Pub. 9 2014-2015 Issue 4

www.nebankers.org 8 Extraordinary Service for Extraordinary Members. W HEN THE INTERNET CORPORA- tion for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) an- nounced 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 leader- ship, did just as it has done since 1875. We led. In 2008, ICANN approved a pro- gram to enable the creation of an unlim- ited 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 ac- cepted applications for new gTLDs and received nearly 2,000 submissions. So far, ICANN has approved more than 100 of those, withmany 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 fTLDRegistry Services, which ABA, the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), and others founded in 2012 for this purpose. Washington Update Email Frank Keating at keating@aba.com. © 2014 American Bankers Association. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. .bank, ABA & You Frank Keating , President & CEO, American Bankers Association ABA decided it was in the best inter- est 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 inter- ests 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 do- ing 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 bank- ing 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 frombeing redirected to fake bank websites, help make it more difficult for criminals to create spoofed emails from a .bank domain, provide a higher level of encryption, and more. We expect the domain to be avail- able 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 ques- tions include whether tomove 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, in- cluding a special process for trademark holders, visit aba.com/dotbank. ABA’s work to secure the .bank do- main is a reflection of our longstanding leadership in payments and cybersecu- rity. Count on us to continue that leader- ship role as the field becomes ever more complex and important. 