Demoing at Bank Innovation Israel, Polycoin debuted their new Blockchain based compliance solution. The product expands Polycoin’s offerings from what had previously been limited to bitcoin payment processing products. Launched in 2014, Polycoin had come to market with a bitcoin transaction solution for online businesses such as brokers and gaming firms to both accept Payments and issue withdrawals in bitcoins.
With their new solution, Polycoin is entering what has become an active market this year of startups creating products that leverage the distributed ledger of the blockchain. As a public ledger, blockchain technology is viewed as a powerful accounting platform that could become a potential replacement for firms to handle items such as reconciliation, distribution of shared data and identifying ownership of securities.
Demoing their product, Polycoin CEO Alfred Shaffir showed how their solution can help compliance officers with items such as verifying financial transactions to assist with handling anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) requirements. During the demo, Shaffir stated that “everyone is talking about distributed ledgers” and many banks are investing in the technology, but “it is not so easy to implement since you can have anonymous users”.
To create a solution that balances compliance requirements but deals with the relative anonymity of transactions, Polycoin’s platform analyzes transactions to try and identify who they are from. Transactions are then ranked. Upon a transaction being deemed suspicious, the product sends compliance officers an alert to further investigate problems like AML breaches.
Currently participating in the Citi Innovation accelerator in Israel, Polycoin will shortly be joining a similar program operated by Nordea Bank in Helsinki, Finland. According to Shaffir, with their new solution, Polycoin has been able to draw interest from banks who are analyzing methods to integrate blockchain technology within their company in the future.
