Private equity firms Parallax Capital Partners and StepStone Group have acquired a majority stake in digital identity authentication outfit IdenTrust. Financial terms have not been disclosed.
IdenTrust was founded in 1999 by a group of banks, including Citi, Bank of America, Chase, Barclays, HSBC, and Deutsche Bank, to provide a multi-bank ID authentication system.
In 2011 Indian fintech vendor Polaris Software agreed to buy an 85% stake in the San Francisco-based company for $20 million. Zions Bancorporation took on the minority interest.
IdenTrust now claims 10 of the world's biggest financial institutions as clients for its identity management technology and its digital certificates secure more than six billion payment transactions a year in the UK.
John Baldwin, partner, Parallax, says: "IdenTrust's experience and expertise in providing identity management for many of the world's largest banks, its role as a major identity provider to the US Federal and State Governments, and its growing emergence as an identity solution for the corporate sector make it the perfect company for us to invest in."