Here’s an abstract from the paper: In wrapping up the closing plenary and Sibos itself, CEO Lázaro Campos chose to illustrate SWIFT’s commitment to bringing innovation into the banking mainstream, in particular via Innotribe. “Innovation and operational excellence are not contradictory,” he observed. Campos also congratulated the two winners of this year’s USD 50,000 Innotribe innovation challenge: Truaxis, whose StatementRewards system analyses customer’s recurring bills to offer better deals via their online banking site; and GuardTime, which provides software that generates keyless signatures to provide a provable audit trail for electronic data.

Read the full SIBOS Issues paper.

O’Connor explains, “In order for the evidence to exist and be viable, it is critical that the appropriate authorities are able to preserve the entire content of a target web page or other online resource in an evidentially-sound manner without converting, re-formatting, or otherwise modifying the original content. Furthermore, the near future will bring the need for the evidence itself to possess independent proof that it was captured at the time claimed and that it has not been tampered with in any way since its collection and preservation. Today’s hashes that are used to instill trust in the data will no longer be sufficient – digital signatures will be required to deliver proof surrounding the evidence.”

The team at GuardTime couldn’t agree more Owen.

Read the full article.

GuardTime developed and provides the solution code-named “DataConductor,” which can detect changes and/or transfers of any data stored in both datacenters and cloud environments. By signing the data using GuardTime’s Keyless Signatures, DataConductor can automatically detect when and where the data was created or transferred, and if the data has been tampered with or not. An alert is sent to the customer when an abnormal status is detected. DataConductor can assure the integrity of data and confirm the location where data exists, providing a full audit trail of data storage in the Cloud. DataConductor enables regulatory compliance for archiving with commodity cloud storage.

As a leading provider of information security, NRI Secure has accumulated extensive and profound consulting knowledge with product offerings that, together with one-stop services, provide comprehensive security solutions to customers in sectors such as the government, financial services, retail, and enterprises. In particular, as cloud computing demand grows, NRI Secure is increasingly undertaking a number of projects for the secure building and management of cloud services.

GuardTime and NRI Secure will leverage the solutions and know-how on both sides to collaborate in the following areas:

• Solution service integration: Planning and development on the integration of GuardTime DataConductor into NRI Secure’s security management solutions and services.
• Joint marketing and sales activities: Both companies will jointly hold seminars and conferences to introduce the solutions. Both companies will jointly identify business opportunities and propose solutions to existing and new customers.

About NRI SecureTechnologies, Ltd.
NRI SecureTechnologies, a leading provider of information security solutions, is one of the group companies of Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. Established in 2000, it examines information security at business corporations from the aspects of technology and business management and offers a one-stop service from consulting to solution implementation, training, management and surveillance.

For more information visit http://www.nri-secure.co.jp

“GuardTime sits at the intersection of several trends. GuardTime sets itself apart by proposing a fundamentally different model for establishing and maintaining the integrity of a data volume as it moves between domains and virtualized instances. GuardTime has a flexible, lightweight and distributed system approach to providing a one-to-many method of verification and provability.”

Read the full report here: 451 Group Impact Report

GuardTime was among the top companies to enter the competition, claiming the spot of Best Candidate. During one of the follow-up sessions, GuardTime’s Keyless Signature technology was described as “having the potential to bring huge value in many places,” notably in the areas of banking and e-commerce.

Learn more about SmartCamp 2011 in Shanghai.

“GuardTime’s technology allows documents to be signed easily and securely, making forgeries and changing an already signed document without the signer’s consent impossible,” said the Estonian Minister of Economic Affairs and Communications Juhan Parts. “Estonia’s ambition is to be the most secure e-states in the world and GuardTime provides significant alternatives in the realization of Estonian public sector security measures,” Parts added.

According to GuardTime Estonia CEO Raul Vahisalu, cracking digital timestamps is mathematically impossible and signatures cannot be forged or changed without the author’s consent. “These reasons make it a perfect data protection solution for countries, which have to keep their data secured on one hand, but also make it accessible to citizens. We are very keen to start co-operation,” said Vahisalu.

The first Estonian public sector organization working on implementing GuardTime’s signature is the National Archive of Estonia. “For long-term storage, ensuring authenticity is one of the key issues,” said Lauri Leht, head of the National Archive’s digital preservation bureau. “Implementing timestamps for digitized documents coming into the archive and signing internal materials gives an objective proof that the files have not been changed by unauthorized users,” added Leht.

GuardTime’s keyless data signature can be verified by a code published in the Financial Times that contains a hash value, date and time record. In Estonia, GuardTime’s technology has already been adopted by SEB Bank.

GuardTime’s founders invented an algorithm that mathematically proves the time, location and integrity of electronic data at rest and in motion. GuardTime’s Keyless Signatures enable enterprises to switch to a cloud compute model with confidence, maintaining an independent audit trail of all data and related activities while complying with regulatory and legal admissibility requirements.

Contacts:
Raul Vahisalu
CEO of GuardTime Estonia
+372 509 0385
raul.vahisalu@guardtime.com

Uuno Vallner
Director of the Division of Information Technology Architecture at the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications
+372 513 7174
uuno.vallner@riso.ee

Lauri Leht
Head of the National Archive’s Digital Preservation Bureau
+3727387535
lauri.leht@ra.ee

REYKJAVÍK, ICELAND—December 09, 2011— Aha (www.aha.is), one of the largest eCommerce companies in Iceland with its main focus on daily deals, selling Internet coupons for everything from spa treatments to Go-Kart racing, has teamed up with data integrity service provider GuardTime in order to bring Aha merchants peace of mind. With the GuardTime Keyless Signature Service, Aha will be able to solidify its business agreements, conduct tamper-evident coupon transaction auditing for all its daily deals, and wipe out the question of trust that can linger around the authenticity of the data.

Selling “deal of the day” e-coupons to consumers is hugely popular, as evidenced by Groupon Inc.’s recent $700 million initial public offering, the largest IPO by a U.S. Internet company since Google’s 2004 IPO. There are plenty of other daily deals sites to reference as well, including U.S.- and UK-based LivingSocial, which last week managed a national offer for McDondald’s, the fast food chain’s largest daily deal ever.

Yet with so much money at stake, fraud attempts are bound to follow. Aside from risks of coupon tampering, daily deals service providers typically have full control over their transaction-processing and data storage systems which can also raise doubt in merchants’ minds concerning the handling of the data. Without a verifiable auditing system in place, how is a service provider to prove authenticity on its end in the event that a dispute arises?

For example, this week Groupon was accused of altering previously-sent emails which capture the details of its agreements with its merchants. Filing a class action lawsuit, BidMyCrib.com sued Groupon in a Chicago federal court for allegedly violating the Stored Communications Act by altering sent emails “in electronic storage”. While GuardTime has no insight into either party’s position on the matter, this is a case that would be easy to prove either way – and could have even been avoided – if Keyless Signatures had been applied.

Aha’s daily deals service uses digital and printed coupons, allowing merchants to log any usage through QR codes and a secure merchant fulfillment web portal. The terms of service are also negotiated and agreed upon prior to merchant deals being offered to consumers. With the number of merchants, consumers, and transactions residing within the Aha service platform, it is critical to have proof of who is involved, what each party has agreed to, and what activities have taken place. All aspects of each agreement and every step of each transaction require a verifiable audit trail. This is where GuardTime Keyless Signatures come into play.

“The amount of activity on any one daily deals website creates a lot of traffic and a lot of noise that opens the opportunity for a tremendous amount of fraud, and even accidental mishandling of coupons by the merchants themselves,” says Mike Gault, GuardTime CEO. “By digitally signing all transactions through a third party, Aha can strengthen its relationships with its merchants, converting trust-based handshakes into proof-based binding digital agreements.”

“As a company with a strong focus on eCommerce, we see tremendous value in using Keyless Signatures,” says Maron Kristófersson, CEO of Aha. “We currently sign 3-4 agreements with customers each day; with Keyless Signatures we envision a future in which all these agreements are finalized online, saving us paper, simplifying accounting, and saving a tremendous amount of time in our sales processes.”

In addition to increasing efficiency and turning the data that passes though Aha’s system into signed, tamper-evident data, the GuardTime Keyless Signature Service is also the only solution to provide Aha with the ability to independently verify the signatures without reliance on GuardTime or any other third party.

“With GuardTime we have bank-grade, tamper-evident security and can produce a verifiable digital audit trail for every action,” added Kristófersson. “Merchants that use our system have practically eliminated the risk of processing false coupons as the success rate for coupon tampering is as likely as winning the lottery.”

In summary, by using the GuardTime Keyless Signature Service, Aha receives the following benefits:

• All business arrangements and associated agreements are recorded and maintained with lifelong non-repudiation.
• Merchants can prove electronic coupon authenticity prior to accepting and processing.
• All parties have proof of the status of electronic coupons.
• Trust is now backed by mathematics.

Aha eCommerce Case Study
Click here to read the Aha eCommerce Case Study. The Case Study is also available for download as a PDF:

DOWNLOAD THE AHA ECOMMERCE CASE STUDY

eCommerce Auditing Solution

About Aha.is
Aha.is, one of the largest eCommerce companies in Iceland, provides a daily deals service which enables multiple merchants to list online offers for goods and services that consumers can purchase at tough-to-beat prices. Aha’s e-coupon system makes it easy for merchants to increase sales and reach wider consumer audiences while also providing a hub for consumers to find terrific deals on just about anything.

For more information, please visit: www.aha.is.

Aha Contact
Maron Kristófersson, CEO, Aha
Email: maron@aha.is
Phone: +354 664 7311

All company names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Why is this important? Because this process ensures an ironclad, independently-verifiable proof of time when an invention was made, along with proof-of-invention ownership that adheres to U.S. “first-to-invent” requirements. The process also ensures that the data associated with the IP is legally-admissible as evidence in the event of an attack aimed at violating patent rights.

Benchmark’s BMark^SM Real-Time solution provides continuous market-derived real-time pricing data for fixed-income and derivatives products – starting with corporate bonds and credit default swaps, with ongoing expansion slated across other OTC asset classes.

Says Peter Cotton, Benchmark’s Chief Scientist, “We saw the value in cryptographically timestamping intellectual property, notwithstanding possible changes to patent law. The GuardTime solution was an easy win and, given the simplicity of the product, we envisage other uses for the technology going forward.”

Using patent-pending Market Calibrated Framework^SM technology, the BMark Real-Time solution provides unbiased, streaming prices for over 2000 CDS curves across six distinct tenors, and 90% of the corporate bond volume monitored on TRACE. Over 12 million market inputs are analyzed to generate 118 million market-derived prices each trading day with updates every 10 seconds, providing up-to-the-minute assessments of market conditions, credit risk, and the complex dynamics of the credit landscape.

To maintain a competitive position, it’s critical for organizations to protect its IP. Using GuardTime Keyless Signatures to sign its IP data, Benchmark Solutions will effectively protect its in-progress inventions, pending patents, and granted patents.

Benchmark Solutions Case Study
Click here to read the Benchmark Solutions Case Study. The Case Study is also available for download as a PDF:

DOWNLOAD THE BENCHMARK SOLUTIONS CASE STUDY

IP Protection and Theft Prevention

About Benchmark Solutions
Benchmark Solutions was founded in the wake of the credit crisis in September 2009 to address fundamental shortcomings in price transparency and independence in the fixed-income and derivatives markets – a market that currently trades in the dark with little or no real-time pricing data for a majority of its assets. Backed by Warburg Pincus and led by CEO, Jim Toffey (Founder and CEO of Tradeweb), Benchmark has spent two years and significant financial investment in technology and human capital to solve this problem.

Benchmark’s flagship solution creates the industry’s first and only fully independent, streaming, market-driven pricing for US corporate bonds and CDS with ongoing expansion across other OTC asset classes.

Based on a patent-pending market-calibrated technology, the firm provides comprehensive pricing transparency and analytic solutions offering pre-trade intelligence to empower investment decisions and enhance their clients’ daily workflows, helping them understand the true market value of assets, discover previously unseen buy/sell opportunities, and proactively manage risk in real-time.

Benchmark employs over 70 professionals in finance and technology and is headquartered in New York.

For more information, please visit: www.benchmarksolutions.com.

Benchmark Solutions PR Contact
Ceci Thomas, Benchmark Solutions
Email: ceci.thomas@benchmarksolutions.com

All company names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Financial messaging network Swift is to extend its start-up challenge to three regional showcase events in the US, Asia, and Europe, inviting companies to pitch for the chance to present their innovations to financial institutions at Sibos – Swift’s annual conference – in Osaka in 2012.

In 2011, over 200 financial technology and service start-ups applied to the Challenge. This year’s competition at Sibos In Toronto was won by Truaxis and GuardTime, each netting $50,000 in prize money. Mike Gault, CEO of GuardTime says participation in the challenge generated more than 50 leads for the Singapore-based firm.

This year’s Regional Showcases will be held in New York on 8 February 2012, Bangkok in April 2012, and Belfast in June 2012.

Read the full article online