Digital ID

Large investment houses see an opportunity to improve financial conditions for contract workers, accelerate evolution away from cash to digital payments, expand the smartphone as a commerce device and streamline user experience.

FIS’s $43 billion agreement to acquire Worldpay and Fiserv’s $22 billion deal to buy First Data are largely closing the gaps between financial technology and merchant acquiring. But these mergers are only the first of many steps.

They haven't thrown in the towel yet, but comments by top executives at the two big banks suggested that their interest in finding financial services uses for distributed ledgers is wearing very thin.

Alongside identity-document scanning and other ID verification, the two companies are offering real-time checks of lists of suspicious persons. The goal: keep money launderers out of the banking system.

Dumping passwords in favor of interoperable, flexible identity is an evolution as bumpy as it is necessary. FIS and Worldpay’s combination stands to create tools that can smooth this road.

CULedger and the computing giant will work to develop blockchain technologies, create new products and improve existing ones.

Amazon, Accenture and Mastercard are using digital identity, blockchain and mobile payments to crack a window into sustainability and inclusion, but they’re also gaining potential retail benefits by capturing consumers who crave information about the origin of products.

Midwest BankCentre in St. Louis, with the help of a stable of fintechs, started Rising Bank to keep up with big banks in the hunt for deposits and millennial customers.

Regulators are handing out fines for GDPR violations, that while relatively small can have a large impact on the push for sharable identity by drawing attention to how large companies use data.