Community Banks and Credit Unions adopting PKI-Based, Two-Factor Authentication Solutions at a faster rate than most alternatives

Community Banks and Credit Unions adopting PKI-Based, Two-Factor Authentication Solutions at a faster rate than most alternatives

Community banks and credit unions are taking a best practices approach to mutual authentication by opting for two factor solutions that offer the highest levels of security and authentication without sacrificing usability. To meet regulatory guidelines, many financial institutions felt compelled to quickly deploy a two-factor solution even though it was expected to be difficult for both users and the bank. By contrast, Comodo’s Two Factor authentication model for the mid-market is based on a usability study that identified four key drivers; 1) ease of customer adoption, 2) no bank-side integration 3) ease of configuration and 4) low cost.

The recent, rapid adoption by banks and credit unions of PKI- based client certificates confirms this “needs based model” since it recognizes that authentication – no matter how secure – can not sacrifice usability. “Previously, most small to mid sized financial organizations were simply focused on being compliant within the timeframe without trying deploy a best practices approach largely because virtually all solutions either required major IT deployments or were difficult for consumers to adopt or both.” said Andrew Pynes, Executive VP at Comodo. “But now, client certificates combine the best of both worlds – security and ease of use – so banks and credit unions can provide a better customer experience within a highly secured environment.”

Comodo Two Factor (TF) was developed using customer insights garnered from research among bank and credit union customers to understand the optimum hierarchy of needs that balance customer usability and security. The result of this research led to the development of Comodo TF that utilizes PKI-based digital certificates within a highly flexible, low cost and configurable architecture. Comodo, as a leading Certification Authority manages the entire lifecycle of the digital certificates via an authentication/proxy server.

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