* Survey of online banking and security
TriCipher’s Ravi Ganesan (he founded the company back at the turn of the century) and the other fine folks at the company recently sponsored a survey conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research, which does research for the payment and financial services industries. The survey was on consumer online banking and the results were published last week, along with the results of follow-up studies.
The sequence of events was:
1. Consumer respondents filled out an online survey.
2. Consumers respondents downloaded, installed, and logged in to a simulated online bank using the TriCipher Identity Protection Tool.
3. An executive survey of the top 25 banks was conducted to determine the monetary value of increasing online banking and billpay adoption.
The survey sought to answer five general questions (by asking many more specific ones):
1. How many consumers have been the victims of identity theft or fraud?
2. How does negative press about identity and fraud affect online banking usage and customer loyalty?
3. What online banking authentication methods do consumers prefer?
4. Will consumers download and use free online banking authentication software?
5. Will offering free online banking authentication software increase online banking usage and banking industry profitability?
That first one always bothers me (see “What is identity theft?”) but a couple of years ago I was cheered by another Javelin study (see “Survey finds electronic ID fraud less prevalent than paper fraud”) which pleasantly surprised me with its conclusion that in all instances where the fraud perpetrator was positively identified, half of all identity fraud was committed by a friend, family member, relative, neighbor or in-home employee – someone known by the victim, and not some faceless hacker.
This new survey looked at consumer perception of online banking security. The result (almost a foregone conclusion, I’d think) was that consumers wanted more online security, had no problem with downloading free strong authentication software and were more likely to switch to online banking, or increase their use of online banking, if stronger authentication was used.
It’s no surprise, of course, that TriCipher is in the business of providing strong authentication solutions, is it? Still, that doesn’t disqualify the results of the survey. Check the TriCipher site for the full results and check on the TriCipher Armored Credential Systems (TACS) while you’re there. Attached to the copy I got was a valuable glossary of strong/second factor authentication methods which you should all clip and save. Since it’s fairly long, we’ll reprint it in the next issue.
