First joint regulatory effort to operationalize bank reliance at scale, enabling trusted customer verification to become reusable across financial institutions

NEW YORK: The SOLO Network today announced a FinCEN-observed bank reliance pilot in coordination with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), demonstrating the first scalable framework for making trusted customer verification reusable across financial institutions.

For decades, financial institutions have repeatedly verified the same consumers and businesses – not because the work had not already been performed, but because institutions lacked a common way to independently evaluate verification completed elsewhere, had little incentive to share trusted work, and needed consistent, auditable evidence to satisfy regulatory obligations. The industry's challenge has never been a lack of verification. It has been a lack of interoperability between trusted verification performed by different institutions.

The SOLO Network does not require institutions to standardize how they perform verification. Instead, it standardizes how completed verification is represented, evidenced, audited, and independently evaluated. Participating institutions generate standardized, auditable verification artifacts documenting the work performed, evidence reviewed, and standards applied, enabling trusted verification to become reusable across the network while allowing every receiving institution to independently determine whether it satisfies its own compliance and risk requirements.

In coordination with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, FinCEN, OCC, and the FDIC, the pilot demonstrates that trusted verification can move across institutions without forcing consumers to start over, marking the first coordinated engagement across all four agencies to operationalize bank reliance at scale.

The SOLO Network is a scalable model for customer data sharing and reusable verification across banks and fintechs that incentivizes institutions to collaborate around shared, auditable verification artifacts rather than duplicate work. Similar to TSA PreCheck, the SOLO Network enables trusted verification to travel with consumers instead of forcing them to restart every time they open a new financial relationship. Each institution continues making independent compliance decisions but no longer needs to recreate verification work that has already been performed to an acceptable standard.

"Every day, banks and fintechs rely on each other's work, but there has never been a consistent way to represent that work, audit it, or evaluate it across institutions," said Georgina Merhom, CEO and Founder of SOLO. "The financial industry doesn't need one company to verify everyone. It needs any trusted institution to be able to issue a reusable verification that another institution can independently evaluate. Consumers repeatedly start from zero – not because verification hasn't already been performed, but because there has never been a common trust framework. SOLO makes trusted verification portable without requiring institutions to standardize how they operate."

Within a year of its founding, the SOLO Network has onboarded leading sponsor banks and their fintechs, members representing more than 100 million consumer and small business profiles. As a consumer reporting agency, SOLO has built transparency, consumer protection, and auditability into the foundation of the network, helping bridge collaboration between the private and public sectors.

Historically, customer verification has been repeated across the financial system for three reasons: there was no common way to represent completed verification, little economic incentive for institutions to share work already performed, and no operational framework for evidencing reliance consistently across organizations. While bank reliance has long existed in regulation and sponsor banking operations, implementing it consistently across institutions has remained operationally impractical. The SOLO Network provides the infrastructure that makes independently performed verification interoperable through standardized, auditable artifacts while preserving each institution's compliance responsibilities.

Under the SOLO Network model, institutions do not need to perform verification the same way to benefit from work already completed. Instead, they independently evaluate standardized verification artifacts documenting the evidence reviewed, work performed, and standards applied, allowing trusted verification to become portable without requiring institutions to standardize their processes.

For consumers and businesses, the SOLO Network replaces repeated verification with reusable trust. Rather than restarting identity and compliance processes every time they interact with a new financial institution, customers can authorize participating institutions to evaluate trusted verification that has already been performed. Much like TSA PreCheck allows travelers to move through different airports without repeating the same screening process, the SOLO Network allows trusted verification to move across financial institutions while preserving each institution's independent compliance decisions.

For more information contact team@solo.one

About SOLO
SOLO is a customer data sharing network and consumer reporting agency that rewards banks and fintechs for collaboratively maintaining a single shared customer record. SOLO’s model incentivizes compliant, governed data reuse of data and bank-attested verifications made reusable through a bank reliance framework. Fintechs and banks leverage their credentialed data and verifications to fulfill compliance steps across a full customer lifecycle, from identity verifications to fraud screening, financial assessment, and ongoing servicing. Learn more at solo.one.

Fonte: Business Wire