Product Line or Service

PINvault.com Inc. provides an E-Commerce enabling technology and service for businesses and consumers. PINvault.com is a free, Web-based service that securely stores and manages end users’ user names and passwords, as well as auto-registers users for various Web sites, and subsequently links and logs consumers onto those sites.  PINvault.com expects to commercially launch its service in Summer 2000. 

PINvault.com increases the sell-through of various E-Commerce goods and services by both eliminating consumers’ hassles associated with remembering so many user names and passwords and eliminating abandoned shopping carts for businesses. Additionally, PINvault.com helps to reduce the billions of dollars in costs that Web sites annually pay with respect to the user name and password management issues. As such, PINvault.com is a hybrid B2B and B2C enterprise, and it is uniquely positioned as a “C2B Play” because of the fact that PINvault.com channels consumers to businesses.

PINvault.com embraces the fundamental principle of enabling subscribers free access to their vital information at anytime, from anyplace, with any band, through any protocol and with any device. 

Technology/Proprietary Rights

PINvault.com’s general outside counsel, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius has filed a Patent Application for PINvault.com in order to protect the Company’s business model and operational processes, including, but not limited to, authenticated credential links – user names, passwords and PINs - that facilitate E-Commerce transactions by linking and logging consumers onto various 3rd party content, commerce and applications sites. 

Market Opportunities 

According to Forrester Research, “Consumers demand simplicity. eCommerce customers today are overwhelmed by password proliferation – many users struggle to remember 15 or more user names and passwords in a typical day.¹ 

The Company believes that most E-Commerce sales today are lost due in large part to consumer frustration with the proliferation of user name and passwords. According to a recent study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group in San Francisco, less than 2% of visits to online merchants resulted in a purchase. The reason(s)? Consumers express concerns about privacy, security and the need to enter personal data repeatedly at various Web sites.² Additional findings, with arguably the same underlying causes, indicates that more than two-thirds of online shopping carts are abandoned prior to the sale being completed at the point of purchase.³ 

Industry analysts report that repeat problems account for over 50% of the service requests to information technology organizations. The Gartner Group estimates password management and account management incidents alone account for up to 50% of service requests. As a result, companies worldwide spend over $30 billion annually to manually resolve these and other end user management requests.⁴ 

Marketing Sales and Distribution

PINvault.com offers a free service to end user subscribers. PINvault.com classifies its customers into four segments: 1) E-Commerce firms, 2) Online advertisers, 3) 3rd party firms purchasing “anchor tenant” space within the PINvault.com Service and 4) Web sites offering a co-branded version of the PINvault.com Service. To date, the Company has executed revenue sharing agreements with north of 275 best of breed E-Commerce Web sites and services including Amazon.com, Dell, Priceline, etc. 

Competition

The market for personal data management in the portable identity industry can be characterized as vastly underserved and thus very immature today. The Company’s competitors can be divided into several categories: 

• Aggregator (data transportation)
• Browser (device-centric)
• Digital wallet (e-commerce focused)
• Portal (user transportation)
• Operating System (device-centric)
• Proprietary software (device-centric)
• Sticky notes (reminder service)
• Tray utilities (device-centric)

No firm is addressing the ever-growing problem of managing user names and passwords in a consumer-driven manner, architectural framework, operational process and business model similar to PINvault.com.¹ 

1. “The Forrester Report, “A Digital Certificate Road Map,” Forrester Research, June 1999.
2. Boston Consulting Group Research and Faulkner & Gray, March 2, 1999.
3. Action News, 6ABC, WPVI-TV, “Cyber6” Report, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 4, 2000.
4. The Gartner Group and Courion, www.courion.com, March 20, 2000.
5. Various Web sites including, www.digitalme.com, www.passport.com, www.verticalone.com, www.mypassword.net, www.netscape.com, www.webpasskey.com, www.cnet.com, www.zdnet.com, etc.