A pilot program launched Wednesday aims to soothe a particular headache in bank-fintech partnerships: repeated customer verification.
Solo, a consumer reporting agency, has demonstrated a data sharing model – in coordination with the Treasury Department, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. – that allows banks and fintechs to reuse customer verification work that their partners have performed using a specific compliance standard.
The process has the potential to reduce the risk that banks will face enforcement actions over customer vetting by their fintech partners that regulators, at times, have argued is too lax to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act or know-your-customer criteria.
"Every day, banks and fintechs rely on each other's work, but there has never been a consistent way to represent that work, audit it, or evaluate it across institutions," Georgina Merhom, Solo’s founder and CEO, said in a statement Wednesday. "Consumers repeatedly start from zero – not because verification hasn't already been performed, but because there has never been a common trust framework.”
Merhom likens Solo’s model to airline passengers’ “pre-check” status – or to kidney donation.
"A bank submits its own [customer information program] policy and required verification steps to the network,” Merhom told American Banker. “The network identifies regulated institutions that have already completed equivalent or stronger verification on the same customer. If a match exists, the requesting bank receives a network-audited record of that work.”
Solo has created know-your-customer and know-your-business certificates for institutions to complete. Then the institution must confirm with Solo which steps it took to verify identities. Solo will audit the institution’s process and verify what it’s attesting. Once that’s complete, Solo will issue a reusable certificate for partner institutions in the network.
"You don't have to trust another institution's judgment," Merhom said. "We map their work against your policy, filter out anything that doesn't qualify, independently audit that what they attest to doing is what they actually did, and make sure the supporting artifacts are available so you can demonstrate compliance during an examination."
Solo last year debuted a service – modeled after the Zelle payment network – that allows banks to share customer data with each other, while avoiding third-party data aggregators like Plaid.
The hope is that institutions avoid losing customer business amid the process of repeated verification.
Solo has backing from at least one former regulator: Former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Acting Director Mick Mulvaney has served as an adviser to the company since October 2025.
