Pub. 3 2014 Issue 9

l e a d i n g a d v o c a t e f o r t h e b a n k i n g i n d u s t r y i n k a n s a s 14 W HEN THE INTERNET CORPORATION for Assigned Names and Numbers – ICANN – announced that more than a thousand new top level domains would be unleashed on the Internet, there was little doubt about our response. ABA, guided by our banker leadership, did just as it has done since 1875. We led. In 2008, ICANN approved a program to enable the creation of an unlimited number of new generic Top-Level Domains, or gTLDs. The most common of these today are .com, .org, .net, etc. From January to May 2012, ICANN accepted applications for new gTLDs and received nearly 2,000 submissions. So far, ICANN has approved more than 100 of those, with many more expected. Among the new domains is “.bank.” And, thanks to a multi- year effort by ABA and other banking organizations, that domain will be operated by the banking industry. Specifically, it will be operated by fTLD Registry Services, which ABA, the Financial Services Roundtable and others founded in 2012 for this purpose. ABA decided it was in the best interest of the global banking community for .bank to be owned and managed by the banking industry. Our reasons were twofold. We wanted to protect the interests of the banking industry by ensuring outsiders, whose main interest would have been making a profit, were not at the controls. And we wanted to preserve customers’ trust in banking. We are doing that by making sure proper security controls are in place to protect .bank. Those controls begin with the fact that only verified members of the banking community will be able to register for a .bank site. The new domain also will have enhanced levels of security and adhere to 31 strict standards developed by ABA and FSR. These will help prevent users from being redirected to fake bank websites, help make it more difficult for criminals to create spoofed e-mails from a .bank domain, provide a higher level of encryption, and more. We expect the domain to be available in June 2015, at which time fTLD will have a website that will guide banks through the registration process. In the meantime, you’ve got some planning questions to consider with your marketing, IT and legal staffs, as well as your core processor. These questions include whether to move all of your Internet activities to .bank or keep some activities in the bank’s existing .com or .net site. To learn more about .bank and the process for applying for a domain, including a special process for trademark holders, visit aba.com/dotbank. ABA’s work to secure the .bank domain is a reflection of our longstanding leadership in payments and cybersecurity. Count on us to continue that leadership role as the field becomes ever more complex and important. E-mail Frank Keating at keating@aba.com © 2014 American Bankers Association. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. ‘.BANK’, ABA AND YOU By Frank Keating, President and CEO American Bankers Association KBA will be hosting webinars in January and February on the ‘.bank’ issue with Doug Johnson, ABA. Details will follow in the e-Source.