Government May Soon Force Banks To Impose New Online Authentication Steps Hot
"The FFIEC is an interagency council that develops standards for the federal auditing of financial institutions by bodies such as the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC)," PC World reports.
In 2005, it issued a set of guidelines, titled "Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment." It called on banks to upgrade their single-factor authentication processes -- typically based on user name and passwords -- with a stronger, second form of authentication by the end of 2006.
That change caused havoc for account aggregation systems. However, most account aggregation systems rely less on screen scraping and more on direct downloads now. So authentication changes are likely to have less impact this time around--one would hope.