The echeck project was started in 1996 by the FSTC (Financial Services Technology Consortium), a bank technology research group. The project was an early attempt to provide a secure, internet-based payment system, similar in use to paper checks in the US.
The project particpants included a number of large, important organizations, including the Bank of America, The Federal Reserve, the Department of Defense, Citibank, IBM, Sun, and many others.
There were a number of important technlogical advances made by the project, including...
- The first use of digital signatures to sign a markup document (this was before XML existed).
- The use of smartcards to perform digital signing, which demonstrated an important technological advantage of using smartcard technology to mitigate the security problems caused by viruses, trojan horses, and other malware. It also demonstrated the use of this technology to greatly reduce the possibily of identity theft.
- The widespread use of a Public Key Infrastructure, built and operated by the banks.
The IBM Research contribution to the project included major design work on the markup language used for echecks, called FSML, and editing of the specification document.
The IBM Research team also designed and developed a high performance Echeck Bank Server system. It was capable of handling hundreds of thousands of echecks a day, and was successfully used in a pilot project by several banks. Also, with the assistance of the IBM CPCS group in Charlotte, the server was interfaced to the IBM CPCS system, which is in wide use by banks for paper check processing.
Last updated 11 Jan 2007