BT and Hitachi Europe Ltd. announced that they are jointly designing an identity management solution for the financial services market. In this move, BT is introducing BT Unified Trading federation, a cloud-based trust utility for secure identity exchange and will incorporate Hitachi’s Finger Vein Authentication Engine and technology to offer biometric security capabilities.

The combined strengths of both products will offer the market a trusted solution for the secure interchange of identities between financial firms, identity providers and service providers, at the heart of financial services industry.

BT Unified Trading federation will be accessible by the 15,000+ member sites in the BT Radianz Cloud, a secure networked financial services community. An advantage to the federation solution is that firms retain responsibility for their own directories, authentication and the attributes they enable third parties to see.

BT Unified Trading federation facilitates the secure exchange of that information.
The solution will use Hitachi’s Finger Vein Authentication Engine and technology. This provides financial institutions with user convenience, cost savings and productivity benefits, as well as improved security, an automatic audit trail and improved compliance.

The new system aims to deliver benefits to financial institutions, including:

• Single sign-on to cloud and enterprise applications and devices
• Identity and counterparty assurance for the market
• Improving security – reducing ability for individuals to use login credentials from a firm they have left
• Collaboration across organizational boundaries
• Rapid establishment of effective relationships and business-to-business processes through self administration and management of identity
• Helping to address regulatory issues, for example, an imperative of the Dodd-Frank Act in the USA will be to introduce more accountability in terms of systems and procedures that relate to areas such as keeping customer information safe, protecting intellectual corporate data and combating identity theft.