Yodlee Contributes to Financial Security Industry Standard

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Yodlee, Inc., the leading provider of personal financial management (PFM) and integrated payments solutions, announced that it was recognized as a Subject Matter Expert for contributing to the development of the Application Security elements of the BITS Shared Assessments Agreed Upon Procedures (AUP) version 5.0. The Shared Assessments Program's AUP now offers procedures for financial application security assessment, specifications on cloud computing and widgets.

The Shared Assessments Program's goals are to streamline and standardize the service provider evaluation process, introducing speed, efficiencies and cost savings.  As a member of the Shared Assessments Program and Technical Development Committee, Yodlee contributed its expertise to the development of new procedures with an eye to computing services offered "in the cloud."  The AUP procedures provide a rigorous toolkit for service provider audits that can be used in popular cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments.  Provisions relevant to cloud and SaaS environments have also been inserted into several sections of the Shared Assessments questionnaire, known as the "SIG."  

"At Yodlee, we are opening our platform to software developers so that they can write applications that enable people to manage their finances practically," said Peter Hazlehurst, Senior Vice President of Products at Yodlee. "We are thrilled to learn the Shared Assessments standards provide a best practice (or benchmark) for evaluating controls around cloud computing and widgets. It is Yodlee's mission to always stay at the forefront of security needs."

Catherine A. Allen, Chairman and CEO of The Santa Fe Group, stated, "Yodlee and its fellow Technical Development Committee members have helped raised the bar for the industry with new Shared Assessments standards that addresses application security, cloud computing and SaaS environments." The Santa Fe Group is a strategic consultancy that manages the Shared Assessments Program.

To ensure the integrity and protection of consumer data, Yodlee is also in the process of implementing its certification programs for all developers interested in working with Yodlee's FinApp Store, coming in 2010. For every widget developed, Yodlee will use the enhanced Shared Assessments AUP 5.0 as an initial security audit.

To learn more about Yodlee's security practices and involvement with Shared Assessments, visit yodlee.com.

About Yodlee

Leading financial institutions and portals trust Yodlee to power critical online banking applications that increase profitability and drive more value from the online channel. Yodlee's proven personal financial management, payments, and customer acquisition solutions unify all personal financial account information to deliver a simple, centralized and secure way for consumers to manage all of their financial tasks anytime, anywhere. Yodlee makes financial institutions' Web sites essential to their customers and generates new deposit and revenue opportunities. Yodlee's patented data, payments and risk management utility supports more than 11,000 account sources and over 100,000 different account types. More than 100 leading financial institutions and portals offer Yodlee-powered solutions to millions of customers worldwide. Yodlee is headquartered in Redwood City, California. For more information, visit www.yodlee.com.

About BITS and Shared Assessments

BITS (www.bits.org) was created in 1996 to foster the growth and development of electronic financial services and for the benefit of financial institutions and their customers. A division of The Financial Services Roundtable (www.fsround.org), BITS provides intellectual capital and addresses emerging issues where financial services, technology and commerce intersect, acting quickly to address problems and galvanize the industry.

The Shared Assessments Program (www.sharedassessments.org) was created by leading financial institutions, the Big 4 accounting firms, and key service providers to inject standardization, consistency, speed, efficiency and cost savings into the service provider assessment process. Today, nearly 60 major outsourcers, service providers, assessment firms and licensees participate in Shared Assessments. Designed to help outsourcers carefully evaluate the security of the systems, processes and controls their service providers have in place, the Shared Assessments Program offers a faster, more efficient and less costly means of conducting control assessments. The Shared Assessments is managed by The Santa Fe Group (www.santa-fe-group.com).

Yodlee is a registered trademark of Yodlee, Inc. All other products and services mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Yodlee, Inc.