TREND MICRO: Trend Micro and Origo secure e-mail services for UK life and pensions sector

Trend Micro, Incorporated (TSE: 4704),a global leader in Internet content security and strategic alliance partnerOrigo, the UK's financial services industry standards body, today announced that Trend Micro's advanced encryption technology has been deployed to power its Unipass Securemail service to secure email communications between life insurers, pension providers and IFAs.

The alliance, a first in the industry, highlights both companies' commitment to enabling financial services companies to exchange confidential data with their key stakeholders electronically and in an efficient, secure and cost-effective manner.

With financial services keen to adopt electronic business processes, Origo identified the need to introduce secure e-mail services. It subsequently launched an initial pilot programme last year to run encryption-based e-mail services for a number of leading UK life and pension companies with their networks of independent financial advisors (IFAs).

Since the completion of the successful pilot, Unipass Securemail featuring Trend Micro Email Encryption has been rolled out across financial organisations and IFAs.

As part of the roll-out, Origo conducted a research study amongst 31 of the largest distributor groups, representing many thousands of IFAs to gain insight into current email practises and highlight the need for industry wide secure email services.

The research showed that the majority of firms (87%) did not currently have secure email systems, with over half of respondents (58%) highlighting that they were waiting for an industry standard to be put in place.

While this is the case, an alarming majority of respondents (94%) said they did use email to send personal, sensitive or confidential data.

"Origo's research confirms that many independent financial advisors use email as a vehicle to exchange confidential and sensitive data", says Anthony O'Mara, Vice President of EMEA at Trend Micro. "Amongst these organisations, a large majority (84%) expressed concerns that sending personal data via email without suitable security was unacceptably risky. These results confirm that there is a need for an industry-wide solution that ensures adequate email security is in place to prevent data loss and data leakage."

"We believe that there's a growing need for secure email services that can offer advanced encryption capabilities to secure sensitive data", says Paul Pettitt, Managing Director of Origo. "A majority of research respondents (90%) confirmed that, if offered, they would consider secure email services. We feel that by bringing together our understanding of the needs of financial services and independent financial advisors as well as Trend Micro's expertise in facilitating secure digital communications, this partnership is ideally placed to deliver these secure email services."

About Trend Micro:

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in Internet content security, focuses on securing the exchange of digital information for businesses and consumers. A pioneer and industry vanguard, Trend Micro is advancing integrated threat management technology to protect operational continuity, personal information, and property from malware, spam, data leaks and the newest Web threats. Visit TrendWatch at www.trendmicro.com/go/trendwatch to learn more about the threats. Trend Micro's flexible solutions, available in multiple form factors, are supported 24/7 by threat intelligence experts around the globe. A transnational company, with headquarters in Tokyo, Trend Micro's trusted security solutions are sold through its business partners worldwide. Please visitwww.trendmicro.com.

Copyright 2008 Trend Micro Incorporated. All rights reserved. Trend Micro, the Trend Micro t-ball logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Trend Micro, Incorporated. All other product or company names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their owners.

About Origo

Origo was launched by sixteen of the UK's leading life assurance companies in June 1989 to facilitate the development of electronic trading between principals and agents for Life, Pensions and Collective Investment business.

Origo's main purpose is to drive forward the adoption of e-business in the financial services sector by creating a standards based, competitive and secure trading environment in which industry goals are being met. Using proven expertise Origo has focused its business on developing XML and other Standards to support business processing as well as developing UNIPASS, digital certificates that secure the online trading environment.

Origo is an open forum that provides the catalyst for bringing different industry groups together, including product providers, financial advisers, portals and software companies to address non-competitive issues.

CONTACT: Trend Micro Tel: +44 (0)20 8322 1922 e-mail:trendmicro@gbc.co.uk WWW: http://www.trendmicro.com Funda Cizgenakad, GBC Tel: +44 (0)20 8322 1922 e-mail: trendmicro@gbc.co.uk Garry Miller, PA - Laura Reed, Origo PR Tel+44 (0)131 451 5181 e-mail: gmiller@unipass.co.uk WWW: http://www.origoservices.com

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