As you know, I've been making a policy of measuring the effect of EV SSL Certificates (and therefore green address bars) on visitor behavior at various types of Web sites. One area that's been underresearched is online banking. I'm pleased to tell you that yesterday VeriSign announced the first such measurement on an online bank.

Michigan-based Flagstar Bank measured the effect of green address bars on new user signups. This strong regional bank saw a 10% increase in new account signups when green bars are present over when they are not. There are many reasons why increases in online transactions are good for banks. Costs are greatly reduced servicing customers on...

As I discuss EV SSL with a variety of online businesses, one question I get a lot is about the name that appears adjacent to the address bar in compatible browsers. The question goes something like this, "We do business under the well-known brand of HipCoolStuff, but our company is actually called Old Stodgy Holding Corporation. We don't want the Old Stodgy name on our Web site. Nobody knows us by that name, and it's not the brand identity we choose to present to the public. What can we do about that?"

The answer is that you're allowed to use any legal trade name that you possess in that address bar. A business may obtain EV certificates under an organization name that is a legally registered trade name of the organization in question (referred to in the EV guidelines as "Assumed Name"). VeriSign or the other CA must authenticate the legal status...

Regular readers of The SSL Blog will know that Opera 9.5 supports EV and has supported the VeriSign root from the very beginning. Well, Opera 9.5 now contains native support for GeoTrust and thawte roots as well.

I mentioned that I recently gave a Web seminar with some lively questions at the end. I'll present some of the questions I received, with my responses. Because I received so darn many questions, I'll break this one into multiple postings.

Q: If EV is so far ahead of standard SSL (in terms of security/authentication), do you think the PCI industry will mandate EV in near future?

A: I certainly hope so. EV is a definite improvement to a consumer's ability to protect herself against credit card theft, and the PCI standard is all about reducing credit card theft. It's not only in the interest of the consumers but also in the interest of the issuing banks, who usually are the ones that wind up eating bad credit card debt.

Q: What is the cost of implementing EV?

A: Costs break into two...