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New Meridea Software Beefs Up Mobile Banking Security

With growing pervasiveness of Internet usage in Singapore and a shockingly low incidence of users taking safety precautions (only 56% use anti-spyware and 53% use a firewall, according to a recent IDC survey), Internet banking has been steeped in fraud of some sort or the other. ‘Phishing’ by fraudulent websites, spyware disguised as innocuous files; Trojan and ‘Man-in-the-Middle’ attacks – these are some of the alarming alerts Internet users hear about with increasing frequency.

To combat the prevalence and increasing sophistication of attacks on Internet security, the Monetary Authority of Singapore issued guidelines to financial institutions and encouraged banks to strengthen their online verification procedures by adopting two-factor authentication (2FA). Two-factor authentication refers to any method of authentication requiring two independent ways to establish identity and privileges. Traditional login authentication requires only one 'factor' (a password or PIN) in order to gain access to a system.

Meridea, a mobile and online self-service software provider, has taken more than just notice of the new guidelines for Internet security. Meridea has unveiled a 2FA software solution that circumvents the need for banks to invest in hardware-based methods of authentication using physical tokens. Consumers benefit from the convenience of not having to carry, and keep track of, separate tokens for different banks. A lost phone would be noticed sooner than a misplaced token that is only used occasionally – and the bank only needs to send a new token to the consumer’s new mobile phone.

Meridea’s 2FA solution authenticates the customer to the bank in real time, besides authenticating the bank and the transaction to the customer – providing protection against sophisticated ‘phishing’ and ‘Man-in-The-Middle’ attacks. Customers can be sure that what they have authorized is exactly what they have instructed the bank to do, and therefore be sure that the transaction is unaltered (and unalterable) by a “Man-In-The-Middle”.

2FA can be configured to handle simple transactions such as logon, or more complex transactions such as 3rd party payments, external transfers and brokerage transactions.


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