PwC Tests Blockchain System That Will Verify Employee Credentials

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the “big four” auditors of the world, has recently decided to conduct a trial of its newly created blockchain platform, which was created in order to verify the truth and integrity of employee credentials with the help of the distributed ledger technology.

The trial will be made in a partnership with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and it was announced yesterday, February 28. Called Smart Credentials, the new system was originally unveiled on February 13, when it was shown to the world for the first time.

Smart Credentials will be used in order to store and share certificates in a secure way. This way, one could verify its credentials with the blockchain technology. The trial will see the employees of the company issuing their own blockchain-based certificates.

PwC believes that the decentralized nature of the blockchain and how tamper-proof if it can be important aspects in order to finish off fraud. This way, it can reduce the costs of screening applicants for jobs and simplify the whole process, as it will be an alternative to paper-based credentials, which can be easy to lose and very costly to replace in case something happens to them.

Another important part of the plan is to make no special requirements from the certificate issuers as this will “lessen the burden” of doing so and could potentially harm the reach of the project.

All certificates will be stored directly in the wallets of the participants, so they can update them as they wish and provide or revoke the viewership of the content to whoever they want. Obviously, the system will also be very useful for employers, which will have more confidence while hiring the employee.

Steve Davies, the global blockchain leader of PwC, has affirmed that the new product is being pitched as a blockchain solution that will create a verified, trusted and irrefutable digital identity for people in multiple fields.

He affirms that the blockchain was created to allow people not to depend on middlemen anymore and that is what they want to do, to create a system in which it is not a single anymore that has central ownership but in which people will really have the ownership of their own credentials.

PwC is far from the only company doing this move now. Sony and Fujitsu were reported to create a similar blockchain-based project recently in which they validated and enhanced the certificates of educational course records.