I enjoyed reading today's front page story in the Wall St. Journal about Royal Bank of Scotland's multi-brand banking strategy.

People choose a bank for reasons for rational and irrational, says Fred Goodwin, Royal Bank's plain-spoken chief executive. "It isn't my job to tell them they made the wrong choice," he says.

Reminded me of some smaller versions of the same strategy among a couple of bank holding companies here in the US: Great Bay Bancorp here in the San Francisco Bay Area and Synovus in Alabama and Georgia.

ID Analytics today released the results of an extensive study of identity fraud.

The knowledge gained through this research, combined with new advanced technology, led to the development of ID Analytics' ID Score, which assesses the legitimacy of identity information provided by individuals at the point of application, before credit, debit or new accounts are granted. Underlying the ID Score is a pioneering pattern recognition technology called Graph Theoretic Anomaly Detection˙ (GTAD˙), which has a patent pending. GTAD dynamically detects unusual patterns based on the identity data elements on an application. Today, the ID Score is being used by some of the nation's largest credit card, retail card, wireless and online instant credit companies, daily helping to detect hundreds of frauds and saving many thousands of dollars in losses.

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