Criminals don’t steal money. They steal identities. With Dan Feaheny.

Meet Dan Feaheny, an expert in bridging strategic infrastructure across payments, digital identity and financial risk, with professional experience spanning decades. Going back-and-forth with our host Igor, Dan takes the opportunity to highlight two things: First, digital banks still have a long way to go. Second, identity theft is a far bigger threat than financial theft.

Key Insights #

• Smartphones rewired how people bank: The conversation shows how smartphones, not banks, triggered the biggest behavioral shift in finance. Mobile-first challengers emerged once people trusted apps more than branches, with adoption accelerating sharply during COVID. What started as balance-checking evolved into full money movement, collapsing costs and making real-time banking the default expectation.
• Real-time finance exposed legacy identity flaws: As banking became instant and automated, identity verification stayed slow, manual, and paper-based. The episode highlights how digital banking removed human oversight at branches but failed to replace it with a truly secure digital alternative, creating blind spots that fraudsters exploit at scale.
• Identity, not money, is the real target: A central insight is that modern financial crime focuses on stealing identities rather than funds. Once an identity is compromised, it can be reused across institutions, borders, and products. This makes identity theft a permanent harm, while money loss is often reversible, raising the stakes for how identity is designed and protected.
• Self-sovereign digital identity is the path forward: The discussion points toward a future where individuals control their digital identity through cryptography, biometrics, and consent-based sharing. Examples from Europe, COVID certificates, and device-based identity systems suggest a move away from centralized databases toward identity that is created, verified, and used entirely online, forming the foundation for wallets, open banking, stablecoins, and AI-driven finance.

Why Listen #

This conversation serves as a chronological recap of how banking evolved, along with a prediction on where it’s going. The episode also serves as a red flag on the issue of security loopholes individuals and corporations still face when it comes to security.