March 10, 2006 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Open Solutions Inc., a technology and web hosting provider for financial institutions in the United States and Canada, has announced the release of its Security Matrix Two-Factor Authentication feature for Internet banking. The feature will be offered to financial institutions as a security add-on to e-Commerce Banker – an Internet banking application. Beta testing was recently carried out by Provident Savings Bank and the system will be available in April.
"Regulators are requiring all financial institutions to use multifactor authentication, layered security or other controls appropriate to the level of risk by December 2006," suggested Lil Brunner, CIO, SVP of Provident Savings Bank. "We were excited that Open Solutions developed a solution this quickly. It's very important for us to protect our customers' accounts, and we really feel the need for another layer of protection - especially for Internet banking. We volunteered to test Security Matrix as soon as Open Solutions offered it."
Security Matrix provides a two-factor level of protection. Users are given a card that shows unique random numbers arranged in rows and columns to form a matrix. After submitting a usually user name and password the system asks for authentication using digits contained in 3 randomly chosen cells in the matrix. The matrix provides 59,000 possible authentication combinations.
"With all the new requirements and concern surrounding improved Internet banking user authentication, Open Solutions developed its own two-factor authentication solution," said Mike Nicastro, SVP and CMO of Open Solutions. "We saw the need to move to a two-factor model to help better secure the online banking process as well as help our client financial institutions satisfy their needs for additional security to combat identity theft, phishing and online fraud. The key to our approach is that it securely identifies the user accessing the Internet banking application without requiring the online banking customer to have any new hardware or install new software. This add-on customer protection measure helps financial institutions comply with recent FFIEC guidelines regarding online banking services risk assessment and associated improvements in customer sign-on authentication."
