Headlines:
B of A's SiteKey to Be Mandatory
Bank of America Corp. is making its SiteKey online banking authentication system mandatory.
The Charlotte company said Thursday that SiteKey would be required in some markets beginning this month.
SiteKey was introduced as an optional service in June in Tennessee and is being gradually rolled out to all of Bank of America's more than 13 million online banking customers. Customers can begin using it this month in California, and it will be available nationwide by early 2006. The last markets to receive SiteKey will be Washington and Idaho.
Bank of America plans to make SiteKey mandatory for all users eventually. Like the initial rollout, the switch to mandatory use will be done region by region.
The SiteKey system uses software from PassMark Security Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. Customers enroll by selecting an image and a phrase that are displayed when the customers log in to verify that the Web site is legitimate.
Many scam artists create counterfeit bank Web sites to trick bank customers in to revealing personal information that could later be used to steal their indentities; they would not be able to duplicate the SiteKey information for every user.
SiteKey also looks for a file on customers' computers to verify that they are using a known machine. If they are using a different machine, the system will ask them a series of questions to authenticate them. 
P&H Automating Bank File Transfers
To keep up with surging demand, the cash management software vendor P&H Solutions Inc. plans to upgrade its outsourced service to banks by automating many of the routine file transfers that are executed by the banks' corporate customers.
Ralph Dangelmaier, the president of the vendor, which used to be Politzer & Haney Inc., said in an interview last week that the hosted version of the company's P&H Web Cash Manager now supports 80,000 corporate users served by 100 individual banks.
He expects the number of companies using P&H's data center to grow fivefold next year, to 400,000 from its existing bank customers. With new customers, the number of users could top 1 million in 2007, he said.
Automating the file transfer management system in the data center is vital to meeting the growing demand, Mr. Dangelmaier said.
"It enables us to scale it in a more efficient manner."
P&H, of Newton, Mass., is installing software from MessageWay Solutions Inc. of Livonia, Mich., to automate the delivery and retrieval of data from bank or corporate endpoints.
Greg Faubert, MessageWay's president, said the software also gives P&H the ability to convert files from proprietary formats to standardized ones that work with other business applications, including electronic data interchange and Swift messaging formats.
The automated delivery and retrieval enables P&H to focus on exception management, Mr. Faubert said. "It only alerts staff when something needs to be attended to."
Mr. Dangelmaier said P&H will begin a phased introduction sometime before yearend, initially converting new files to the MessageWay format and then converting existing customer files to it.
The project will probably not be completed until early next year.
Mr. Faubert said MessageWay also provides messaging systems to Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., and Barclays PLC, among others.
