A minimum of 36 financial TLD applications are aiming to get a “dotBANK” name approved by ICANN. Besides the community-based “.BANK” string applied for by ABA/BITS and its rival application from dotSecure, a number of strings ranging from .UBANK to .NETBANK are more or less trying to achieve the same. Most applicants play safe, by using their companies and already established brand names, like BARLAYS, ICBC, EVERYBANK, PICTET or ANZ. Most surprising: PayPal Inc. is not applying for the .PAY string, which is nonetheless applied for by a Russian funded Swiss entity. PayPal pushes the string “.SOFTBANK”, stemming from its Japanese partner. Here is a list of  36 banking related finTLDs we identified from ICANN’s  disclosure on June 13th, 2012.

A look into round 10 of ICANN new gTLDs with a run-up to 100’000 domains… http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/100000-new-gtlds-alter-global-branding-models-0138391

A smashing letter sent to ICANN by the European Banking Authority with concerns of regulators about a .bank or .fin application reveals horrifying
lack of understanding of the internet and ICANN process – not only that .fin is a no-go string (Finland), they have obviously never spoken to the parties concerned.

PayPal’s Michael Barrett, Andy Steingruebl and Bill Smith have collaborated to produce a terrificly insightful White Paper on CyberCrime. It is a must-read for understanding today’s problem of enforcement.

Dan Bernstein’s DNSCurve. More at: http://dnscurve.org/

EFAMA applauds EU Commission decision to protect European ISIN data users. Read the press release below.

A free look-up mechanism was suggested as one solution. It would enable the application of the ISO 6166 standard without necessarily having to obtain a copy of the entire database.

http://www.bis.org/publ/cpss100.htm for the publication – and read our comments to understand the reasons that this could become a dotLEI or better dotLegID.

.bank, one of the proposed “security” finTLDs, was recently trademarked by ASIF LLC in order to obtain prior rights in the domain selling arena.

ARI Registry Services expects the financial services Industry among the top applicants for new TLDs.