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London

Member since

2013

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Valido Ecospend

Julian Wilson

Director Open Banking and Consumer Innovation at FreedomPay

Message Posts: 0 Comments: 5

Bio Throughout my career I have had the privilege of working with many bright people at some lovely companies. Much of this focus has been as a 'product guy' turning ideas into products and services: describing the vision, raising the money and assembling the team. Then working with engineers on how to build and the commercial teams on how to sell them. Today I am building a zero knowledge proof based, self sovereign data assertion and verification service: enabling people to assert or prove anything which could be evidenced from a Bank statement without revealing their identity. This approach makes it much easier, technically and legally, for a business to access this information. Career History Apple. AT&T Unisource, Barclays and two Internet software start ups.

Julian is Commenting on

Why Bitcoin And Governments Will Always Be At War

Perhaps the 'True Cause' of Bitcoin's resurgence is a [probably] sensible reaction to the global response to COVID. People are concerned that the actions being taken by governments to 'print money and allow thousands of businesses to fail, will result in the wholesale devaluation of shares and currencies?

19 Apr 2021 Reply Read article

Barclays to shut down Pingit on 30 June

I worked at Barclays during the time when Pingit was launched and up to and beyond the point when Open Banking was introduced. These opinions are personal and are not necessarily representative of the Barclays position or motivations. Pingit effected bank to bank transfers using a mobile phone number as a proxy for a sort code and bank account number. Underpinniing this 'feature' was a bank to bank transfer via Vocalink's Faster Payments network. This is the same process Open Banking payments follow today. Like all payment services / instruments in order to work commercially they need critical mass of both buyers and sellers [points of acceptance]. My guess would be that Barclays could justify this decision for several reasons: its mobile banking platform and Bpay provide similar functionality, the proliferation of Open Banking services and the scope of companies driving adoption [distributes the cost of creating acceptance], or maybe the possible lack of differentiation. The future? Open Banking and Open Finance in combination with the capabilities of the crypto building blocks [in particular verifable credentials] will, in my opinion, introduce a new level of efficiencies for payment networks or Bank to Bank transfers. In fact I'd like to predict that one day people will say, of Open Banking, its key contribution was to 'simplify the payments value chain'. Enabling banks to do what they did hundreds of years ago: put people in control of asserting something they own or have proven. Issue 'transferable bearer instruments' enabling instant atomic transactions [all aspects of the ledger are updated instantly or nothing happens at all] without the need for third party intervention/involvement. Yes, this is how crypto currencies work today: and my suggestion describes a fiat pegged transfer, using modifications to the protocols to manage permissions and ownership and the maintenance of systems of record [perhaps the biggest cost saving for Banks]. Ooops, I have broken my rule to not use the conditional subjuntive [could have, should have would have]...

13 Apr 2021 Reply Read article

FCA to define new rules about data ethics in evolution of Open Banking

I also agree with Andrew Smith when he suggests that to meet the goals of Open Finance, we need to 'kill off the concept of direct APIs.' For hundreds of years one of the pillars of trust between a bank and its clients has been/continues to be that only the bank and its clients can see the transaction history. An Open Banking data API threatens to break this trust. It places a huge burdeen of responsibility on the business acting as data controller for such sensitive data, and requires a leap of faith for the consumer. To solve this problem at Ecospend, we have built a mechanism for individuals to assert anything which can be evidenced from a Bank Statement, without revelaing any personally identifiable information. In technical terms this is a zero Knowledge Proof based self sovereign data assertion and verification service. It obviates the need for APIs for the business and mitigates most of the GDPR obligations for the relying party [business]. Whereas this is still early days, we are ready to participate in trials with Banks or Large corporations who would like to run some tests.

30 Mar 2021 Reply Read article

US shift to EMV gathers momentum

...by the end of 2017.?' Might there not be alternative means of maintaining systems of record and/or counter party ledgers by this time?

04 May 2015 Reply Read article