IBM, Equifax Team Up for Secure Electronic Commerce

NEW YORK —  IBM and consumer-credit agency Equifax Inc., pledging to make the Internet a trustworthy place to do business, will announce today a plan to ensure that online customers are who they claim to be, executives said.

The executives said Equifax will act as an independent verifier of computer users’ identities for companies using IBM’s Internet commerce system. The system would allow companies to trade purchase orders, lawyers to exchange contracts and consumers to conduct home banking and make credit-card purchases via the Internet while going a long way toward eliminating the potential for fraud.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of IBM’s Internet division, said in a recent interview that the system will give electronic commerce customers the same level of confidence that they have in face-to-face transactions.

As part of a series of announcements, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM will introduce Vault, a complete set of technologies and services that establishes computer users’ identities and enables them to encode and transmit information over networks securely.

Equifax, based in Atlanta, will handle verification services for corporate customers, performing a series of checks and counterchecks comparable to those for a bank safe-deposit box, in which dual keys are used to secure valuables, even from bank employees.

“The essence is to ensure that people are who they say they are,” Equifax Chief Executive Thomas Chapman said.

IBM will begin offering the Vault system next month. The Equifax service, built around the Vault system, will be offered to North American customers in the third quarter and eventually expand to other continents.

Vault supplements an existing IBM system for securing credit-card transactions over the Internet that has been available for a year, executives said.

Importantly for Equifax, the partnership marks the expansion onto the Internet of the company’s business of managing confidential financial information for retailers, banks and other financial institutions.