World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
The U.S. mint may proclaim ''In God we trust'' on every U.S. dollar bill, but that is not enough of a guarantee for businesses conducting transactions via the Internet. Trust needs to be established more concretely in cyberspace because parties to a transaction, in the absence of some other form of assurance, have no way of knowing the true identity of their business counterparts or whether their messages may have been intercepted or altered during transmission.
Identrus LLC, a company launched in April by eight major banks, addresses this problem by linking the trustworthiness of certain major financial institutions to legally binding guarantees called digital certificates. A digital certificate is the electronic equivalent of an identity card.
A digital certificate combined with a digital signature (as the name implies, the electronic equivalent of a signature) authenticates the message sender and guarantees the integrity of the message.
The bank's role is that of a certificate authority: a trusted entity with the knowledge to certify and issue digital certificates trading partners can rely on. The consistency of the process and legal policy created by the Identrus network ensures that all users are on an equal footing. It also provides a common mechanism for dealing with disputes.
Identrus's founding financial institutions - ABN AMRO, Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Chase Manhattan, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank (including its recent acquisition, Bankers Trust, which was also a founder) and Hypo Vereinsbank, plus CertCo, an electronic commerce security leader - have subsequently been joined by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Industrial Bank of Japan, the NatWest Group and Sanwa Bank. Identrus members now represent more than 50 countries and more than 7 million business relationships.
''What distinguishes us from competing solutions,'' says Paul Donfried, chief marketing officer for Identrus, ''is that we are focusing more on the goals than on the technology. The goals include risk management, business processes and the legal framework. Risk management is one of the biggest problems in e-commerce, so we have concentrated on that. We have also built a legal framework that contractually binds the participants in a business agreement.''
Last month at Sibos, a financial conference held in Munich, Identrus demonstrated its ability to handle every stage of a business transaction: connecting buyer to seller, negotiation, delivery and receipt, and invoicing and payment.
Trading partners certified by Identrus financial institutions will be able to use its system starting next year.
''Our members are running pilots now and will be commercially operational by Jan. 1, 2000,'' says Mr. Donfried. ''We will be fully deployed by March 2000.''
Claudia Flisi