

Net Banking fails Small Enterprises: many opportunities here. - olefoo
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2009-12-30-cybercrime-small-business-online-banking_N.htm

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tptacek
What are the opportunities here? There is perhaps no area of technology more
aggressively addressed by venture capital funded startups than electronic
commerce security; not only that, but the market is moving slowly towards
hardware solutions, which price out seed-stage first-attempt entrepreneurs.

I totally believe there's an angle for startups vs. sucky online banking
(customer service, flexibility, etc), but I don't think security is it.

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olefoo
You're right about the capital intensive nature of this market; and about how
competitive it is. But it's also a very broad market and there are many niches
that are not well served. The linked article points out that organizations and
people whose liquid assets are in the range of $100,000 to $5,000,000 are
particularly vulnerable if they don't keep on top of their network security;
but most businesses in that range don't have full-time staff in that specialty
and don't know enough to effectively deploy packaged solutions.

The larger problem is that innovation in the banking sector is really hampered
on multiple levels. It's highly regulated, consumers are relatively
conservative; and on some level any offering in that market is asking
customers to place their trust in entities they cannot possibly verify to
handle their money responsibly.

Note: did anybody catch the sidebar that referred to the "secure Ubuntu brower
loaded from a USB Stick"?

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tptacek
Again, the major banks are addressing this problem directly across all their
customers. Some of them are doing it with hardware fobs, and some of them are
doing it with "true-r" software multifactor auth. It's a top-of-mind problem
in banking. It doesn't matter what segment of the banking customer base you're
serving: you are up against extreme competition for banking security.

I'm not saying there's no opportunity with small business banking. I'm sure
the banks themselves are painful enough to deal with that a Wesabe-a-like has
a good shot at capturing the market.

(NB: banking security kind of in our wheelhouse at Matasano).

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rwhitman
I agree about opportunity, online banking is my #1 reservation about going
with smaller local banks.

If there were a super-secure, super-stable, fully-featured product for smaller
banks out there to leverage as their online banking platform it would be such
a game-changer

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charliepark
Wesabe has actually done just this, with their Springboard product.
<http://www.wesabe.com/page/springboard>

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precipice
Thanks, Charlie. A better link these days is:
<https://www.getspringboard.com/>

We aren't really going after small business accounts (referring to the main
article), at least not yet. I do think banking software has a ton of room to
change.

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ars
"We're not entirely sure who ended up with the funds."

How is that possible? Can't electronic money be fully traced?

~~~
olefoo
Across multiple transactions, through multiple jurisdictions, in cases where
not all of the entities involved are acting in good faith?

Not easily.

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steveklabnik
I've been having some discussions with people lately about the concept of
'banking as a service.' Enable people to make a co-op of credit unions, and
pool the resources together for things like online banking, iPhone ATM finding
apps, and similar things...

