Data integrity service provider GuardTime today announced that Benchmark Solutions will use GuardTime Keyless Signatures to protect its intellectual property (IP), and confidential documents.

New York, NY (USA), Tuesday – December 20, 2011 — Data integrity service provider GuardTime ( http://www.guardtime.com ) today announced that Benchmark Solutions ( http://www.benchmarksolutions.com ), a financial services technology company and the only producer of unbiased, streaming market-derived prices for the fixed income and derivatives markets, will use GuardTime Keyless Signatures to protect its intellectual property (IP), and confidential documents. The GuardTime technology is a software-generated tag for electronic data that provides proof of time, origin, and that not a single bit of the data has changed since the point in timeit was signed. The tag, referred to as a Keyless Signature, never expires and verification relies only on mathematics with no dependence on keys, secrets, tokens, certificates, or any third parties.

Why is this important? Because this process ensures an ironclad, independently-verifiable proof oftime when aninvention was made, along with proof-of-invention ownership thatadheres toU.S. “first-to-invent” requirements. The process also ensures that the data associated with the IP is legally-admissible as evidence in the event of an attack aimed at violating patent rights.

Benchmark’s BMarkSM Real-Time solution provides continuous market-derived real-time pricing data for fixed-income and derivatives products—starting with corporate bonds and credit default swaps, with ongoing expansion slated across other OTC asset classes.

Says Peter Cotton, Benchmark’s Chief Scientist, “We saw the value in cryptographically timestamping intellectual property, notwithstanding possible changes to patent law. The GuardTime solution ( http://www.guardtime.com ) was an easy win and, given the simplicity of the product, we envisage other uses for the technology going forward.”

Using patent-pending Market Calibrated FrameworkSM technology, the BMark Real-Time solution provides unbiased, streaming prices for over 2000 CDS curves across six distinct tenors, and 90% of the corporate bond volume monitored on TRACE. Over 12 million market inputs are analyzed to generate 118 million market-derived prices each trading day with updates every 10 seconds, providing up-to-the-minute assessments of market conditions, credit risk and the complex dynamics of the credit landscape.

To maintain a competitive position, it’s critical for organizations to protect its IP. Using GuardTime Keyless Signatures to sign its IP data, Benchmark Solutions will effectively protectits in-progress inventions, pending patents, and granted patents.

About Benchmark Solutions:
Benchmark Solutions was founded in the wake of the credit crisis in September 2009 to address fundamental shortcomings in price transparency and independence in the fixed-income and derivatives markets – a market that currently trades in the dark with little or no real-time pricing data for a majority of its assets. Backed by Warburg Pincus and led by CEO, Jim Toffey (Founder and CEO of Tradeweb), Benchmark has spent two years and significant financial investment in technology and human capital to solve this problem.

Benchmark’s flagship solution creates the industry’s first and only fully independent, streaming, market-driven pricing for US corporate bonds and CDS with ongoing expansion across other OTC asset classes.

Based on a patent-pending market-calibrated technology, the firm provides comprehensive pricing transparency and analytic solutions offering pre-trade intelligence to empower investment decisions and enhance their clients’ daily workflows, helping them understand the true market value of assets, discover previously unseen buy/sell opportunities, and proactively manage risk in real-time.

Benchmark employs over 70 professionals in finance and technology and is headquartered in New York.

For more information, please visit http://www.benchmarksolutions.com

About GuardTime:
GuardTime was founded with the goal of solving one of the biggest problems in computing: how to be sure electronic data is authentic. GuardTime’s Keyless Signatures provide proof of origin and that not a single bit of the data has changed since a specific point in time. The verification of the signatures can be done offline without reliance on keys, secrets, or the existence of a trusted third party. GuardTime’s mission is to change the world to one where Keyless Signatures are ubiquitous and a natural part of the everyday data lifecycle, whether on disk, in transit, or in the Cloud. The company was recently selected as co-winner of the Innotribe $100K Start-Up Challenge, honoring the company as one of the world’s most promising financial technology start-ups. Visit http://www.guardtime.com for more information about using Keyless Signatures for signing your data.

All company names are trademarks of their respective owners.

GuardTime PR Contact:
Victor Cruz, MediaPR
vcruz@mediapr.net

Benchmark PR Contact:
Ceci Thomas
ceci.thomas@benchmarksolutions.com

Press & Media Contact:
Victor Cruz, Principal
MediaPR.net Inc
New York, NY 10178 – USA
+1 978-594-4134
vcruz@mediapr.net
http://www.guardtime.com

All coupons and agreements are recorded and maintained with lifelong non-repudiation.

Mountain View, CA / Reykjavík, Iceland, Tuesday – December 20, 2011 — Aha ( http://www.aha.is ), one of the largest eCommerce companies in Iceland with its main focus on daily deals, selling Internet coupons for everything from spa treatments to Go-Kart racing, has teamed up with data integrity service provider GuardTime in order to bring Aha merchants peace of mind. With the GuardTime Keyless Signature Service, Aha will be able to solidify its business agreements, conduct tamper-evident coupon transaction auditing for all its daily deals, and wipe out the question of trust that can linger around the authenticity of the data.

Selling “deal of the day” e-coupons to consumers is hugely popular, as evidenced by Groupon Inc.’s recent $700 million initial public offering, the largest IPO by a U.S. Internet company since Google’s 2004 IPO. There are plenty of other daily deals sites to reference as well, including U.S. and UK-based Living Social, which last week managed a national offer for McDonald’s, the fast food chain’s largest daily deal ever.

Yet with so much money at stake, fraud attempts are bound to follow. Aside from risks of coupon tampering, daily deals service providers typically have full control over their transaction-processing and data storage systems which can also raise doubt in merchants’ minds concerning the handling of the data. Without a verifiable auditing system in place, how is a service provider to prove authenticity on its end in the event that a dispute arises?

For example, this week Groupon was accused of altering previously-sent emails which capture the details of its agreements with its merchants. Filing a class action lawsuit, BidMyCrib.com sued Groupon in a Chicago federal court for allegedly violating the Stored Communications Act by altering sent emails “in electronic storage.”While GuardTime has no insight into either party’s position on the matter, this is a case that would be easy to prove either way – and could have even been avoided – if Keyless Signatures had been applied.

Aha’s daily deals service uses digital and printed coupons, allowing merchants to log any usage through QR codes and a secure merchant fulfillment web portal. The terms of service are also negotiated and agreed upon prior to merchant deals being offered to consumers. With the number of merchants, consumers, and transactions residing within the Aha service platform, it is critical to have proof of who is involved, what each party has agreed to, and what activities have taken place. All aspects of each agreement and every step of each transaction require a verifiable audit trail. This is where GuardTime Keyless Signatures ( http://www.guardtime.com ) come into play.

“The amount of activity on any one daily deals website creates a lot of traffic and a lot of noise that opens the opportunity for a tremendous amount of fraud, and even accidental mishandling of coupons by the merchants themselves,” says Mike Gault, GuardTime CEO. “By digitally signing all transactions through a third party, Aha can strengthen its relationships with its merchants, converting trust-based hand shakes into proof-based binding digital agreements.”

“As a company with a strong focus on eCommerce, we see tremendous value in using Keyless Signatures,” says Maron Kristófersson, CEO of Aha.”We currently sign 3-4 agreements with customers each day; with Keyless Signatures we envision a future in which all these agreements are finalized online, saving us paper, simplifying accounting, and saving a tremendous amount of time in our sales processes.”

In addition to increasing efficiency and turning the data that passes though Aha’s system into signed, tamper-evident data, the GuardTime Keyless Signature Service ( http://www.guardtime.com ) isal so the only solution to provide Aha with the ability to independently verify the signatures without reliance on GuardTime or any other third party.

“With GuardTime we have bank-grade, tamper-evident security and can produce a verifiable digital audit trail for every action, “added Kristófersson. “Merchants that use our system have practically eliminated the risk of processing false coupons as the success rate for coupon tampering is as likely as winning the lottery.”

In summary, by using the GuardTime Keyless Signature Service, Aha receives the following benefits:
* All business arrangements and associated agreements are recorded and maintained with lifelong non-repudiation.
* Merchants can prove electronic coupon authenticity prior to accepting and processing.
* All parties have proof of the status of electronic coupons.
* Trust is now backed by mathematics.

About Aha:
Aha.is, one of the largest eCommerce companies in Iceland, provides a daily deals service which enables multiple merchants to list online offers for goods and services that consumers can purchase at tough-to-beat prices. Aha’s e-coupon system makes it easy for merchants to increase sales and reach wider consumer audiences while also providing a hub for consumers to find terrific deals on just about anything.

About GuardTime:
GuardTime was founded with the goal of solving one of the biggest problems in computing: how to be sure electronic data is authentic. GuardTime’s Keyless Signatures provide proof of origin and that not a single bit has changed since a specific point in time. The verification of the signature can be done offline without reliance on keys, secrets, or the existence of a trusted third party. GuardTime’s mission is to change the world to one in which Keyless Signatures are ubiquitous and a natural part of the everyday data lifecycle, whether on disk, in transit, or in the Cloud. Visit http://www.guardtime.com for more information about using Keyless Signatures for signing your data.

All company names are trademarks of their respective owners.

GuardTime PR Contact:
Victor Cruz, MediaPR
vcruz@mediapr.net

Aha Contact:
Maron Kristófersson, CEO
maron@aha.is
+354 664 7311

Press & Media Contact:
Victor Cruz, Principal
MediaPR.net Inc
Mountain View, CA – USA
+1 978-594-4134
vcruz@mediapr.net
http://www.guardtime.com