FSTC Launches Project Aimed at Authenticating Financial Institutions to Consumers; Major Project Part of On-going Better Mutual Authentication Initiative.

NEW YORK -- Over the past several years, the financial services industry has increasingly developed and offered automated methods of helping their customers ensure that they are actually in contact online with their institutions and not being spoofed into communications with fake Websites. These techniques of customer authentication have experienced a variety of malicious attacks where personal financial information has been compromised and confidence in online financial services is eroding. In addition, scrutiny and pressure from regulators is increasing. The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) has taken a major step forward in this arena by announcing today it has launched a major project aimed at authenticating financial institutions to their customers.

FSTC's recently concluded Better Mutual Authentication (BMA) project broke new ground by developing an architectural framework for authentication solutions based on multiple techniques used in combination, whether as parallel methods or as alternatives that can be employed in different circumstances or to meet specific application requirements. This project, with participation from twenty-eight financial institutions, industry associations, government agencies, and technology vendors established core financial industry requirements and put forward a series of recommendations aimed at improving authentication practices for online retail financial services.

"The financial services industry needs to move quickly to develop mutually agreed upon technologies and methodologies that will ensure that consumers are indeed communicating with their financial institutions when they are doing business online," said Dan Schutzer, Executive Director of FSTC. "With this project, we intend to leverage and influence existing technology and social initiatives coming out of the computer and communications vendor community to address our needs in financial institutions Website and email authentication. This will include making many of these solutions from the vendor community more workable through cooperation and partnership with institutions throughout North America and beyond."

The Authenticating Financial Institutions to Consumers project will consist of the following tasks:

1. Create one or more use cases and threat analyses that can be used to evaluate a set of technology solutions currently being developed by the IT and communications industries

2. Define and create a test bed, with a supporting test plan and evaluation criteria for testing and evaluating financial institutions authentication solutions, against use cases defined by the project team

FSTC is currently in the process of assembling the project team for this project and is soliciting membership from across the financial services, IT, and communication communities as well as appropriate government agencies and standards bodies. Please contact Dan Schutzer at [phone] for more information.

FSTC brings together diverse, and often competitive financial institutions, industry services providers, government agencies, and others to collaborate and find solutions to key industry challenges. Project topics come from member financial institutions and are driven by participating members with the support of FSTC staff.

For more information on FSTC, the Authenticating Financial Institutions to Consumers project, or current and future FSTC projects, please visit www.fstc.org.