A glimpse of the future of payments
Jaye Hackett
Payments are everything.
Chloe and I have just returned from a week at the Slush conference in Helsinki, and some of our most interesting conversations while there were with payments companies; card issuers, processors and the like.
I came across a story the other day from a Curve card user who was made to re-do KYC while standing in line for checkout, and, left with no other way to pay, had to abandon their shopping, go all the way home and dig out their documents.
What might that have looked like in a world with digital ID?
When you unlock your device to use Apple or Google Pay, the face scan is tied only to a locally stored biometric.
What if, when it really mattered, your payment could be tied to your actual identity?
I’m not talking about your grocery shopping, but the bigger, higher-risk transactions.
Merchants would say goodbye to an entire class of fraud overnight. The trust would come built-in with the transaction, rather than having to be re-established every time you buy something of value.
We think this technology brings exceptional promise, and businesses big and small deserve to benefit from it.
But as identity and payments start to mingle, what does it mean for the people who are excluded? The 11 million in ID poverty, or the 1 million who are still unbanked in the UK?
There is a lot of work still to do, and that’s why we’re so pleased to be working with OnePay to help realise the promise of identity-driven payments without excluding anyone.
Onepay provides the means to safely receive, send and manage money to people who might otherwise be without. Like us, they work heavily with the UK’s credit union sector.
By combining OnePay’s account and payments infrastructure with our inclusive, digital ID-native KYC, we’re laying the groundwork for a new breed of payments that reduces fraud without shutting people out. This is what safety and access look like when they’re designed together.
We’re going to be focusing on identity-driven payments, and the other ways that digital ID will affect our everyday lives, at our next executive panel in London, in early 2026.
To get an invite, or to learn more about our OnePay partnership, email me at jaye@vouchsafe.id.
