Partnerships are at the core of promoting OAX Foundation’s vision of an open, transparent, decentralized digital asset industry ruled by strong governance. (Photo credit: Shutterstock)

At OAX Foundation, our mission is to promote the mainstream adoption of digital assets and the last few weeks have seen us make some important moves towards achieving this goal. These have all revolved around our belief that a sustainable industry needs to be underpinned by strong governance, and have involved us partnering with some of the biggest and most innovative companies in financial services today.

World class Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) standards are critical to ensuring the safety of any digital asset trading network. They’re equally important for the wider industry to help make it an accepted part of the financial system. Trust and confidence are essential for any organization to succeed, and this is particularly the case in our industry. That’s why we’re now working with two leading firms in these areas to help promote the highest standards in compliance.

The first of these is Refinitiv, formerly the Financial & Risk business of Thomson Reuters. Refinitiv is one of the largest financial technology providers in the world, and has a distinguished track record in helping fight financial crime with some of the most widely used technology in the sector. It’s a leader in offering KYC and AML screening, helping thousands of customers around the world know with confidence who they are doing business with.

Complementing this relationship is our partnership with KYC-Chain. We issued a press release last week announcing that we’d be working with them on cross-promotion activities. KYC-Chain was founded to help individuals control and manage their digital identity securely, while allowing financial institutions to manage consumer data in an efficient and secure manner. It’s already got an impressive track record, having partnered with Standard Chartered to build and test KYC concepts for the bank, as well as having been a finalist in the 2016 Fintech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific.

As well as the need for compliance controls, one of the main barriers to mass adoption of digital assets is the high levels of market manipulation that occur across the industry. Effective trade surveillance tools are vital to combating this, and so earlier in the month we announced a partnership with Solidus Labs.

Founded by former Goldman Sachs FinTech engineers, Solidus Labs has developed a market surveillance system specifically for the crypto industry, taking into account the unique operational and regulatory challenges of this market. As partners, we’ll be working together to promote effective market oversight and governance as drivers of the future success of the industry.

We’ve chosen to partner with all these firms because they share our vision of a digital asset industry based on principles of openness, transparency, decentralization and strong governance. It’s only by demonstrating a commitment to these principles that the industry will come into the mainstream. Our work at OAX Foundation is focused on making this vision a reality.

About Solidus Labs Incorporated
Founded by former Goldman Sachs FinTech engineers, Solidus Labs’ mission is to bridge traditional finance and the new digital economy through compliance infrastructure tailored for digital assets. The company envisions a healthy digital asset ecosystem where innovators and regulators work together to benefit consumers, markets, economies and societies. Solidus Labs’ machine learning-powered market surveillance platform was designed uniquely for digital assets and is currently deployed with diverse clients including exchanges, broker-dealers, hedge funds and market makers in Europe, the United States and Israel.

About Refinitiv
Refinitiv is one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, serving over 40,000 institutions in over 190 countries. It provides leading data and insights, trading platforms, and open data and technology platforms that connect a thriving global financial markets community — driving performance in trading, investment, wealth management, regulatory compliance, market data management, enterprise risk and fighting financial crime.

About KYC-Chain
KYC-Chain provides state of the art compliance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Since 2014, the leading Compliance Software has helped process over 500,000 KYC applications in a cost-effective and scalable way.