The use of the Internet to conduct businesses without the need for physical presence has already been accepted but it is still far away from being established as a common medium for both financial and non-financial transactions.

Today, many online communications are performed through Web browsers, emails and other interactive front ends systems, operated by users to access the backend applications. With the evolution of Internet technology, may companies today are looking at automating their physical business processes in such a way that the communication between companies/ to legal entities are handled purely by these application programmes only. This further poses new challenges on ways to create "Trust" out of these machines as well as the application programmes and servers.

To create a trusted environment in the e-World, we require proper mechanisms to be in placed in a perfect way that online trust can be created and transferred from specific entities to other entities with whom we are communicating with.

A trusted environment is characterised by :

• The fact that all entities are uniquely identifiable
• That there is a minimum number of prior trusted entities
• That these entities have unquestionable trust to other participating entities

A trusted electronic business environment enhanced by the iVEST Secure Transactions Platform can offer significant cost savings as well as open up new market channels. It can also make an e-government delivery system over the Net a reality today.

The iVEST Secure Transactions Platform offers a range of products and services for developing secure applications that are truly safe, scalable and robust