BACS wins award in Berlin

Sources close to the organisation told SC Magazine that the automated bank clearing house BACS and Thales won the award for the BACSTEL-IP project.

The project has been running for 18 months now and will be finished in 2005 when BACS' 50,000 corporate customers are issued with more than 250,000 PKI-based smartcards by participating banks in the scheme. The project allows customers to make financial transactions on the BACS system using digital signing and smartcards within a PKI framework.

Tim Lambertstock, technology strategy manager at BACS has been working on the project since it began. He said the award "endorses the work gone into making the system reliable and secure."

"It's great to get the award and we are very proud of what we created," he said.

He said the project has kick-started token-based PKI in the UK.

"(PKI) has had a bad press in the past, but our customers think the system is great as they no longer need to remember multiple passwords." He added that customers have seen better integration with their own systems than with the previous BACS infrastructure.

"It slots in much more consistently than previous systems as they were isolated from the bank's own networks."

He predicted there will now be similar schemes using PKI tokens for personal banking use.

www.bacs.co.uk