New Delhi,12th December,2013 – SafeNet India Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of SafeNet Inc., a global leader in data protection, was recently awarded Compliance Project of the Year during the Global Conference on Financial Inclusion & Payment Systems (FIPS) in India for its contribution in securing the Cheque Truncation System (CTS) through a PKI-based solution.
The Cheque Truncation System, a project of the Reserve Bank of India, speeds up the collection of cheques, enhances customer service, reduces the scope for clearing related frauds, minimizes the cost of collection of cheques, reduces reconciliation problems, and eliminates logistics problems.
Although electronic banking has become more popular with consumers, cheques continue to be utilized as a common means of payment and deposit. Therefore, banks must focus on improving the efficiency of the Cheque Clearing Cycle. Cheque Truncation is a more secure system than the current exchange of physical documents where the cheque moves from one point to another. This system can create delays and cause customer inconvenience if the cheques are lost in transit or manipulated during the clearing cycle.
With CTS, bank customers benefit in the following ways:
· Faster realization and credit
· Extended presentment window
· Improved reconciliation services for corporate customers and government departments
· Reduction in geographical dependence
· Reduced operational risk due to inbuilt security in the workflow
· Faster customer services- reduced TATs on service requests, queries and Management Information System (MIS)
SafeNet Luna series Hardware Security Modules provided reliable protection by securing critical keys and provisioning encryption, decryption and digital signing services. The secure and certified boundary of Luna does not allow any unauthorized access to the keys, which are the root of trust in the entire security system. Luna HSMs offloaded and accelerated cryptographic operations to a dedicated cryptographic processor that eliminated bottlenecks and maximized application performance so that large number of cheque images can be cleared in a designated time frame.
Mr. Rana Gupta, Business Head, SafeNet India, said, “SafeNet has provided a security solution using PKI as per the IT Act of India to make the Cheque Truncation System secure, interoperable and scalable. SafeNet’s solution helps CTS to securely establish smooth communication between banks and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). This security ensures the non-repudiation, integrity, confidentiality and strong authentication of the cheque images, since the cheque images are encrypted and unauthorized users can’t alter the image. The strength of security has been revised to higher levels time to time as per the guidelines of Controller of Certificate Authorities (CCA), Govt. of India.
Strong security implemented in CTS across India has made it one of the most trusted payment systems like Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT). It has also encouraged many peer countries to follow similar standards and compliance to avoid breaches throughout the life cycle of cheque images during the clearing process. The successful implementation has laid the road ahead for digitalizing many other financial processes without worrying about security. This model is quite successful and no breach has been reported so far.
