The act of verifying someone's ID before they can transact with a company doesn't mean the same thing for every interaction, particularly for large firms that do business in a number of countries with widely varied customers, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland.
RBS hopes that advanced management of its identity efforts through deployment of a hosted solution from IdenTrust will help it save millions of dollars over the next few years by integrating authentication efforts across the enterprise, a move it's making to create more flexibility to help drive its core payments and financing business.
The bank has rolled IdenTrust's product into its own TrustAssured portfolio ID platform. Inherent in TrustAssured is a new IdenTrust rule set that governs the procedures, policies, legal framework and operations for ID authentication and validation for RBS.
By utilizing automated transaction tools such as digital signatures, RBS now has an interoperable infrastructure for relying on digital identity certificates issued by the bank in support of its customers' global electronic commerce activities. Additionally, the IdenTrust platform allows TrustAssured to deliver authentication products via different media-USB, chip branded cards or soft certificates-at different price points. IdenTrust will also manage RBS' ID authentication infrastructure and scheme.
By changing to a hosted solution, the bank hopes it will be easier to follow an ID strategy where the proper level of authentication-and subsequent expense-is based on the level of security that's necessary for a specific business unit, end user or business partner.
"Instead of having a Rolls Royce ID solution for everyone, you can customize the degree of security or authentication for every application you need," says Timothy Guyre, managing director and CEO for Thoughtware Worldwide, a third-party research firm hired by IdenTrust to assess the RBS deployment. RBS and IdenTrust wouldn't do interviews, though RBS substantiated Thoughtware's ROI and performance measurement of its authentication project.
Thoughtware says that as a result of the rollout, RBS is expecting a 45 percent reduction in average cost per digital ID certificate. RBS is also planning to manage higher-volume transactions due to the decrease in cost associated with issuing certificates. The institution is also hoping to save about $3.17 million on infrastructure, hardware/software refresh and disaster recovery and business continuity over the next five years. Overall, the bank is projecting an internal rate of return of 96 percent over five years, payback within one year and a total savings of about $9 million over the next five years.
"If I'm with British Telecom, for example, and am leasing cars for my employees, I can do all of the contracts digitally rather than having someone come out to my office to sign the contracts," Guyre says. "And RBS can do this at a lower cost, with a more efficient solution, rather than having a different process for one group or another as they did before. With the new rollout, they can increase their visibility among all constituencies with the right media based on the needs of their customer, and application and the frequency of the transaction. RBS can now do these kinds of transactions with more than just the 'top tier' of customers."
Alenka Grealish, manager of the banking group at Celent, says managing ID costs across multiple transaction types and partners is becoming easier to accomplish because the technology is advancing on two fronts - the ID authentication and the employee rollout side. "Today we have Webinars and email video conferencing, so you can scale up a rollout with greater ease than you could in years past. It's all about the rollout and making sure that employees understand everything they need to remember."
