Equifax Enables Trust for the Complete Identity Lifecycle

ATLANTA, Feb. 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) announced today new service offerings to complement existing solutions from its Anakam business unit that will significantly enhance trust, reliability and security throughout the identity lifecycle.  The result is a complete identity ecosystem for organizations that want to conduct trusted online transactions with large external user communities such as citizen groups, account owners or e-commerce customers.  

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Equifax's identity lifecycle solutions ensure that organizations know which users have access to their applications; that users have secure on-going access to the applications they need; and that the organization can accurately say who had access at any given time. These services can be deployed as either a cloud solution or an on-premise solution to protect a wide variety of applications across your enterprise.

One of the solutions, the Anakam.ODI On-Demand Identity service, lets an enterprise grant access to users outside the organization with an easy-to-use remote on-demand validation of a person's identity and further ensures the users are trusted for secure access to sensitive internal data.  This frees the organization from managing a detailed identity proofing process for each user and from maintaining an unwieldy identity management system in-house.

Anakam.ODI leverages the unique abilities of the Anakam platform to help achieve NIST SP 800-63 Level 3 requirements for ID proofing using dynamic Knowledge Based Authentication based on a variety of public and private data sources. The solution integrates risk-based authentication with out-of-wallet questions to minimize the costs of identity proofing while maximizing the likelihood that the person conducting the transaction is who they claim to be.

A newly introduced service,  Anakam.CGW Credentialing Gateway, lets enterprises that need to manage identities assign trusted credentials to the user after verifying the upfront identity of a user at enrollment, ensuring proper roles and access to mission-critical applications and systems.  Credentials are confirmed through trusted professional credential repositories – either internal or external to the enterprise.  Degrees earned, certifications, or internal titles can be linked to an electronic identity to grant or deny the user access to particular data or tools.  For example, a tax agency could link CPA credentials to an electronic identity to give that person enhanced access to certain accounts or files.   Enterprises will also be able to verify the identities of the organizations that users are associated with so that they can be assured of the true identity of the partner organizations they are doing business with, and not just the individual user.  

A third service, Anakam.TFA Two Factor Authentication delivers strong authentication for approved users through devices they already own such as a cell phone or office phone.  All Anakam offerings integrate seamlessly with the leading first-factor identity management solutions and SSO technologies such as those made by Microsoft, IBM Tivoli, Oracle and CA Technologies.  

About Equifax (www.equifax.com)

Equifax empowers businesses and consumers with information they can trust. A global leader in information solutions, we leverage one of the largest sources of consumer and commercial data, along with advanced analytics and proprietary technology, to create customized insights that enrich both the performance of businesses and the lives of consumers.

With a strong heritage of innovation and leadership, Equifax continuously delivers innovative solutions with the highest integrity and reliability.  Businesses – large and small – rely on us for consumer and business credit intelligence, portfolio management, fraud detection, decisioning technology, marketing tools, and much more.  We empower individual consumers to manage their personal credit information, protect their identity, and maximize their financial well-being.

Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Equifax Inc. operates in the U.S. and 15 other countries throughout North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Equifax is a member of Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500® Index. Our common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EFX.

SOURCE Equifax