What is Kiva Protocol?

A modular, extensible, standards-based authentication platform for connecting government identity systems with financial services and payments infrastructure.

Built around a digital wallet, Kiva Protocol allows individuals to easily share their ID and other information with organizations in a privacy-preserving way.

Read The White Paper

How it works

Individuals store their ID credentials and other records in digital wallets, where they can control who can access the information

Step 01

A government agency issues an ID to the individual’s digital wallet

Step 02

The individual shares that ID credential with a bank

Step 03

The bank authenticates the individual, and opens an account

Step 04

The individual can also store her financial records in the wallet

Solutions

Secure and compliant onboarding

eKYC

The eKYC solution is designed to support digital customer onboarding at financial institutions. It provides a secure, high level-of-assurance method of conducting digital KYC (know your customer) and other customer due diligence processes. Individuals benefit from a streamlined account opening that requires no paperwork and can be processed in minutes instead of days or weeks. Financial institutions dramatically lower operational costs by eliminating the manual review and recording of physical documents, while simultaneously improving compliance and their risk profile.

Financial histories

The Kiva Protocol digital wallet can also hold verifiable records of financial transactions, enabling the individual to demonstrate her financial history to FSPs, employers, and other organizations. Each transaction (e.g., loan repayment) is sequentially recorded into the wallet as a credential, where three-way cryptographic signatures offer proof that the transaction history is complete (no missing entries). Like all credentials stored in the wallet, these transaction histories are portable with the individual, allowing her to access and share them at any point in the future.

Portable, user-controlled financial records

Social benefits payments

G2P payments

Social protection and benefit programs have become critical infrastructure in the Covid era. These programs are often challenged with incomplete beneficiary targeting, lack of payment verification, and high service delivery cost. Kiva Protocol enables payment issuers to accurately verify recipient eligibility and securely issue payments through a variety of payment channels, including bank transfer, mobile money, and even voucher-based redemption. This allows fast, cheap, and secure payments to reach beneficiaries, and also provides the foundation for hyper-targeted programs to reach beneficiaries who are currently not receiving their intended payments.

About

The challenge

Drawing from Kiva’s 15 years of experience facilitating micro-loans across more than 70 countries worldwide, we have a deep understanding of the systemic and structural barriers to financial inclusion.

Our global partner network of financial service providers do their best to work with underserved and marginalized communities who are shut out of the formal sector, but analog systems and manual processes make operational costs and compliance risks critical barriers to scaling up services.

Government stakeholders and other development actors driving financial inclusion agendas recognize the need for modern digital services to increase inclusion, but are wary of massive, one-size-fits-most technology projects that may leave them dependent on proprietary systems and locked into a single vendor.

Our approach

As a nonprofit, mission-driven organization that is accustomed to operating at scale, we are building open-source infrastructure that can meet the needs of governments and financial service providers while also encoding individual privacy and data protection into the system from the start.

Kiva Protocol’s modular approach extends existing systems with modern digital capabilities, enabling high level-of-assurance identification services, financial history reporting, and G2P payments processing in flexible packages that integrate easily with legacy systems. We are committed advocates for open-source software and open standards, and are active contributors to multiple Hyperledger projects as well as W3C standards efforts. And we firmly believe that no one organization can or should try to define the vision of how we meet the quickly evolving needs of a post-Covid world as we make progress toward the SDGs.

Kiva Protocol is a proud member of ID2020, a recipient of the World Bank’s Mission Billion Challenge, and registered by the Digital Public Goods Association.

Press

YOUTUBE

What is Kiva Protocol? Two of the major barriers to accessing financial services are a lack of formal identification and a lack of verifiable credit history.