile application for iOS and Android, a user can use the mobile DI wallet for DI interactions and storage: creating and storing cryptographic keys, and creating connections for receiving, holding and presenting verifiable credentials. It interacts with verifiable credential issuers and verifiers.
Mobile DI Wallet SDK: For customers that want to add the DI wallet functionality to their own mobile application, this native mobile SDK provides the capability for storage, creating cryptographic keys, and establishing connections and for receiving, holding and presenting VCs.
Verifiable Credentials Service/SDK: This service provides the ability to establish connections with DI wallets and to issue VCs. It also provides the ability to request and verify presentation proofs from DI wallets.
Relay Service/SDK: This service introduces an always-on capability for a mobile DI Wallet. Implemented as a cloud service, the Relay Service provides mediator capability for incoming/outgoing verifiable credential and other messages, so that sending and receiving is not limited to when the client implementations of the mobile DI wallet and SDK are online.

As an API-first developer platform, Sudo Platform includes everything necessary to quickly bring new products to market or augment existing products with value-add privacy and identity protection capabilities. It includes:

Developer-focused documentation
APIs
SDK source code via GitHub
Sample applications for test-to-deploy of various capabilities
Brandable white-label apps for quick go-to-market deployments.

You can see in these images how a credit union has used the Sudo Platform sample app and SDK to build a VCs solution within its banking app:

4 steps of installing the sudo platform app — In 4 steps, go from installation of your mobile application to having an encrypted connection with your potential new member. With this channel established you can commence your KYC process.

a KYC proofing with a verified credential issued at completion — With an authenticated end-to-end connection established members can complete their KYC proofing with a verified credential issued at completion that can be used for future proofing exercises needs either in branch or online.

In this example, a customer wants a car loan and the car dealership verifies their account quickly and securely, avoiding additional applications and legacy forms: