Elliptic and LexisNexis team up for Bitcoin risk management
The key to Bitcoin security?
Blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic and LexisNexis Risk Solutions have partnered for the “first” use of “bank-grade” risk management for Bitcoin.
Elliptic has integrated LexisNexis’s anti-money laundering (AML) risk management data into its Bitcoin transaction monitoring and compliance products.
The two firms have built a proof-of-concept that uses financial intelligence data from LexisNexis and presents it alongside Elliptic’s proprietary risk scoring.
Thomas Brown, SVP of US commercial markets and global market development at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, says: “As a result, the virtual currency potential evolves to a new level – from possible conduit for money laundering to trusted technology along the economic value chain.”
The firms add: “While the underlying Bitcoin technology, blockchain, has gone mainstream, the financial services industry is still hesitant to embrace the full promise of Bitcoin and confidently provide banking relationships to Bitcoin companies. The lack of financial transparency on Bitcoin entities continues to stymie the ubiquitous adoption of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies.”
LexisNexis Risk Solutions is used by over 100 of the “top banks in the world”, and works with 80% of federal agencies in the US and has “very close ties” with the British Bankers Association (BBA) in the UK.
The firms say this alliance will “allow banks to know exactly what the entity behind a Bitcoin transaction has done in the past, whether they’ve been convicted of drug trafficking, are on a sanctions watch-list or have funded terrorism”.
Thieves like us
The timing of the launch is interesting, as today (3 August) $72 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen from the Bitfinex exchange platform in Hong Kong.
Nearly 120,000 units have been pilfered making it the second-biggest security breach ever of such an exchange.
