Why I Went From Payments Company Exec to Employee #43 at Skyflow

I just joined Skyflow to help fintech companies ship faster while protecting customer’s sensitive data.

Fintech Companies are Rewriting the Rules of the Financial Services Industry

Over the last decade, we have seen tremendous strides in the level of financial services innovation as banking and payment networks open up and cloud-native services enable companies to build faster with less overhead. This has enabled innovators to rapidly deploy new financial services that drive rapid customer adoption of new business models. These new services and models are revolutionizing the way that consumers and businesses make financial decisions — consumers have new ways to purchase goods, buy houses, invest in assets, and move money. Businesses now have access to new forms of non-dilutive capital, new ways to price risk, and new ways to reduce fraud.

Ship Faster but Don’t Break Things, Especially Privacy

While this new open ecosystem has given consumers and businesses more ways to bank, pay, and transact, it has also increased the complexity of data protection and usage. Data privacy and security regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PCI are only the first step in ensuring that businesses are protecting customer data accordingly. Innovators have an obligation to securely maintain and mindfully utilize sensitive customer data in a trusted framework to check credit, run KYC, process a payment, move money, and ultimately service their customers. In my last role as Chief Commercial Officer at RS2, I saw firsthand that many of the engineering teams at ISVs becoming PayFacs were spending inordinate amounts of time focused on data protection instead of driving fast innovation and new business models.

Skyflow has created a better way to utilize sensitive data without compromising on security and privacy through an isolate, protect, and harness approach.

Skyflow Data Privacy Vault does three things:

• Isolates sensitive data in a secure data vault and centralizes all access to that data through a zero trust architecture and framework — the same model that Apple, Netflix, Google have embraced
• Protects sensitive data by utilizing polymorphic encryption while at rest, in transit, and on the wire. A native data governance framework centralizes access to the sensitive data and allows users to create granular, multi-dimensional access policies that define the structure and shape of the data that users and services have access to
• Governs sensitive data through full workflow and SQL analytical capabilities while the data is fully encrypted. The privacy vault’s polymorphic encryption also uses many different encryption and de-identification algorithms that differentially redact the data, allowing different users and services to access different forms of the same data through a single API. This enables fintech companies to share data securely, for example, to run credit and KYC checks, through a tightly controlled policy

There is no other product like Skyflow Data Privacy Vault that has the ability to protect the data while still allowing full use for processing workflows and analytics. This game changing solution has been developed over the last two years by an amazing team and led by two experienced co-founders, Anshu and Prakash, who have the proven ability to capture the opportunity.  

So when they asked me to join Skyflow as employee #43, I was reminded of the advice Eric Schmidt once gave Sheryl Sandberg:

"If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

I am very excited to be part of the Skyflow team and look forward to helping drive fintech innovation while protecting customer’s sensitive data. Let’s see where this rocket ship takes us.