Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ) and Standard Chartered have begun issuing Identrus digital certificates to commercial customers to secure their business-to-business electronic commerce activities.
The two banks join eleven Identrus financial institutions who are already using the global trust network to conduct secure business exchanges with corporate customer over the Internet.
IBJ is currently testing a document management application that will enable customers to securely exchange high value, highly sensitive collaborative information and execute non-repudiable document delivery over the Web. The bank is also discussing plans for interoperating with other Japanese member banks.
Souya Nakazato, deputy general manager, says: "Identrus gives IBJ customers a secure, cost-effective way to engage in e-commerce with trading partners, and gives us a solid foundation to further develop our portfolios of e-business services."
IBJ is also one of the founding banks of the Eleanor global payments initiation project, and is developing an Eleanor pilot programme for 2002 in addition to other Identrus initiatives.
Standard Chartered is using Identrus to help move a number of banking services to the Internet. These include payment initiation with trading partners for corporate customers; collaboration with the bank to manage accounts receivable; access to currency conversion services; and custodian services for fund managers.
Over the next few months, Standard Chartered will be conducting pilots with several prominent corporate customers and will enter full production in mid-2002 in more than a dozen countries, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and the Persian Gulf countries, Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom. The bank is considering using Identrus to secure a variety of technologies, including computer-to-computer transactions, secure e-mail, mobile communications and handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs).
By the end of 2002, Standard Chartered plans to implement its Identrus compliant services in as many as 30 countries with the goal of ultimately expanding its offering to all of the bank's 50-plus markets.
Guy Tallent, Identrus president and CEO, says: "Corporate customers increasingly realise that through Identrus they can trust a transaction in the cyber world as they do in the world of paper, ink signatures and face-to-face contact."