More than 5,500 global banks — including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — have applied for the dot-bank domain to protect their institutions and customers from cyber breaches, according to Washington, D.C.-based fTLD Registry Services, which manages the domain.
Craig Schwartz, fTLD's managing director, told ThinkAdvisor Thursday that more than 2,200 banks have applied for more than 5,500 domain names. Those banks include BB&T, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, SunTrust, Dollar Bank and City National Bank.
FTLD Registry Services — established in 2011 by a coalition of banks, insurance companies and financial services trade associations from around the world — launched .BANK in May 2015, as "a trusted, verified, more secure and easily identifiable location on the Internet for the global banking community and the customers it serves," Schwartz said. "We're specifically carving out a place on the Internet for banks, their customers and the service providers that facilitate online banking services."
"So far, just more than 2,000 domain names have been approved," he said, adding that he couldn't readily say how many banks had successfully registered those domain names.
Examples of domain names are bbt.bank, wellsfargo.bank and chase.bank, vs. the historical bbt.com, wellsfargo.com and chase.com.
Schwartz said there was a "strong demand for owning a dot-bank domain," which "shows that banks recognize that the security offered by dot-bank will be a critical tool for protecting their customers' proprietary information."
A dot-bank website still has the "look and feel" of other websites, Schwartz adds, "but the use of dot-bank will signal their bank's commitment to online security."
