Nick Thomas: Finicity’s Journey from Personal Finance App to $985M Acquisition for their Open Banking Platform
Feb 7, 2024
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Nick Thomas, co-founder of Finicity and EVP at Mastercard, discusses Finicity's journey from app to data aggregator. He shares insights on open banking, verifiable credentials, and parallels between fintech and IDtech. The podcast explores industry collaborations, disruptive innovations, and challenges in digital identity infrastructure.
Industry standardization is crucial for digital identity growth, drawing parallels to Bluetooth's success in creating unified standards.
Government involvement is essential in shaping digital identity infrastructure, akin to its role in developing physical infrastructure like roads.
Deep dives
Phoenicity's Journey and Lessons in Digital Identity
Nick Thomas, co-founder of Phoenicity and now the executive vice president of Global Open Finance Innovation at Mastercard, discusses Phoenicity's evolution from a consumer application to a major data aggregator, emphasizing their disruption strategy in open banking. The podcast delves into Phoenicity's work with verifiable credentials, highlighting the challenges faced in rolling it out into production, offering insights on the intersection of FinTech and IDTech.
The Significance of Standardization in Digital Identity
The discussion shifts to the importance of industry standardization in digital identity, drawing parallels to the success of Bluetooth in creating a unified standard. Nick emphasizes the need for players in the identity space to converge and create common standards to foster interoperability and growth. Lessons from Bluetooth's approach underscore the potential benefits of shared standards in driving the evolution of digital identity.
Government's Role in Digital Identity Infrastructure
Nick highlights the pivotal role of governments in developing and maintaining digital identity infrastructure, drawing analogies to government-driven infrastructure in physical realms like roads. He envisions a future where governments collaborate with industry to establish standardized identity systems, emphasizing the necessity of government involvement in shaping the digital identity landscape.
Future Trends and Challenges in Identity Technology
Nick shares insights into the evolving trends in digital identity, foreseeing a shift towards self-sovereign identity controlled by governments, coexisting with federated identity systems within organizations. He underscores the potential of standardized identity protocols like OpenID to enhance interoperability and collaboration across digital platforms. Nick's discourse provides a nuanced perspective on the emerging landscape of digital identity technology and its implications for businesses and consumers.
Today we talked with Nick Thomas, cofounder of Finicity, which was acquired by Mastercard, where Nick went on to be the EVP of Global Open Finance Innovation. Nick has a fascinating career that has paralleled digital identity for a long time, as a cofounder of Bluetooth and FDX, the major open banking standards body in the US. These are both organizations that brought an industry together around common standards to grow the market far bigger for everyone involved—and we talk lessons learned and how this applies to identity.
Nick shares a deep look into Finicity’s story starting as a consumer application and eventually becoming a major data aggregator. Then we dive into Finicity’s journey disrupting themselves by pushing into open banking. We explore the work Finicity did with verifiable credentials as an issuer, and the big challenge that prevented them from rolling it out. You’ll appreciate all of his takes on the parallels between fintech and IDtech.
To learn more about Nick you can find him on LinkedIn.
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Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.
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