Monthly Archives: October 2018

Spotlight on Quartech

Meet Quartech

  1. What is the mission and vision of Quartech? 

Our mission is to make our clients successful. We do this by attracting the brightest and most capable innovative people who will create clarity, drive innovation, and deliver excellence

2. Why is trustworthy digital identity crucial for existing and emerging markets? 

Privacy and identity are at the core of the next generation of our digital lives.  Our customers, clients and citizens are demanding privacy. An interoperable digital identity that offers verifiable claims, creates a trust fabric that will make possible improved and streamlined ways of interacting in the markets as well as increasing privacy while retaining that verifiable identity.  Digital identity will give the citizens back control over their personal information and drastically reduce identity theft and other vulnerabilities brought on by our digital experiences so far. Digital identity is a key enabler for a more efficient and private future online.  Finally, digital identity empowers the customer with a means to conduct business in a way that protects privacy without compromising access to services. For example, a person can now verify their age without sharing their birthdate or any other personal information. 

3. How will digital identity transform the Canadian and global economy?  How does Quartech address challenges associated with this transformation?

A digital identity trust framework across Canada will allow for an unprecedented level of efficiency and economy when conducting everyday transactions online. With digital identity and a trust framework, transactions can be achieved efficiently and cost-effectively and with minimal necessary personal information. The Canadian and global economy will benefit from the removal of barriers and latency associated with traditional identity verification methods that slow commerce, delay money flow and hinder the economy. With a decentralized and standards-based identity solution, a new set of experiences will emerge that empowers users and organizations to have greater control over their data – all while delivering higher quality services with a higher degree of trust and security.

4. What role does Canada have to play as a leader in this space? 

In many ways, Canada is a leader in this space. In BC, the inception of the BC Services Card and its digital identity capability is a first step towards creating a trusted and verifiable Digital Identity and trusted identity-based economy.  The next step is decentralization and the creation of a standards-based trust fabric.  Quartech, with its involvement in the Verifiable Organization Network project and its implementation of Hyperledger Indy, helps place Canada in the leading edge of this trusted identity space. The next step is decentralization of our digital identity following a self-sovereign identity model for use not only for access to government services in person and online but access to services outside of government where verifiable, privately managed digital identity is an enabler.

5. What else should we know about Quartech? 

Quartech Systems is an award-winning technology and business consulting firm with offices in Vancouver and Victoria, BC.  Our clients are predominantly public sector, including crown corporations within BC.  One of our most relevant recent projects includes our development team working on Verifiable Organizations Network project, a self-sovereign identity blockchain identity project to manage verifiable claims for organizations.

Spotlight on iComply Investor Services

Meet iComply Investor Services 

1. What is iComply’s Mission?
iComply’s mission is to enable a global transition of wealth from traditional to decentralized assets without harm. We do this by providing risk intelligence, compliance data, and leveraging the unique features of decentralized technology in order to reduce the burden of compliance. Because of the way a blockchain functions, it can significantly lower the cost, the number of resources required, and time spent maintaining compliance and regulations in the financial industry.

2. Why is a trustworthy digital identity critical for existing and emerging markets?
In financial services, there are really only two things that matter – the transactions and the people behind them.
Blockchain can validate a lot of things – for example, whether double spending is occurring; however, blockchain is still only a data structure, meaning that you still need good data – garbage in means garbage out. We need to make sure that we are properly valuing and validating not only the assets being placed onto a blockchain but also the people who are publishing assets onto blockchains. This is extremely important. Digital identity can heavily transform the financial industry and if it’s done properly, we can enable both privacy and transparency in ways we can’t even imagine today.

3. How will digital identity transform the Canadian and global economy? How does iComply address challenges associated with this transformation?
The creation of a digital identity for the Canadian economy is going to be extremely beneficial. However, if we as Canadians deploy a solution that does not interoperate beyond borders it will be a terribly expensive, and likely futile, endeavour. Canada is very trusted on a global scale and there’s a lot of good technology coming out of Canada. I believe the digital identity and blockchain technologies being created here can be used to solve some of the major problems we face globally.

We focus on providing risk data and intelligence on both transactions and people. iComply is currently the world’s leading solution for risk and compliance in digital finance and crypto-assets. We provide new fintech ventures with access to the risk and compliance infrastructure that banks are currently investing billions into with a simple SaaS fee. This allows fintech innovators and forward-looking incumbents to gain significant competitive advantages in their target market verticals.

iComply’s compliance infrastructure leverages market-ready technologies such as blockchain, secure identity hashing, machine learning, data clustering and more. This enables even the most cautious CCOs or GCs to effectively mitigate their firm’s risks while participating in the burgeoning financial industry of asset tokenization.

4. What role does Canada have to play as a leader in the space?
Canada is doing some exciting things in both digital identity and blockchain. Our federal government now publishes every National Research Council grant to the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum itself is a Canadian born technology, we are leading the world in the move towards decentralized finance. iComply has worked closely with the Canadian government on initiatives to take this technology into overseas markets. Canada’s has an exceptional reputation in this industry and coupled with the resources and cost-effectiveness of our technology-resources, such as the cost of local, highly-skilled developers, positions us with a strong competitive advantage globally.

5. Why did iComply join DIACC?
iComply joined DIACC because we saw a need to enhance the development of standards and adoption of decentralized digital identity. There are lots of ideas and conversations on digital identity happening around the world right now but through organizations such as DIACC, we are able to focus on increasing adoption, specifically as a solution for enterprise markets. DIACC presents a unique opportunity to collaborate and cross-pollinate with other Canadian innovators that are focused on action and ready to implement live enterprise solutions that can be used by both startups and established financial institutions as well.

6. What else should we know about iComply?
iComply is really focused on using emerging technologies to provide compliance solutions, and as a young company, we have a strategic opportunity to not be bound by legacy or data silos. We are currently the world’s leading risk intelligence and compliance automation solution for cryptocurrencies, digital finance, and non-face-to-face transactions. We have a number of products on the market and available to both the market and regulatory agencies. Our primary focus as a company is to elevate the entire industry through enhanced transparency, trust, and integrity.

iComply is focused on expanding its partnerships and reaching across the aisle, into more traditional financial institutions, to demonstrate that using distributed ledger technology doesn’t make you a criminal – just because people have used cash for criminal activity in the past doesn’t mean every cash transaction is associated with crime. In order for fiduciaries and institutional money to enter crypto-asset markets they need tools to manage their risk – this is what we enable. There is a huge competitive advantage for traditional financial institutions entering this market provided they can manage their risk, compliance and protect the identity and assets of their stakeholders.

IEC Workshop Recap & Committee Update

Collaboration is at the core of DIACC’s mandate. DIACC members are working on three committees to strategically drive forward Canada’s digital economy.

The Innovation Expert Committee (IEC) was launched in February, 2018, and currently has 17 active members. Among its values are privacy, commercial visibility, cooperation, transparency and impartiality.

With the vision of a robust, privacy enhancing and commercially flourishing digital identity ecosystem for Canada, the Committee conducts its work along two concurrent tracks.

Track A focuses on defining and executing innovation initiatives while Track B focuses on how innovation initiatives need to be defined, prioritized and supported. In the IEC context, “innovation initiatives” are sets of efforts involving two DIACC members or more aiming to deliver a white paper, consultation and analysis report, case study, proof-of-concept, pilot or in-production solution which illustrates, explains or supports the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (“PCTF”).

The PCTF is a set of standards intended to support Canada’s full and secure participation in the global digital economy through secure and interoperable services, transactions, and digital activities.

“I joined the IEC because its focus is to drive adoption of the DIACC Pan-Canadian Trust Framework, said Patrick Cormier, Vice President Digital Transformation at Notarius and IEC Chair. “I find deep satisfaction in working with others to drive across the finish line innovative solutions, even more so when they are leveraging carefully thought out frameworks.”

“The IEC actively seeks to leverage the PCFT to solve real life and meaningful digital innovation challenges by delivering innovative solutions to digital identity challenges in a privacy-enhancing, collaborative and legally reliable framework approved by governments and private industry,” he said.

The IEC works to solve real life and meaningful digital innovation challenges 

On October 11, the IEC met for an all-day workshop which took place at the OneEleven building (325 Front Street West), in Toronto.   

The Committee agreed on how it will receive, evaluate and prioritize innovation proposals as well as innovation problem assessments. In the latter case, the Committee decided it was appropriate to receive not only solution-defined innovation proposals but also problem assessments. In these problem assessments, the members of the Committee are called upon to craft a Pan-Canadian Trust Framework compliant solution leveraging solution components that already exist. The Committee has also tentatively agreed on the structure of a DIACC Members Directory.

Those in attendance were more than pleased with the output from the workshop and found it to be extremely worthwhile and an overall great experience.

The committee wishes to thank IdentityNORTH Chair Aran Hamilton for setting up the meeting space.

DIACC is pleased to announce the new OEC leadership:

  • Chair: Eric Swedersky – Securekey / SVP Delivery and Public Sector
  • Vice Chair: Patrick Ullrich – Vivvo / Software Developer

Want to have a seat at the table? Sign up for one of our Expert Committees.