A sitting U.S. securities regulator is pushing for a fundamental rethink of how financial firms verify customer identities, arguing that cryptographic tools could satisfy anti-money-laundering rules without the industry building ever-larger repositories of sensitive personal data.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce laid out the case during a September 23 speech at SIFMA’s 2026 Digital Assets Conference in New York. Her central proposal: regulators should embrace zero-knowledge proofs and attribute-based digital credentials so institutions can confirm a customer’s age, citizenship, accredited-investor status, or sanctions-screening results without actually collecting the underlying documents.

The remarks arrive during what the SEC’s…