Can Competitors Collaborate On a Common Goal? webinar

In 2020, Digital Jersey and Mesh ID kicked off a collaboration initiative within Sandbox Jersey, which aimed to create a solution for a common problem faced by financial services providers in Jersey: performing repetitive client due diligence on common clients. This webinar was held on 28 July 2021.

The project brought together key players in the corporate, legal, fund and banking industry, with the aim to create a technology solution that will allow them to better share key information about clients they shared in common, in a secure and trusted way. Since these players are in various cases direct competitors, there are many forces at play that risk derailing the project.

It was not an entirely smooth ride, and the team at Mesh ID and Digital Jersey often learnt the hard way how not to approach collaboration across competing organisations. As they kicked off the project, they discovered a competing project led by the local government was running in parallel, they saw parties pull out at the last minute, and discovered some new information at the last minute that almost saw the initiative end before it started. Just to make things a litter tougher on the team, the project was launched in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit, meaning the team had to adjust to a fully remote setup in a very short time.

Despite all the interesting ups and downs, the team managed to deliver a working product by the end of the year, on time and within budget. Gui Vohringer presented the sequence of events in the project that led up to the launch, and illustrated some of the biggest areas where they failed along the way, and what they learnt from the whole experience. Next challenge? Adoption of the product with the launch clients - Gui briefly touched on how things are going in this regard.

Gui has very kindly allowed his presented material to be made available for viewing. The webinar recording on YouTube is now available in our APM resources area and also embedded below for reference.

Presenter:

Gui Vohringer is the co-founder of Mesh ID. Mesh ID creates verified corporate identities, helping corporations identify themselves with their financial services providers as easily as showing a passport at the airport. Gui has worked in the financial services industry for 15+ years in various technology and operations leadership roles at some of the world's largest asset management and professional services firms. Gui has one foot in the world of technology and the other on a strategic level, helping companies better understand their customers and design friction-less and fully digital financial services. Most recently, Gui has led a Jersey-based and regulator backed working group of leaders in the fund management, fund administration, banking and legal sectors in the creation of a blockchain-based 'know your customer' information sharing network to remove the duplication of client due diligence work involved in onboarding fund investors.