Under the project, more than 100,000 digital certificates will be issued over the next six months to corporate banking customers and Chinese stock traders who perform online transactions valued at over 1 billion U.S. dollars.

Bill Conner, president and chief executive officer of Entrust, said in an interview with Xinhua that the project was launched at a time when China is gaining more and more impetus in on-line business.

"Entrust is focused on penetrating key vertical markets containing lead adopters of enhanced Internet security solutions and services," said the CEO.

"As China gains Internet users at a rate of more than 100 percent each year, and as more governments and businesses around the world move more valuable and sensitive services and data online, the demand for enhanced Internet security continues to grow," he added.

"We started to focus on key geographic countries, and obviously China was one of those key areas we focused... and as we all know, security is going to be the key of the success of e-commerce," he said, explaining why Entrust choose to launch this securing on- line banking project in China.

The CFCA, security services provider for China's financial sector, such as national and regional banks, stock brokerages, enterprises and e-commerce sites, is quickly becoming the key security driver for China's e-commerce infrastructure.

It already has issued through its 13 member banks in a pilot program about 15,000 digital IDs from Entrust to help secure those financial institutions' online banking services, according to Entrust, a leading global provider of Internet security services and solutions.

(People's Daily 08/31/2001)