Financial Services - distance selling, money laundering, "Know Your Customer"

Issue/Topic: Financial Services – distance selling, money laundering, “Know Your Customer

Convener: Gordon Rae

Session: 5D

Conference: IIW-Europe October 11, London Complete Notes Page

Notes-taker(s): Gordon Rae

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

The meeting discussed the delivery of financial services in the countries of Europe, and the possible contribution that federated identity could make.

Our first observation was that payments and retailing have well integrated infrastructure across Europe; but the delivery of financial services does not have a federated structure even within single countries. Advocates of federeated identity might be pushing against a closed door.

There are opportunities, and benefits. The group identified several.

In the Netherlands companies have financial planning tools that could benefit from using a federated identity mamgt. But federations would need to be established within a single conutry federations first.

E-Invoicing - across borders - is another potentially interesting area which could deliver benefits to participants.

Banks are well placed to be IDPs, and could generate income from providing ID and verifying IDs and claims against IDs; they would also benefit from other high-quality IDPs for distance selling.

Also, identity proofing outside payment is still difficult, e.g. for opening an account over the internet.

The European financial environment is quite restrictive in respect to regulations. The technologies are powerful enough to enable more complex business cases to work across borders. But the regulations are difficult. Savings guarantee systems etc. are bound to national laws.

Because of the banking crisis, European countries are looking at changing the regulations, but they are unlikely to support loose regulations.  There is a big emphasis on consumer protection.

People in the IIW community who are interested in advocating / supporting innovation in this area need  to build relationships with innovators in the financial sector, and build consortia at national or regional levels first.