Synechron and LeapYear Technologies partner to accelerate the use of ‘differential privacy’ solutions

By Edlyn Cardoza

Synechron Inc., a leading digital transformation consulting firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry, recently announced its partnership with LeapYear Technologies to accelerate the use of ‘differential privacy’ solutions that Synechron can provide to its top tier banks, asset management firms, insurance companies, and stock exchange clients. LeapYear provides solutions to unlock commercial value from the large-scale collection and use of data, all in a mathematically proven, scalable, rigorous, and anonymized way.

Synechron and LeapYear have been working together since last year to elevate LeapYear’s best-in-class solutions and validate the outcomes and benefits through the co-development of a Proof of Concept. Moving forward, Synechron and LeapYear will enable financial services firms to unlock extraordinary value from their collected data with ironclad protection of the source. Synechron brings deep financial services industry domain knowledge and a complete understanding of the prework and engineering that must be done to properly implement differential privacy solutions. LeapYear continues to develop tools that enable financial services firms to optimally use data to protect the identity of the source.

Sandeep Kumar, Managing Director, Innovations at Synechron, said, “LeapYear has advanced a new generation of technology that can be tapped for privacy preserving data access and use. This allows firms to monetize the vast amounts of data they collect. These datasets are often siloed within different lines of business across a financial services company for regulatory and confidentiality reasons. But, with a solution like LeapYear, this data can be collectively leveraged to derive analytics and valuable insights, while still keeping individuals, clients and institutions private. That data, after application of these powerful solutions, can be shared with external partners without worrying about exposing client information.” He continued, “We are excited to be working with best-in-class technology firm LeapYear as we help our clients tackle their goals to generate more business value from data while respecting privacy and confidentiality requirements.”

Anantha Sharma, Synechron’s Director – Innovations & Data Science, London, UK, said, “By applying sophisticated use-case specific techniques through differential privacy, data can now be shared in a safe way. Businesses can infer certain characteristics that can be used commercially, all without any data leakage. This can be applied to real-world situations, such as in developing flow data products, creating credit risk models to predict loan losses, for use with FICO scores and for credit card issuance, among other situations.”

Synechron has been working to prepare its technical teams and FinLabs experts across the globe on the use and deployment of LeapYear’s solutions and will make this available to its financial services clients across North America, Europe and Asia. Moving forward, Synechron and LeapYear will be working to develop other use cases and solutions that will provide additional tangible benefits to companies.    

Ishaan Nerurkar, CEO of LeapYear Technologies, said, “LeapYear’s solutions are becoming the defacto way for capital markets teams to fully leverage their data. Our solutions allow enterprises to break down silos, form data partnerships, and maximize the commercial impact of their franchise data.” He added, “We are excited to be working with Synechron to help its financial services clients within this highly regulated industry generate maximum commercial value from their data without concern for compromising client privacy.”