The banking sector is being increasingly regulated to counter money laundering, illicit transactions, and unaudited activities. Stricter regulations often affect banking operations as customers are faced with increasingly complex solutions and burdensome services. Nevertheless, emerging digital technologies promise to provide solutions to the problem, allowing user-friendly financial business operations to continue. This inherently requires secure and swift customer data exchange between banks and other financial operators. Guardtime helps to create privacy-preserving and accessible models and frameworks for financial transactions in the CRITICAL CHAINS project.

Together with partners, Guardtime will define and develop a new ICT architecture and specific technical services for banks, insurance, settlement and toll-road management. The project, launched in July 2019 and funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme, aims to develop new technologies to be used by financial system operators. One of the main ideas of the project is to support that the developed technologies are transformed into standardised platform services for smaller stakeholders in the financial sector to protect their transactions and operations.

With a focus on ensuring data integrity, Guardtime puts its knowhow and KSI® Blockchain technology stack into use for the platform’s security requirements and central database protection. As the first EU-eIDAS accredited blockchain-based trust service provider in the world, Guartime aims to develop solutions for the highly regulated financial services domain that not only significantly increase security but also provide novel ways to ensure regulatory compliance.

Guardtime’s Head of Research and Innovation Cooperation, Henry Rõigas:

“No modern financial infrastructure can survive without a rigid data security backbone. We are excited to collaborate with partners like EY, INDRA, CEA and the Fraunhofer Society to develop solutions that significantly increase end-user trust and, in turn, service take up through increased security, auditability and regulatory compliance.”

The project lasts 36 months. England, Italy and Spain will be the first countries where the developed technology will be tested to gather feedback for the solution.

More information about the project: https://research.reading.ac.uk/critical-chains/

Project manager: 
[email protected]
+372 505 3587