VRSN press release
eBay note from PayPal president
San Jose, Calif. and Mountain View, Calif, Oct. 10, 2005 –
eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and VeriSign (Nasdaq: VRSN) today announced a strategic alliance that calls for the two companies to collaborate on payment services and security initiatives for e-commerce. Under the terms of the agreements, PayPal, an eBay company, will acquire VeriSign’s payment gateway business and combine it with PayPal’s leading merchant services platform. VeriSign will also provide eBay and PayPal with a suite of security services that includes the deployment of two-factor authentication, a security system that gives customers a one-time password or digital certificate to help protect against online identity theft.
With the acquisition of VeriSign’s payment gateway, which processed more than $40 billion in total payment volume in 2004, PayPal plans to accelerate its merchant services business by expanding its customer base to tens of thousands of new small and medium-sized business customers online. The payment gateway is a real-time, scalable Internet payment platform that allows merchants to authorize, process and manage online payments. The combination of VeriSign’s payments gateway with PayPal’s existing services will provide merchants with multiple processing choices from a single provider, including VeriSign’s gateway, PayPal’s Website Payments Standard, Express Checkout or Website Payments Pro.
Wow. Big news for some of us. I am intrigued by the eBay/PayPal deployment of multi-factor authentication tokens. They'll be eBay branded tokens, but will be VeriSign Unified Authentication Service devices. RSA and AOL made an annoucement last year that they were doing this, but I haven't heard or seen anything about it since then. I saw a web mock up of an AOL token...basically the SecurID SD600 in a baby blue tinge with AOL branding.