Trace support The Global Open Finance CoE in 'doing data right'

Trace provide strategic privacy services to The Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence, at a critical time for the ‘start up’.

"The Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence (GOFCoE) seeks to harness financial data to empower citizens, organisations and governments for social, societal and economic benefit. Data privacy, ethics and developing public trust in our research is very important to us. As a new initiative with a growing pipeline of projects, we are fortunate to build on extensive experience at the University (of Edinburgh) in hosting sensitive data for research, such as health data. We’ve been delighted to work with Sorcha at Trace Data who enabled us to put Privacy by Design principles into practice quickly and effectively. This has enabled us to accelerate progress against our mission whilst putting the right process and policy foundations in place, including building the right culture within our start-up team. The University has a strong ethos of working with industry including our local SMEs. Our work with Trace Data is a really great example of how the University can work with SMEs in a way that delivers mutual value beyond just a simple supplier relationship.”

Kevin Collins; Interim CEO, GOFCoE

The Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence (GOFCoE) are on a mission ‘To safely unlock the potential of customer data as a force to improve lives’. GOFCoE will research and develop a suite of financial services offerings aimed at delivering citizen-focused social and economic benefits by unlocking financial data for good. Funded by UK Research and Innovation with a recent award of £22.5 million to catalyse its mission, GOFCoE has been championed by the University of Edinburgh, FinTech Scotland, the Financial Data and Technology Association (FDATA), the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise.

In April 2020 GOFCoE appointed Trace to provide Data Governance and Privacy expert services, with Sorcha Lorimer as their lead in this area. Sorcha’s remit as interim Chief Privacy & Risk Officer is crucial to GOFCoE and Data Driven Innovation (DDI) wider initiative who’s core principle is ‘doing data right’, which means using data as a force for global good, whilst always respecting user privacy, compliance and data ethics.

The appointment of Trace came at a crucial time for GOFCoE, as one of its key projects, the Global Economic Observatory, which is a longitudinal study of how humankind earns, spends and saves, through the lens of both consumers and businesses. These insights are critical to the development of public policy, particularly in an economic crisis such as the one that has followed the COVID-19 health pandemic.

The pandemic has only heightened the need to tap into the power of innovation and insights, and for ethical data sharing, to inform data-driven public policy design. Sorcha Lorimer is working closely with the legal and the data science teams to champion an ethos of Privacy by design and deliver data governance leadership on an ongoing basis.

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