A few weeks after the official opening of Milano Hub, the Bank of Italy's innovation center, here are the first two projects with which the CeTIF- Research Center in Technologies, Innovation and Financial Services of the University Cattolica of Milan is ready to contribute.
The first initiative, currently being piloted, is the one called O-KYC (an acronym that stands for: Onboarding - Know Your Customer), which aims to simplify, streamline and reduce, through DLT/Blockchain technology, the time and cost of the onboarding process by enabling citizen/user control of personal data.
In practice, through an infrastructure based on blockchain technology, it will be possible to certify and update (subject to their consent, of course) the data of customers who, for example, have multiple current accounts, phone cards, multiple debit cards and utilities. With advantages for customers in terms of simplified processes and data processing by banks, P.A., utilities, telcos. A kind of single "registry", updated in real time.
The second project of CeTIF, which is being studied with the Bank of Italy's Milano Hub, concerns digital surety bonds and aims to significantly reduce the phenomenon of fraud by dematerializing surety documents and providing certified information to all players in the supply chain.
"Sureties are necessary in tenders issued by the public administration, but in addition to the problem of fraud, estimated at 4 billion in the last four years, there is also an issue of lengthy disbursement processes, which can' be as long as three months," explains Professor Federico Rajola, director of CeTIF.
Also in this, case the testing of the technology blockchain, conducted with leading technology partners, has been successful and is ready to be industrialized. "The collaboration between CeTIF and Bankitalia, as well as with Ivass, is long-standing," Rajola explains. The new theme in recent years concerns the speed imparted by innovation and the need for the authorities to ensure system stability and consumer protection, as well as to adapt regulations in real time. In this context, the collaboration with the Bank of Italy's Milan Hub is important because CeTIF has always been an outpost of Applied Research for innovation in financial ecosystems and will therefore be able to bring an important contribution in terms of knowledge sharing and cooperation, aimed at the implementation of concrete and systemic projects."
CeTIF - which has been conducting studies and promoting research on the dynamics of strategic and organizational change in the financial, banking and insurance sectors since 1990-has among its institutional partners the Bank of Italy, IVASS, ABI, ANBP, ANIA, AIPB and CONSOB. With Ivass, for example, it conducted a trial (already approved and turned into an operational project) for the use of blockchain technology in smaller insurance policies (travel coverage, reservations).
The CeTIF team in charge of all the concretization activities of the initiatives born within the framework of the research is that of CeTIF Advisory led by managing director Imanuel Baharier, who has been working in the world of data science and technology applied to customer engagement in the fintech field for more than two decades.