Identity verification company Sedicii has had a busy year since participating in Bank Innovation‘s DEMOvation Challenge in Seattle last March. The company tells us it won 10 awards for startups and privacy companies in 2014, and it was a finalists for many others.

The most recent award for the Waterford, Ireland-based company was a first-place finish among seven participating companies in the Ernst & Young Startup Competition, held at Level 39 in London in December:

The competition was run in a bid to find new technical products that should help EY clients to better respond to the data privacy issues surround the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), particularly focusing on the “right-to-be-forgotten”.

Under the “right-to-be-forgotten” laws, companies could be forced upon request to remove results for queries that include a person’s name, if the results shown are inadequate, no longer relevant, or excessive. EY believes this right will increase consumers’ awareness of their rights to their own data and will mean that businesses will need to consider issues around reputation management, consumer trust, compliance and operational efficiency.

Sedicii’s winning solution was built on its patented technology, the Zero Knowledge Proof Protocol, which eliminates the need to transmit, store or otherwise expose sensitive data during the identity verification process.

CEO Rob Leslie told Bank Innovation that the company developed three solutions in 2014 based on this technology:

• Sedicii “Unity” –  providing a unified, user-friendly and more cost-effective way of achieving secure two-factor authentication with just a smartphone
• Sedicii Contact Centre Authentication – providing automated and real time authentication of callers to/from a contact center, thus reducing agent call costs by up to 20%
• Sedicii KYC (Identity Verification) – providing real-time verification of identity with trusted third parties without exchanging or exposing the underlying user data

Leslie said the company is focusing on selling these three services in 2015, rather than necessarily launch new products.

Interested in applying for a spot in the DEMOvation 2015 Competition, the winners of which can demo for free at Bank Innovation 2015? Apply here.