Societe Generale has signed for Texas-based e-security vendor Entrust's authentication platform, IdentityGuard, to protect online transactions and enterprise communications for high-end users.
Societe Generale, is expected to deploy 1500 Entrust IdentityGuard grid cards to authenticate access to the company's investment Web portal for high-end clients.
Users receive a security grid card that contains a series of numbers and letters in columns and rows. To obtain authentication, the users have to respond to random challenges requesting information that they locate on their grids.
Entrust says the cards - which are replacing third party hardware tokens - could be rolled out to thousands of users in the future.
Didier Lajarrige, IT manager, Societe Generale, says: "Not only did we save money by dropping our high-priced hardware tokens, we did so with an authenticator that is easy to use, simple to deploy and concurrently enables secure access to our corporate resources, applications and intellectual property."