Here comes the fastest public-key algorithm that most people have never heard of: It's called NTRUEncrypt and this month was approved by the financial services standards body, the Accredited Standards Committee X9.
The X9.98 standard specifies how to use NTRU, as it's called for short, in financial transactions.

"The NTRU public-key algorithm competes with RSA and elliptic curve" says Ed Adams, CEO of Security Innovation, which owns the rights and patents associated with the NTRU algorithm. It was invented in the mid-1990s. Unlike RSA, NTRU is not widely used, and in fact the NTRU cryptosystem needed changes early on to improve its security by addressing weaknesses and performance. But today NTRU is recognized as faster than the widely used RSA algorithm.

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