Each customer (30,000 in the trial) receives a keyring-sized security device, which generates a six-digit code to be used alongside their username and password. The news was received with great interest by the business press and was reported on the BBC radio, television and online media and in national newspapers.

The technology that enables this is a highly secure and reliable Authentication Server installed at the bank end, delivered by Cryptomathic. The solution (Cryptomathic Authenticator), designed by a highly skilled team in Cryptomathic's division in the Cambridge Science Park, UK, and developed in its HQ in Aarhus, Denmark, is now in its third generation.

The Cryptomathic Authenticator is capable of verifying 500 secured transactions per second, and can be scaled to manage even higher volumes. The guaranteed uptime for a single server on a Microsoft platform is 99.7%, which can be increased with the addition of fail-over machines. By using tamper resistant hardware (HSMs) all keys are completely protected against any kind of exposure. In addition the server provides advanced independent auditing measures, which simply makes insider attacks completely infeasible. The core hardware component of this authentication engine is provided by nCipher, one of Cryptomathic's partners and a leading HSM vendor.

The Cryptomathic Authenticator is unrivalled among authentication servers as it allows a bank to choose among a variety of customer authentication mechanisms (SMS OTP, CAP, Card and Reader, TAN cards, etc), as well as offering a number of additional features indispensable for Internet and telephone banking. Because the Cryptomathic Authenticator supports a wide range of authentication schemes, it avoids both technology-mandated solutions and vendor lock-in to a particular authentication scheme.