and strategic alliance partner Origo, the UK’s financial services industry standards body, today announced that Trend Micro’s advanced encryption technology has been deployed to power its Unipass Securemail service to secure email communications between life insurers, pension providers and IFAs.

The alliance, a first in the industry, highlights both companies’ commitment to enabling financial services companies to exchange confidential data with their key stakeholders electronically and in an efficient, secure and cost-effective manner.

With financial services keen to adopt electronic business processes, Origo identified the need to introduce secure e-mail services. It subsequently launched an initial pilot programme last year to run encryption-based e-mail services for a number of leading UK life and pension companies with their networks of independent financial advisors (IFAs).

Since the completion of the successful pilot, Unipass Securemail featuring Trend Micro ™ Email Encryption has been rolled out across financial organisations and IFAs.

As part of the roll-out, Origo conducted a research study amongst 31 of the largest distributor groups, representing many thousands of IFAs to gain insight into current email practises and highlight the need for industry wide secure email services.

The research showed that the majority of firms (87%) did not currently have secure email systems, with over half of respondents (58%) highlighting that they were waiting for an industry standard to be put in place. While this is the case, an alarming majority of respondents (94%) said they did use email to send personal, sensitive or confidential data.

“Origo's research confirms that many independent financial advisors use email as a vehicle to exchange confidential and sensitive data”, says Anthony O’Mara, Vice President of EMEA at Trend Micro. “Amongst these organisations, a large majority (84%) expressed concerns that sending personal data via email without suitable security was unacceptably risky. These results confirm that there is a need for an industry-wide solution that ensures adequate email security is in place to prevent data loss and data leakage."

“We believe that there’s a growing need for secure email services that can offer advanced encryption capabilities to secure sensitive data”, says Paul Pettitt, Managing Director of Origo. “A majority of research respondents (90%) confirmed that, if offered, they would consider secure email services. We feel that by bringing together our understanding of the needs of financial services and independent financial advisors as well as Trend Micro’s expertise in facilitating secure digital communications, this partnership is ideally placed to deliver these secure email services.”

About Trend Micro:

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in Internet content security, focuses on securing the exchange of digital information for businesses and consumers. A pioneer and industry vanguard, Trend Micro is advancing integrated threat management technology to protect operational continuity, personal information, and property from malware, spam, data leaks and the newest Web threats. Visit TrendWatch at www.trendmicro.com/go/trendwatch to learn more about the threats. Trend Micro’s flexible solutions, available in multiple form factors, are supported 24/7 by threat intelligence experts around the globe. Many of these solutions are powered by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, a next generation cloud-client content security infrastructure designed to protect customers from Web threats. A transnational company, with headquarters in Tokyo, Trend Micro’s trusted security solutions are sold through its business partners worldwide.

Information Source:    Trend Micro