Group Seeks Web Banking Standard

Computerworld - The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), a nonprofit organization that includes banks, research firms and government agencies, is planning to meet June 15 to discuss authentication issues for Web sites that aggregate banking information.
The group has already developed what it calls the Financial Agent Secure Transaction model, which allows financial institutions to provide services ranging from customer authentication to payment guarantees. At the meeting, consortium members will further develop the technical model and prepare it for a market trial.
Anatoly Kissen, a vice president at Citigroup Inc. in New York who is evaluating the FSTC's aggregator project, said the main goal of the committee is to stop accessing customers' personal financial information via screen "scraping," which is usually done without banks' permission. The FSTC wants to move to a common, standards-based platform. Kissen said aggregators scrape personal financial information from bank Web pages - not the most secure and reliable approach. "If we provide a direct feed to the aggregators, the quality of the information could be improved," he said.
At the June 15 meeting, financial industry representatives from organizations such as the American Bankers Association in Washington, Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, N.C,. and Citigroup will discuss the details of a pilot project.
The pilot, said Kissen, may not necessarily be a full-scale, XML-based platform, but it may eventually lead to one.
The meeting is a sign that banks and other financial institutions have accepted that aggregator sites are inevitable, said George Barto, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group Inc.
"The banks would prefer that this didn't happen, but it did happen," he said.