Sixteen Leading Global Fintechs Join Spring Labs’ Founding Industry Program

Leading Small Business and Consumer Fintech Lenders Partner with Spring Labs to Leverage Blockchain to Enhance Id Verification Capabilities and Prevent Fraud

Spring Labs, which is developing the Spring Protocol, a network designed to transform how information and data are shared globally, announces that industry leaders at the intersection of finance and technology SoFi, OnDeck Capital, Avant, GreenSky, Funding Circle, BlueVine, Fundation, Upgrade, Fundbox, and Better Mortgage, among others, have joined the Spring Founding Industry Partners (SFIP) Program to help further combat fraud and enhance their ID verification capabilities, effectively lowering the cost and increasing the security of issuing financial products.  SFIP participants, in aggregate, have helped fund more than $100 billion in consumer or small business l**** since inception.  This announcement follows the recent news that Gary Cohn, former Director of the U.S. National Economic Council and former President and Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs, has joined Spring Labs as an advisor.

The Spring Founding Industry Partners (“SFIP”) Program is comprised of financial services institutions and data furnishers that have partnered with Spring Labs to collaborate on the research, development, and implementation of the Spring Protocol prior to its public launch.  Program participants are collectively focused on creating a secure and regulatorily compliant way to leverage data to solve pressing problems related to ID verification and fraud within their respective sectors.

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“As an ever-increasing amount of financial transactions move online, new types of mission-critical fraud and ID verification solutions based on information sharing must be developed,” stated Noah Breslow, CEO of OnDeck Capital.  “We believe the team at Spring Labs has the right background to galvanize industry leaders around the creation of a new and innovative network.”

The Spring Protocol differs from existing data exchange solutions in that it enables network participants to exchange information without sharing underlying data, effectively decoupling data ownership from data value.  This unprecedented approach to information sharing leverages advanced cryptography and blockchain technology.  The Spring Protocol mitigates the need for data aggregators and allows network participants to exchange information securely and anonymously in a peer-to-peer fashion.

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For financial institutions, the Spring Protocol is intended to reduce the risk of data breaches by eliminating the need for data replication.  The Protocol also should cut the cost of issuing financial products by reducing intermediation costs in data sourcing and by allowing institutions to gain access to new types of valuable data that were too competitively-sensitive to share through existing channels.

For consumers, the Spring Protocol should reduce the likelihood your data is compromised as part of a hack, by reducing the replication of data as part of standard ID verification and fraud mitigation processes, effectively improving transparency and security for consumers.  “Thin File” or “Credit Invisible” consumers might also benefit greatly from the Spring Protocol, as improved security means that broader array of institutions are willing to share identification data to build the profiles of underrepresented consumers in the global credit ecosystem.

“We are extremely excited about the initial partners and this is an incredible opportunity to expand the development of the Spring Network,” says John Sun, President and Chief Product Officer of Spring Labs. “We have plans to include other verticals in the near future, and look forward to announcing those partnerships in the coming months.”

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