The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FTSC) has transferred the management of its eCheck Initiative to CommerceNet. The eCheck was developed by the FTSC as a new payment instrument that combined the security, speed and processing efficiency of an all-electronic transaction with the established legal infrastructure, business processes and consumer options associated with paper checks. Banks, government entities, technology vendors and e-commerce organizations around the world cooperated in the initiative – the Bank of America, CertiCom, Federal Reserve Financial Services, GTE, IBM, Sun Microsystems and the US Treasury, to name a few. ECheck is based on the Financial Services Markup Language (FSML) and digital signatures. For the last year, it has been the sole electronic payment mechanism used by the US Treasury for payments over the internet. Products based on the eCheck are under development at several companies, according to FTSC vice president Frank Jaffe. รก
