Initial purchase of 260,000 Entrust IdentityGuard licenses challenges other Latin American banks to offer complimentary consumer authentication

07 Sep 2006

DALLAS - Part of the Santander Group, one of the largest financial groups in the world, Banco Santander Santiago faced a common challenge. They wanted to protect their customers online with strong authentication but felt they should offer it free of charge. That is why they turned to Entrust IdentityGuard by Entrust, Inc, [NASDAQ: ENTU].

“We considered both tokens and PIN/TAN for stronger security. Tokens would require we pass along the cost to our customers, and PIN/TAN just didn’t offer the security strength we wanted,” said Banco Santander Santiago Internet Security Manager Laureano Cuesta. “When we unveiled the cards to our customers, they were thrilled to have a more secure method for doing business with us.”

Banco Santander chose to start with grid card authentication and has branded the card “Super Clave.” The bank initially purchased 260,000 Entrust IdentityGuard licenses but plans to expand its Super Clave user base to 600,000 within the next few years. Prior to Entrust’s solution, the bank had used second passwords but now can use strong authentication to protect the integrity of transactions, such as money transfers. The Santander Group also has banks in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and Brazil. In the future, the banks may choose to add token support on the Entrust IdentityGuard platform as well.

“Banco Santander shares one of Entrust’s key tenets – that everyone deserves to be secure. In fact, they are the only bank in Chile that offers strong authentication to its customers free of charge,” said Entrust Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Conner. “We applaud them for choosing a solution that can be rolled out cost effectively and that also can evolve over time with changing needs.”

Neosecure, a value added reseller, was integral in deploying Entrust IdentityGuard. Neosecure S.A is one of the leading Security Solution Provider Companies serving the Latin American Market. Neosecure brings to the market: technology risk reduction programs, information security services, methodological approach to IT security problems, professional services, consulting and Internet security services.

In addition to Neosecure, ALTEC worked to develop, implement and launch the Super Clave solution. ALTEC is an IT Shared Services Center located in Chile dedicated to software development, maintenance and data processing. The company provides services to eight banks within the Santander Group in Latin America.

 “Because of its low price and high flexibility to evolve over time, Entrust IdentityGuard is a natural choice for our customers who want to deploy strong authentication but need to offer it free of charge to their customers,” said Neosecure CEO Eduardo Diaz. “The grid card authentication method also has a very high usability factor, and that certainly makes it an attractive choice for large retail banks that want to reduce calls to their help desk as well.”

Entrust IdentityGuard is a comprehensive strong authentication platform for Internet and enterprise applications. This suite of strong authentication capabilities can help enable organizations to take a risk-based approach to tailoring a security deployment. The flexible deployment options can enable organizations to match strong authentication methods to the level of risk they have determined to be associated with the different types of users, transactions and applications in their environments. In addition to grid card authentication, Entrust IdentityGuard supports Zero Touch Fraud Detection, machine authentication, challenge/response, out-of-band passwords, one-time passwords by email, picture replay, geo location and even Vasco Digipass tokens.