About ValiDeck
ValiDeck is an infrastructure company working at the intersection of payment systems, commerce data, and privacy engineering. It is developing PCX (the Privacy-Compliant eXtensible protocol), a proposed technical framework through which transaction records produced by different merchants and payment channels can be normalized and handled under a consistent set of technical and privacy rules.
PCX-CTR is the first planned implementation of PCX, focused on customer transaction records. It is designed to let customers retain a coherent purchase history across participating merchants and let businesses provide loyalty and permitted analytics using the information required for each service.
Digital commerce generates huge volumes of transaction records that are reliable within the systems that create them but difficult to use coherently once they are distributed across different organizations, formats, and data environments. ValiDeck concentrates on this underlying coordination problem: the record structures, transformation methods, trust boundaries, and interfaces required to make transaction-derived information usable across systems while constraining unnecessary disclosure. The company is based in Waterloo, Ontario.
How we started
ValiDeck evolved from identity-based review verification toward transaction-backed evidence and a separate identity relationship — laying the foundation for PCX.
ValiDeck began in 2016 as an idea to make online search meaningful and trustworthy. Meaningful search depends on trust, yet one of its most important signals — online reviews — lacked a reliable way to verify who stood behind them. Our initial strategy tied each review to the reviewer’s verified identifier — a phone number for instance — to make it credible. A patent application covering that approach was filed in the US in 2018 and granted in 2021. The next stage of development addressed how to establish credibility while limiting the disclosure of customer identity.
Privacy requirements and conversations with investors highlighted a limitation of the initial approach: establishing confidence in a review should not depend on distributing the reviewer’s identity. The model evolved toward evidence from transactions linked to a pseudonymous account, with the customer’s identity relationship retained by an authorized custodian.
The payment-card industry uses tokenization to protect the card number from exposure; ValiDeck repurposed the same idea to protect the individual, linking records to a token rather than an identity. In 2019, ValiDeck filed a PCT application introducing the token-based capture-and-aggregation of customer transaction records (CTR). That is where PCX begins. Patents from that family have now been granted in the United States, Australia, and India and form part of PCX’s intellectual-property foundation. At the core of the protocol, a transaction is captured under a token that links it to a pseudonymous customer account while keeping direct identity details outside the record-linkage layer.
The Privacy-Compliant eXtensible (PCX) protocol described across this site generalizes and formalizes the tokenization process. The foundational design separates record linkage from direct customer identity. The pending patent applications based on PCX go further, addressing how records are protected and how permitted information is made available to services. Customer-controlled encryption and separation of records and access roles are intended to limit exposure. These newer designs also extend the protocol beyond the direct merchant-to-customer channel, to the cross-merchant loyalty, privacy-preserving search, and analytics described elsewhere on this site. Their security properties remain to be evaluated through implementation and independent review.
Shared infrastructure
PCX is designed as shared infrastructure. ValiDeck will develop the protocol and build reference implementations to demonstrate what can be created on top of it, but it does not intend to own every application that will use the infrastructure. The objective is to let payment providers, merchants, technology companies, and independent developers build competing services under common privacy and access rules.
ValiDeck aims to make data useful without making it captive. Its role is to develop and validate the architecture, build reference implementations and reusable integrations, and support organizations deploying compatible services. ValiDeck’s token-based loyalty program is the first planned reference application of that approach.
The proposed commercial model is to earn revenue from implementation, integration, operating support, and permitted applications and services. A commerce provider deploying loyalty for a limited group of merchants is one prospective first customer. Pilot discussions must establish the budget owner, the benefit each participant receives, the integration scope, and willingness to pay. Pricing and contractual terms remain to be validated.
Our mission
ValiDeck’s mission is to develop a privacy-first data infrastructure that makes transaction records useful without requiring customers to surrender control of their identity or personal information. PCX will enable:
- customers to capture and manage their transaction records under a customer-controlled pseudonym;
- businesses to run privacy-compliant loyalty programs without collecting personal identifiers; and
- enterprises to use verified, privacy-protected transaction data to improve decision-making and customer engagement.
Our goal is to demonstrate that privacy and data utility do not have to be opposing goals: transaction data can remain useful across the commerce ecosystem while the person behind it remains protected.
Where we’re focused
Europe is ValiDeck’s primary strategic market. Our focus is on secure, interoperable financial-data infrastructure that can be evaluated against the requirements of its intended deployment. Privacy, purpose-limited access, and clear institutional responsibilities are part of the design brief. Engagement with European partners and relevant standards bodies is a roadmap objective; implementation, legal assessment, and formal standardization remain work to be completed.
Where we are today
PCX has a documented architecture, but its reference implementation has not yet been built. Foundational patents have been granted in the United States, Australia, and India, while other applications in the family and newer PCX-related applications remain pending. ValiDeck is now working to secure the funding, assemble the engineering team, and establish the first payment-channel and merchant relationships required for Phase I. Phase I will test the transaction flow, privacy boundaries, recovery procedures, and integration assumptions. The Roadmap sets out the build sequence, and the Product Development Strategy explains the technical and commercial gates before Phase II.
Team
Alok Narula — Founder
Alok Narula brings around 25 years in technical communication and information architecture at semiconductor and enterprise-software companies, including STMicroelectronics, Broadcom, and IBM. He is the founder and named inventor on ValiDeck’s patent portfolio. ValiDeck is currently at the pre-implementation stage. Phase I funding is intended to assemble a team with the engineering, payment-integration, and privacy expertise needed to build and evaluate the reference implementation.
Support
ValiDeck has institutional backing from IPON (Intellectual Property Ontario), which provides IP development support, and Communitech (Waterloo’s technology-innovation hub), which provides ecosystem and IP-strategy support. ValiDeck is also exploring potential collaborations with payment providers, technology companies, and universities to support Phase I prototyping and technical validation of PCX.
Help build and evaluate PCX
We welcome investors interested in funding the next validation milestones; payment and commerce partners able to define a bounded pilot; researchers who can examine the threat model and privacy assumptions; and potential technical cofounders or founding engineers who can help turn the architecture into working infrastructure. The Contact and Careers pages describe the current routes for discussion.