Following the Supreme Court judgment that no entity should store Aadhaar numbers directly, start-up firm Syntizen introduced a technology product that helps businesses and governments mask customers’ data.
Funded by Mastercard International and ACPL, Syntizen’s machine learning tool ‘Edo’ performs Aadhaar number masking to ensure compliance.
The company’s USP is that it identifies Aadhaar numbers in any format, be it an image, pdf, excel sheet, etc. There are two forms of data in which masking can be done: legacy data, or data existing in the system, and new incoming data.
“Our solution helps an organisation to mask legacy data via a tool that scans the entire system, identifies potential Aadhaar numbers, mask them and replace the masked file with the old one, making the organisation fully compliant,” said the firm’s co-founder Siddharth Kukatlapalli.
The company has already conducted pilot programmes and is currently in discussions with state governments for the commercial rollout of Edo. The engine has a capacity to mask about 5 million Aadhaar numbers in an hour and has been given to over 10 B2B customers.
Within a short span of its launch, Edo garnered traction and is witnessing bulk transactions daily. “There’s tremendous potential with regards to the product and since we have developed a machine learning tool, we can train the product to identify and mask any sensitive data other than the Aadhaar number, hence, making it a globally market-ready product,” he said.
Started in 2014, Syntizen provides digital identity solutions to businesses and government entities to identify citizens digitally before providing a service or subsidy. The firm’s two key products include one for the private sector and another for the government.
It has launched Electronic Onboarding for the private sector, which allows firms to onboard customers based on Aadhaar-based e-KYC and e-Sign services. Besides, it also offers Subsidy Management System to help government clients ensure that subsidies reach beneficiaries, after a valid Aadhaar-based biometric authentication.