South Korea's banks are preparing to roll out a distributed ledger technology-based identity verification system for mobile and online logins, reports Finextra. Citing the Korea Federation of Banks Finextra says the BankSign system will launch next month, providing an alternative to the country's notoriously user-unfriendly public certification system for desktop-based online banking verification. Technical details are scant but BankSign has been built on Nexledger, a private blockchain system created by Samsung SDS, according to reports. Jamie Forese, president of Citi and chief executive of the bank's institutional clients group has told the Financial Times that Citigroup's investment bank will shed up to half of its 20,000 technology and operations staff in the next five years. He said the operational positions, which make up almost two-fifths of investment bank employees at Citi, were "most fertile for machine processing". If replicated across the industry, the potential job losses would represent a steeper rate of cuts than in the decade from 2007 to 2017, when almost 60,000 jobs were cut from eight of the world's top ten investment banks, according to FT research.