Well, I haven't read everything on their site, so I don't understand all the details and I may have misconceptions, but my understanding is this: In the physical world, to prove that you have a driver's license or a valid credit card or that you are over 13 years old, you need to show a credential that also gives away additional information about you. In their system, the government or bank can issue a cryptographic credential to the user which tells the service provider only the information they actually need to know, and does this through a zero-knowledge proof, so that the provider can't link multiple uses of the same credential to the same user.

The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-research IBM web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ("Delivers a rich, relevant customer and partner experience by extending a common set of business services across every point of interaction" and such.)