“I feel the need – the need for speed,” Tom Cruise’s Maverick famously said in “Top Gun.” But while he was referring to piloting a supersonic F-14 Tomcat, he could have just as easily been talking about how important lightning-fast access to encrypted fraud data has become to financial institutions.
For Kevari and our customers, the need for speed has been critical to our ability to mitigate fraud. To meet that need, our patented Search Engine Encryption Kit (SEEK) technology is integrated into our fraud intelligence platform, combining government-grade security with a blazing-quick search experience. Analysts and investigators must have a way to quickly access millions of encrypted non-monetary records securely through the cloud, and that’s what SEEK does.
Because existing technology doesn’t allow for instantaneous access to the encrypted data, SEEK leverages field-level encryption. As a result, the SEEK technology facilitates all the features of full-text search but provides the flexibility of selecting which fields need encryption, and allows the user to index specific attributes. This protects organizations from human error and security lapses since the data encryption does not rely on manual labor or decision-making. As technology continues to evolve, the need for human intervention to implement security processes and policies will continue to decrease, further strengthening security.
Kevari initially developed the SEEK technology in 2012 as a response to a customer’s need for an innovative solution that delivered both speed and security. A financial services company needed a “Google-like” search experience for accessing sensitive encrypted data, but the available technology wasn’t available, so Kevari developed it. It’s now available to the thousands of banks and credit unions, as well as credit issuers, retailers, and healthcare companies that Kevari serves.
Kevari Chief Technology Officer Sudheer Prem invented SEEK (alongside former team member Matt Schraan) and has been leading the company’s initiative to continually improve the technology to respond to a changing landscape. He says while speed has always been an integral component in fraud detection and mitigation, as both technology and fraud schemes evolve, it’s becoming even more important.
“Kevari was able to design a solution that met a specific customer’s need for both security and efficiency,” Prem says. “And we quickly realized it provided a universal and critical benefit to all of our customers, especially as the speed of fraud has continued to increase.”
For something so fast, the patent process has been decidedly leisurely. The patent application process began in 2013, and we were awarded our original patent for SEEK technology in 2016. And recently we were awarded a continuation patent for the technology.
The proprietary technology has been a critical centerpiece of Kevari’s solutions. By combining a highly secure encryption package with the latest advancements in inverted indexing technologies, SEEK achieves the same functionality – and near-real-time speed – as the world’s best-known search engines, but uniquely enables a heightened level of data security.
I wonder what Maverick would think about that.
