Finicity Joins the Sovrin Foundation as a Founding Steward

As a Sovrin Steward, Finicity will promote the adoption of self-sovereign identity technology

SALT LAKE CITY — April 11, 2018 — Finicity, a leading financial data aggregator, has today been announced as a founding Steward with the Sovrin Foundation, a private-sector, international non-profit whose mission is to promote self-sovereign identity online. Stewards are tasked with the operation and maintenance of the foundation’s decentralized digital identity platform.

As a Steward, Finicity will actively contribute intellectual and infrastructure resources to the Sovrin Network, while working with other Sovrin Stewards to accelerate the mission of the organization by promoting the adoption of self-sovereign identity (SSI) technologies. At its core, this network uses a purpose-built distributed ledger — commonly referred to as a blockchain — to enable the secure exchange of cryptographically signed credentials possessed by individuals, organizations and connected devices, thereby providing the internet with the true identity layer long absent in its original architecture.

“There has been no digital equivalent of a passport, driver’s license, birth certificate or other identity document that the owner exclusively possesses and uses to verify their rights and privileges in the online world,” said Nick Thomas, president and co-founder of Finicity. “Instead, we have dozens of user names and passwords across a multitude of vulnerable databases. Supporting Sovrin’s efforts to solve this, and other identity issues, will bring about a tectonic shift in our digital lives as consumers are put back in control of their identities and data.”

Finicity is one of more than 25 Stewards — organizations spanning the globe and representing a diverse cross-section of industries — charged with ensuring that the network is available, public, secure and independent of outside control.

“As a leading consumer-permissioned financial services data platform, Finicity brings a unique perspective and exciting new use case to the Sovrin Network, since identity and data protection are at the core of their business,” said Dr. Phillip Windley, chairman of the Sovrin Foundation. “Our organizations share a common goal of empowering and protecting consumers through decentralized identity and data management and more trusting interactions.”

Sovrin Stewards are governed by the Sovrin Foundation’s constitutional Trust Framework, within which the ‘diffused trust model’ seeks to prevent undue influence over the network from any single source. Other Sovrin Stewards include IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Brigham Young University and the law firms of BakerHostetler and Perkins Coie.

“We are committed to helping individuals and organizations maintain true control of their data, while empowering them to readily use it to their benefit across a variety of applications and services,” said Steve Smith, CEO and co-founder of Finicity. “But control of data starts with control of identity. We are excited to be working within the Sovrin ecosystem and its wide ranging group of Stewards that share such a powerful vision of giving control back to the individual.”

To learn more about Finicity, visit www.finicity.com. To learn more about the Sovrin Foundation, visit sovrin.org.

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About Finicity:

Finicity enables a financial data-sharing ecosystem that is secure, inclusive and innovative. Through its real-time financial data aggregation and insights platform, Finicity provides solutions for financial management, payments and credit decisioning. It is also leading the development and promotion of industry standards. The company has developed more than 16,000 bank integrations, with the vast majority through connections that provide access to formatted bank data, improving information access and accuracy. Finicity is the winner of API World’s 2016 Finance API of the Year.

About the Sovrin Foundation:

The international, non-profit Sovrin Foundation is governed by a constitutional Trust Framework that ensures its independence from government or industry influence and codifies its dedication to providing self-sovereign digital identity for all. The Sovrin network is operated by independent stewards and uses the power of a hybrid distributed ledger as a fast, private and secure framework for providing every person, organization, and connected device a permanent identity with which to transact online and operate securely in everyday life. Learn more about the Trust Framework underlying the Sovrin network here.