Barclays strengthens online security
I’ve written before about security problems in online banking systems, being quite disappointed that financial institutions have been slow to step up security using even the simplest of tools, especially for personal and small business customers.
A couple of months ago, PayPal introduced security tokens in the form of RSA SecurID key fobs, quite an interesting move I expected one of the high street banks to be implementing first. I was however pleased to now see Barclays introducing a pin pad device which will generate a similar code, although this one in conjunction with a chip-and-pin card. This has the potential of being very useful if it can be shared across all cards, although personally I would much prefer a key fob, although as I have stated before, this does suffer from the problem of carrying around many of them, but to be honest I wouldn’t be carrying around a pocket calculator either.
It would be great if banks allowed customers to define their own security levels within a certain framework. For example, I would be quite happy with slightly less security for smaller transactions, and those to payees who I have paid before, and require specific chin-and-pin + pin pad authenticated transaction when making a payment which is quite large or to a new payee. However, banks usually only do something new when they are forced, rather than to try and improve their service, so I guess I’ll be waiting for several years more for this and some XML interfaces.