Indian identity and trust technology company IDfy has won Code for Consent, a government-run competition to find systems that can manage user consent and data governance at the scale India’s incoming privacy law will demand.
The challenge was organised by MeitY Startup Hub with the National e-Governance Division, both part of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, with Jio Platforms named runner-up. Entrants were assessed on technical, functional, and legal readiness, then had to prove their systems in live demonstrations. The competition is framed around the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, India’s data protection law passed in 2023, which the government has been moving toward operationalising through implementing rules. As enforcement nears, thousands of enterprises must show they can obtain consent, govern the personal data that follows, and produce evidence of compliance when a regulator asks.
IDfy entered with Privy, its privacy and data governance platform. The company’s argument, which the judges appear to have accepted, is that collecting consent is the straightforward part, and that the harder work is tracking where personal data resides, how it moves between systems and vendors, who can access it, and how a person’s rights are honoured when they ask. Privy is built to cover that wider arc, spanning consent governance, data discovery and classification, data principal rights management, privacy risk and third-party risk assessments, and audit-ready compliance evidence.
The platform reflects IDfy’s fifteen years in identity verification, fraud prevention, and risk intelligence, work that has already required operating at scale and keeping auditable records; the company raised 52 million dollars to expand that trust infrastructure. IDfy reports more than 50 live Privy deployments covering close to 500 million users, among customers including Axis Bank, HSBC, and Airtel.
“The DPDP Act is forcing a boardroom shift in how companies treat trust and accountability,” said Malcolm Gomes, chief operating officer of IDfy and head of Privy. “Consent capture is the easy part. The hard part is governing data across discovery, access, rights, and evidence at enterprise scale, and being able to prove it.”
Sources: IDfy
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
