Banks Test Secure B2B Payment Systems

After months of preparatory work, several banks and other financial institutions have launched pilot implementations of Identrus LLCs secure B2B payment system.

The company also announced Tuesday that it has received an unspecified amount of new funding.

Known as Project Eleanor, the application is the first fruit of the Identrus system, which was formed by a worldwide group of financial institutions. Trading partners in the network will have predetermined instructions with their banks for payment authorization, routing and settlement.

Eleanor was originally conceived as a joint venture among several of the Identrus member banks, but is now owned by Identrus. The application is expected to be in full production by the middle of 2002.

“Our customers and partners are ready to take advantage of e-commerce so they will not have to resort to offline means to execute payments,” said Jane Hennessy, senior vice president at Wells Fargo & Co., which is piloting Eleanor. Other financial concerns involved in the pilot include ABN AMRO Bank N.V. and HypoVereinsbank.

Eleanor features a payment process that gives the seller electronic confirmation of payment, eliminating the need to wait for traditional offline payments. To guarantee non-repudiation of purchases, all of the transactional data, including what was purchased, when and how, is permanently linked to the payment function.

The application has six payment types with varying conditions and terms, but the basic concept of all of them is to have the payment evolve seamlessly from the negotiation and ordering process, Identrus officials said.