Headlines:
New Web Security Offerings at B of A
Bank of America Corp. is offering a two-factor online authentication product to former FleetBoston Financial Corp. customers and an anti-phishing product to all B of A customers.
The Charlotte company said Wednesday that it had deployed the authentication software to online banking customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island in December. All those states were served by Fleet, which B of A bought in 2004.
Bank of America began using the product, from PassMark Security Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., last May, after revealing in February that it had lost backup data tapes containing account details on 1.2 million credit card customers. It has since been rolling out the PassMark product, which it calls SiteKey, regionally. The only states where B of A customers cannot yet use SiteKey are Washington and Idaho.
Bank of America has said it plans to make SiteKey available to all of its customers. It has also said that SiteKey will eventually be mandatory in all regions, and in November it began requiring it in some markets.
The SiteKey software displays a pre-selected image to customers when they type in their user name, to confirm that the bank's site is legitimate. SiteKey also looks for a file on the consumer's computer to verify that it is a known computer.
Last month B of A began offering a toolbar plug-in for Web browsers that can flag known phishing sites. It is using a version of the toolbar currently offered by the Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. of Atlanta.
The software receives information about phishing sites from Earthlink users, Cyota Inc. of New York, eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif., Brightmail Inc. (a unit of Symantec Corp. of Cupertino, Calif.), Digital Envoy Inc. of Norcross, Ga., and the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
Metavante Acquires AdminiSource Corp.
Metavante Corp. has completed its acquisition of the health-care payment distribution company AdminiSource Corp.
AdminiSource, of Carrollton, Tex., is the third health-care services company the banking technology provider has bought since 2003. It bought Med-i-Bank Inc. of Waltham, Mass., in July for $145 million. In 2003, Metavante bought Printing for Systems Inc., a Madison, Conn., maker of cards and documents for health insurance companies.
The AdminiSource acquisition was announced in November and closed Tuesday. Metavante did not give the price.
