Edentify and Innerwall Bring New Security Tool to Online Banking
BETHLEHEM, Pa., and COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.--May 11, 2006--Today Edentify Inc. (OTC BB: EDFY), a leading provider of identity management solutions, announced a joint marketing agreement with Innerwall Inc., a leading provider of mobile endpoint security solutions, that gives banks and consumers a new, easy, and comprehensive solution for protecting and managing identities during online banking transactions.
"Nearly 52 percent of online consumers are worried about security when they're banking online--and rightly so," says Terrence DeFranco, CEO of Edentify. "Online banking is a natural target for identity thieves. But thanks to our partnership with Innerwall, banks can now validate customer identities, and then give their customers total control over who can access their accounts online, as well as when and where online account access takes place."
The jointly-marketed solution provides banks and other financial institutions with a secure, two-step identity validation and authentication process. Step one: Edentify's proprietary identity fraud detection technology validates consumer identities when new bank accounts (checking, credit, loans, etc.) are opened. The technology benchmarks the consumer's identity information when it is initially entered, and uses the benchmark as the source of validation upon subsequent evaluations.
Step two: Innerwall's security management software, which handles day-to-day authentication of people with identities previously validated by Edentify.
Unlike basic password-protection which can be cracked, Innerwall's software authenticates the consumer, their computer, and the online banking software the bank provide--and does so every time the consumer signs on. If the Innerwall software cannot authenticate all three elements at logon, access to the online bank account is denied.
For example, if someone steals a consumer's logon and password, and tries to use it from another computer, access to their online bank account is denied--even if the password is correct. If a consumer's PC is lost or stolen, the bank can deactivate the computer without having to change the consumer's password. The bank can also monitor any attempted account activity to locate the computer, and alert law enforcement. And if someone tries to logon to the account using different software, access will not be granted.
"Our partnership with Edentify brings financial institutions and their customers closer together by improving consumers' trust in online banking, without compromising their convenience or privacy," says Frank Ricotta, CEO of Innerwall. "The only people who are unhappy about this partnership are hackers, who will be stopped cold by the pairing of Edentify's identity verification and our three-way authentication. It's a big loss for hackers, and a big win for security-conscious banks and consumers."
Edentify, Inc. was formed in August 2004 with the objective of becoming the leading organization in the field of developing and deploying data analysis technology solutions for preventing identity theft and fraud. It is currently a later-stage development company and expects shortly to begin a period of increased growth. Edentify will seek to fulfill its goals by analyzing the means by which identity crimes are perpetrated and through the development of new technologies and procedures to assist corporations, the government and consumers in the fight against identity fraud and related crime.
Edentify owns the intellectual property rights to two strategic approaches towards the detection and prevention of identity fraud. One is a patented information-based approach that analyzes identity data information for individuals in large databases, and is capable of detecting and scoring incidences of identity manipulation and potential theft (Identity Quotient Index(TM)). The forerunner of this technology is currently used in screening identities used for new checking account applications at nearly every major bank in the United States. Edentify will continue to market this technology to other areas of the financial services industry, as well as to large healthcare organizations and local, state, and federal governments.
The second approach is a biometric technology that will be marketed through and is named after our wholly-owned subsidiary, InMotion Biometrics, Inc.
('IMB'). This novel set of algorithms combines face and voice recognition techniques for authenticating the identity of an individual. The IMB technology is licensed from face2face, Inc., a leading character animation company that was spun off from Lucent Technologies, Inc. in 2000. The core capability of this technology is its facial analysis system that contains highly evolved algorithms for obtaining the inner lip contour, which can accurately measure for optimal visual speech recognition performance.
Additionally, the system is designed as a multi-modal platform capable of combining the reading of two or more biometric technologies simultaneously.
Innerwall, Inc. (www.innerwall.com), is a leading provider of mobile end-point security solutions for the real time enterprise. The company's Secure Enclave product suite extends beyond traditional perimeter security solutions to protect the entire network, including hand-helds, mobile devices and traditional computers, providing a self-healing grid of security across the virtual enterprise. By empowering interactions at the network's edge, companies realize operational costs savings and growth without jeopardizing corporate or personal information, or violating regulations.
Based in Colorado Springs Innerwall's customers include large organizations in the Fortune 1000, government and financial services markets.