ATB Ventures Looks to Unlock the Value Potential in Digital Identity And Verification

In response to consumers’ growing concerns over the security and management of their personal data by businesses with which they interact, ATB Ventures on Thursday introduced its Oliu platform, a set of identity products aimed at helping businesses safely manage and verify the credentials of consumers they interact with digitally.

The digital-identity market is growing rapidly and is currently valued at $23.4 billion globally, according to ATB. In addition, countries implementing digital-identity technologies are poised to unlock economic value equivalent to 3%-13 % of gross domestic product by 2030, the company adds.

Oliu is a blockchain-based identity-management and financial-services provider that, it says, seeks to make it easier for businesses to digitally issue, manage, and verify customer credentials. Oliu’s decentralized design denies hackers a single point of attack, says ATB, a Canada-based company.

Businesses and regulators can issue, use, and verify digital credentials in what Oliu bills as a secure environment, including during the customer-onboarding process. In addition to what the company bills as built-in data privacy and security safeguards, Oliu says its technology gives consumers greater control and autonomy over their digital credentials. Personal data resides with the individual, not with a third-party granting access or tracking access.

This, Oliu says, enables businesses to become an issuer and verifier of consumers digital identities, while allowing consumers to maintain control over their data privacy. In this way, consumers can provide consent regarding which bits of information, or credentials, are shared with specific organizations.

Included with Oliu is Proof, a mobile digital-identity wallet consumers can use to manage, store, and share their credentials. Proof allows consumers to approve the verification request with full or selective disclosure of their personal data, according to Oliu.

“Over the past decade, reliance on digital commerce has grown dramatically. For organizations attempting to keep pace with their customers’ expectations of receiving their goods and services online, this increase in online activity has resulted in a substantial increase in fraud and cyber-attacks for companies to manage,” Nav Dhunay, head of technology for ATB Ventures, tells Digital Transactions News by email. ATB Ventures is the research and innovation arm of ATB Financial. “Oliu and Proof place the citizen as the sole authority to decide who, where, and what is used from their identity information,” Dhunay adds.