Sunday, October 16, 2005

eBay Buys VeriSign Unit

Redherring reported this week that eBay is buying VeriSign’s payment gateway business. The press-release was wrongly interpreted by many Dutch journalists as: EBay buys the payment system Verisign. But then again, it is not that easy.

eBay and Verisign will in the future work together to combat identity theft issues. VeriSign will equip eBay and PayPal with security services that include a system called a two-factor authentication, which gives users a one-time password or digital certificate to help protect against online identity theft.

So eBay gets acquiring business which is merely risky non-core business to Verisign. But it's what eBay and Paypal can handle and are good at. And Verisign gets to sell more security stuff and solutions (which is what Verisign is good at.

Looks like a win win thing. Does'nt it ?