Following a summer of identity theft warnings sparked by MasterCard’s announcement that 40 million account numbers had been stolen, two of the vendors in the Microsoft booth at the BAI Retail Delivery conference marked one of the industry’s biggest conferences with announcements of new fraud prevention solutions. Meanwhile, a third Microsoft partner made an announcement about its fraud prevention product in early December.

The John H. Harland Company used the BAI event to unveil Validify, its new solution for combating identity theft and check fraud, powered by Mitek. In tests with several financial institutions, including a national bank and community banks, the solution successfully detected up to 85 percent of forged checks. The solution, which was created based on specifications jointly developed by Harland and Mitek, uses image processing software to encode, encrypt, decode and validate signatures to detect forgeries at any point a check is presented for payment. It is able to catch forgeries without relying on information stored in a database.

Harland says payments fraud is a common concern among their customers and Validify is just the first in a suite of fraud prevention capabilities that it will be rolling out.

Also at the conference, Corillian Corp. announced plans to integrate a multi-layered system for authenticating online banking users into its online banking applications. The enhancement, called Intelligent Authentication, uses multiple patterns of online banking behavior to examine attributes of the online banking users to determine when it is necessary to block or challenge visitors. The solution, which is in response to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council’s (FFIEC) guidelines, will be fully available to customers by year-end 2006.

The system can be used with Corillian’s online banking applications for consumer, business, credit card or wealth management customers, and is also available with the Corillian Voyager platform.

Meanwhile, on December 1, a few weeks after the conference had closed, Microsoft partner Jack Henry & Associates announced that Omni Identity, Inc. will resell Biodentify, the biometric security solution provided by Jack Henry's Verinex Technologies subsidiary. Omni Identity will market Biodentify domestically to financial institutions outside Jack Henry's target market as well as to e-commerce, healthcare, and technology companies. Biodentify uses the physical characteristics of fingerprints to verify and validate identity and eliminates user names, passwords, and the related administration and costs.