Bank of America, for which this work was done, is a multi-billion dollar corporation and operates in 36 countries, so size and scale presented extra challenges to the project. The planning involved meetings of many people from many different fields. The project was approached as a learning experience. Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) was used to provide security. During phase 1 of the project, the scale was kept small. No messages were lost and no tampering was detected, but very few transactions were processed. After this early success, the limits and volumes were increased, and a more substantial number of transactions were processed without detected tampering. Testing showed that the FEDI system (rather than the network) caused most of the delays in messages. Public perceptions of security are an obstacle to this sort of project.
Dan Geer asked if a large part of the problem was from the lack of value added networks; Jaana replied ``yes''. Dan followed by noting that VANs are a small part of the total cost of existing financial transactions. Jaana responded that this is true, and that the cost benefit analysis for this approach is not entirely clear. Bob Gezelter commented that over-batching of messages could be responsible for much of the latency, and Jaana agreed that this was possible.