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It's a Matter of Trust: When the Customer Relationship Is Everything, Businesses Bank on SSL Solutions
It's a Matter of TrustWhen the Customer Relationship Is Everything, Businesses Bank on SSL Solutions
At Charles Schwab, the customer relationship is everything.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, this investment and financial management firm takes pride in its customer service - and it has the client base to prove it. Charles Schwab handles 7.1 million client brokerage accounts, 1.3 million corporate retirement plan participants, and 302,000 banking accounts. For 2007, that netted out in the neighborhood of $1.4 trillion in client assets.
Schwab's commitment to information security Protecting its clients and their assets is a huge responsibility - one speaks directly to the biggest issue that every that Charles Schwab takes very seriously. The company upholds that financial services organization faces: Trust. commitment by making security and privacy a cornerstone of its business philosophy, and more importantly putting its money where its mouth is by investing heavily in addressing evolving online security-related needs. Its latest investment: a new class of authentication, the Extended Validation SSL Certificate, which allows online customers to see, at a glance, if the site they are visiting is one they consider trustworthy - or a fraud masquerading as a legitimate site.
Schwab's commitment to information security speaks directly to the biggest issue that every financial services organization faces: Trust.
It All Comes Back to TrustWhether actually a victim, most individuals see themselves as potential prey to any number of electronic crimes, from an account take-over to credit card fraud or identity theft.
"Who could really blame them?" asks Mick Kless, Vice President of Professional Services at Icons, Inc. a Princeton, N.J.-based security consultancy. "Just open any newspaper, and horror stories abound." Among the recent headlines:
. Phishing attacks on the IRS, enticing taxpayers to relinquish their account numbers in order to receive an early rebate. . The Hannaford retail data breach scandal in which malware re-routed credit card information to awaiting criminals. . Countless new incidents of identity theft. All of these threats put financial services organizations at a disadvantage. Customers are wary, unsure of online transactions - especially when financials are involved. And that's made customer confidence, or the lack thereof, one of the biggest issues financial services organizations face today. Yes, banking institutions have made significant strides in securing their perimeters. "But what's more important is customer perception of those security efforts," Kless says. "Do customers know what their banks are doing to protect them? Do those efforts make customers feel safe enough to transact online?"
Customers need to be confident that they are doing business with authentic entities, says Tim Callan, Vice President of Product Marketing, SSL at VeriSign, Inc. of Mountain View, California, "They need to know that they're dealing with, for example, Bank of America, not the Russian Mafia." And they're looking to their banking institutions to demonstrate that trustworthiness. If not, they're taking their wallets and hitting the road.It's a Matter of Trust: When the Customer Relationship Is Everything, Businesses Bank on SSL Solutions
Case Study: DebtHelp And the Survey Says. Confidence Is KeyThis theme of trust certainly rings true in current market research, namely BankInfoSecurity.Achieves 11% Increase in com's State of Banking Information Security Survey 2008. Some 300 leaders within the Click-Throughs financial services community were polled for their insight into the current state of information security. The resounding theme across the board is confidence. That is, a need for shared As an online debt management trust with employees and partners, but most importantly, with customers.resource facing a potential drop in online conversions due to customer uneasiness, DebtHelp Interestingly, respondents express this confidence in stark contradictions. Indeed, the majority made customer trust a priority rates its ability to address security threats as very good or excellent; and for the most part and jumped at the opportunity they believe their customers share this confidence in their security prowe... [download for more]
