The current economic turmoil leaves no doubt that the banking business has to change and become more efficient, if nothing else, just to recover some of its latest losses.

The one area that can help the banking industry achieve such an ambitious goal is the improvement in employee/customers coverage ratio. There is no real point in spreading more branches all over, packing them with more expensive employees and committing to all the other costs that are associated with such branches.

Thus, the industry is looking into better utilization of web based on-line banking. Such a profound shift is the holy grail of the quest for a better coverage ratio. A well designed website improves the service level, availability and ultimately the customer's satisfaction, while saving costs. A small local bank can reach more distant potential customers and offer them superb service matched only by larger global banks.

So what's stopping e-banking from taking center stage position? The number one show-stopper is the huge security holes in e-banking. On-line banking is being attacked by organized crime all around the world, through phishing, identity theft, and malware planted on the customer's machine.

All these measures are designed to stage primarily two sorts of attacks: the hacker's impersonation of the real customer or taking control of the customer's transactions in order to change them in behalf of the predators.  While the impersonation attacks are being fought through two-factor authentication procedures such as One-Time-Password token devices, the control hijacking issues where left unanswered. This makes customers reluctant to base more of their financial affairs on the on-line environment. In fact, when asked, almost half of them indicated that they would consider moving their business to another bank if it provided them with a real secured e-banking environment.

Thus, it is apparent that the customer's uncontrolled and contaminated computer stands between the banks and their goal of business transformation to an internet-centric business model.

Until recently, the void prevented customers from adopting online banking, which is the optimal business model for banks.  However a new solution called "IDentiWall e-Banking" promises to change profoundly the e-banking security landscape. The solution that came out of a start-up company called Made4Biz Security Inc. gets right on top of the problem.  It offers both, two-factor authentication and transaction verification, and all that without adding any new device to the customer 'carry around,' since it leverages on the customer's existing mobile phone.

The way IDentiWall works is extremely simple. When the customer enters their user-id they get in return a text message that includes a One-Time-Password (OTP) that they need to copy, from the phone to the on-line banking screen. This simple measure not only supports customer authentication, but also acts to notify the customer if their identity was breached and criminally used. A customer can understand that their credentials were breached if they got that OTP message without having initiated a transaction themselves.  No token device-based solution can really notify the customer of such event.

But the real breakthrough functionality of IDentiWall is the transaction verification, which makes sure that a tampered-by-malware transaction will not stand a chance of being executed. Only those transactions that get verified by the customer, based on the text message transmitted to the mobile handset, are executed by the bank. With the introduction of a real secured e-banking and mounting pressure on banks to perform better, change is around the corner.

Made4Biz CEO Ilan Meller  said that he believes that the hidden gem of his company’s  achievement, is that the solution,  a radical enabler of secured e-banking, doesn’t require  from the implementing banks to change even one line of code in their applications, and that they can actually implement it within one week.    www.IDentiWall.com