BANK tech-trends News
 

December 24 - December 28, 2007

• Hardware News
• Software Updates
• ATMs/Kiosks
• Biometric Digest Highlights
• Wireless World
• Security Section
• Leaders Roundtable
• Technology and Marketing
• Online Banking/E-Commerce/
  Website Design
• Internet Access
• Call Centers

Hardware News

Many organizations are starting to look for ways to cut power consumption not only in their data centers and server rooms, but in the front office as well. Often the first step is performing an energy audit. Fortunately, doing a power audit of ordinary office equipment is not that complicated. A simple, inexpensive meter that fits between the target device plug and the outlet can measure both current loads and cumulative power consumption over time. If you select a device with a typical usage pattern - for example a laser printer that gets average usage for your office - you can multiply the results across the total population of similar equipment to quickly estimate total power consumption. Meters range from the simple to the advanced. P3 International's Kill A Watt or Sea Sonic Electronics' Power Angel are both simple to use and inexpensive. More advanced units, such as the Watts Up Pro from Electronic Educational Devices, store data and include software for downloading and graphing that data to show watts, volts and kilowatt-hour consumption over time, giving a more accurate picture of power use. 

The SMC GS8P-Smart Switch is a flexible switch that features eight auto sensing ports for 10 Mbps, 100 Mps and 1000 Mbps (1 GbE). The device is a managed switch, meaning there is a Web interface with which a network administrator can control it. The Web interface helps simplify complex networking chores like flow control, trunking and VLAN tagging. It can be either rack mounted or it can be used on a desktop shelf. 

MagTek®’s ExpressCard 1000 is the industry’s first “ALL-IN-ONE” instant issuance and complete card personalization platform forCredit, Debit, ATM, and Financial Gift Cards designed to fit securely and comfortably within a branch location.

For the first time, card personalization features such as color card-printing, magstripe encoding, smartcard encoding, card embossing, indent printing, and foil tipping have been combined into a single device which provides both the physical and logical security features required to meet the demands of a branch or retailer’s card issuing environment.

Equipped with MagnePrint® card authentication technology (www.magneprint.com), the ExpressCard 1000 offers the capability to capture the card's reference MagnePrint at the time of card issuance so that reference value may be used in conjunction with complementary risk management analytics with card present transactions. The ExpressCard 1000 can be connected as a peripheral to MagTek’s IntelliCAT and MCAPS 3000 PIN selection and instant issuance software suites creating a complete and secure card issuing platform.

For more information on ExpressCard 1000, go to www.magtek.com or call your MagTek sales representative at 800-788-6835.

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ATMs/Kiosks

The Royal Bank of Scotland is running an "emergency cash" ATM service that provides funds to consumers who have had their debit card lost or stolen. The banking group says the new service provides a "simple and cardless" method of accessing up to about $500 in emergency cash from any of their ATMs. After calling the RBS call center to report the loss or theft of their debit card and answering three security questions, the customer will be issued a unique single-use PIN number. They then have a three hour window in which to visit an ATM. The customer can access the funds by pressing any of the six blank keys on the machine's key pad. The 'emergency cash' screen will then be displayed requesting the single use PIN number. 

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Armed with a biometric reader, a laptop powered by batteries and mobile phones providing the connectivity, various financial institutions in India are busy extending banking facilities to rural areas as part of a financial inclusion project. Biometrics are used to scan the fingerprints and thus provide effective and unique identification of each individual.

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Affinity Mobile, a global provider of mobile financial services, announced the commercial availability of their Mobile Application Delivery Enablement (MADE) platform. The company says that their MADE system takes the next step beyond mobile banking (mBanking), and enables secure mobile money transfers (mTransfers), mobile bill payments (mPayments) and mobile wallet accounts (mWallet). They say that MADE offers rapid deployment, broad device coverage and the ability to create customized branded solutions including instant issue, prepaid debit cards that can be used at any ATM or debit point of sale. John Carney, CEO of Affinity Mobile, explains that "we have designed MADE to deliver true mWallet, mTransfer and mPayments capabilities to mobile network operators, retail merchants and financial institutions - all sectors that engage in secure financial transactions."

While the dominance of residential landline telephony services has been on the decline for some time, Americans are now spending more on their mobile phone services than on landline ones. Back in 2001, U.S. households spent three times as much on landline phone services than they did on mobile phone services, but in 2007 households will spend more cellular services than landlines.

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Auditing firewalls to keep regulators happy and tracking rule changes - especially for large banks running numerous firewalls or firewalls from multiple vendors - is difficult and time consuming. Fortunately there are third party packages that can help. Software from vendors such as AlgoSec, Secure Passage and Tufin Software Technologies can report firewall statistics to prove compliance with industry and government standards, and they can consolidate rules so firewalls run more efficiently. The programs work with major firewall vendors such as Check Point, Cisco and Juniper Networks. One user reported that Tufin's software allowed his firm to reduce the number of rules in one firewall from about 600 to 200, reducing the CPU power demanded to process traffic. 

A new report from Aite Group projects that spending on anti-money laundering solutions by financial institutions will continue to grow, continuing the ramp-up from recent years. They point out that compliance issues surrounding money laundering and terrorist financing are major concerns to financial institutions, as regulators continue to demand that these firms effectively scrub names against watch lists, and monitor and manage vast volumes of transaction data. The report profiles 16 different vendors: 3i Infotech, ACE Software Solutions, ACI Worldwide, Actimize, ChoicePoint, FircoSoft, GlobalVision Systems, Jack Henry, LogicaCMG, Mantas, Metavante, NetEconomy, Norkom, SunGard, TCS, and Wolters Kluwer.

Astaro Corporation, a leading provider of Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliances, announced that it will continue its annual support of seven security-based Open Source projects in 2008 and will look to increase this number moving forward. These projects not only help the Open Source community to develop more advanced security tools, but also promote the general awareness of security issues and risks as well as available solutions. 

MAGENSA™ is a trusted verification authority (TVA) that provides real-time remote-hosted credential authentication services. These services enable banks, businesses, and government agencies to integrate PCI DSS and FFIEC multi-factor authentication and end-to-end data encryption capabilities into their existing processing environments without the need for substantial financial investments or massive changes to the existing infrastructure.

Specifically tailored to enhance the security of internet banking and ATM applications, MAGENSA delivers unprecedented security and authentication using the familiar magstripe card credentials (secure tokens) that a bank has already issued to its customers. MAGENSA is powered by the trusted and proven card authentication technology known as MagnePrint® (www.magneprint.com). MagnePrint differentiates a customers’ authentic magstripe card from an altered or counterfeit version, transforming the traditional magstripe card into a powerful security token.

MAGENSA’s Secure Data Center (SDC), a reliable 24x7 operations center that is maintained 365 days a year, simplifies the integration of data decryption and MagnePrint scoring into existing websites, and allows for data federation across institutional domains.

For more information on MAGENSA, please visit www.magensa.net or call 877.MAGENSA.

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ONLINE BANKING: 

Embraced by Customers - The Next Steps

Digital Resolve - http://www.digital-resolve.net Read Dennis Maicon's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/DigitalResolve.pdf

First Internet Bank - http://www.firstib.com Read David Becker's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/FirstInternet.pdf

Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com Read Greg Haislip's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Microsoft.pdf

Open Solutions - http://www.opensolutions.com   Read Michael D. Nicastro's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/OSI.pdf

TowerGroup - http://www.towergroup.com   Read George Tubin's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/TowerGroup.pdf

uMonitor - http://www.umonitor.com   Read Dinesh Sheth's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/uMonitor.pdf

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Edgar, Dunn & Company has published a new article titled "Rich Opportunity in the Unbanked Segment" that dispels the notion that the 15% of the U.S. adult population without a traditional savings or checking account are unemployed, poorly educated, and not credit-worthy. The PaymentDynamics 2007 Preferred Payments Study shows that the conventional wisdom regarding the unbanked is overly simplistic at best, and in many ways, simply inaccurate. For instance, many banks may be surprised to learn that more than half of the unbanked have attended college, or that only a third of them are rated as having sub-prime credit scores. The report concludes that many of these segments may have far greater profit potential and lower financial services risk exposure than previously believed.

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A Montreal-based company called HomeATM is trying to bring PIN debit to the world of e-commerce. Their technology relies on low-cost (around $5) card-swipe devices linked via USB connections to users’ computers. Consumer resistance to peripheral devices has plagued similar ventures in the past, but the firm is convinced that younger users, in particular those enamored of iPods and similar devices, see nothing unusual about hooking up a device to make purchases on the Internet.

Revolutionary Convergence of Security Technology for Secure Internet Banking!

MagneSafe^TM P55 is a portable card reader/authenticator with four key technologies for secure online banking: Cardholder Data Encryption, MagnePrint^® card authentication technology, Website Authentication and Track 1, 2 and 3 card reading capabilities. In conjunction with MAGENSA^TM, the MagneSafe P55 is designed to offer secure, multifactor authentication for Internet banking, empowering consumers with the freedom and confidence of knowing that their transactions are protected anytime, anywhere.

MAGENSA, a Trusted Verification Authority that provides real-time, remote-hosted credential authentication services, allows credit unions to integrate PCI DSS and FFIEC compliant multifactor authentication, data encryption, website authentication, and data federation capabilities without the need for substantial financial investments or massive changes to the existing infrastructure.

For more information about the MagneSafe P55 or MAGENSA, visit www.magensa.net, or call 877.MAGENSA.

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Internet Access

Nortel announced that it is shipping Multimedia Conferencing 5.0 which is a software package co-developed with Microsoft and aimed at enterprises who want to host their own audio or video conferences. Conferencing 5.0 can be used without any Microsoft products, enabling teleconferences through any kind of phone, including external and analog lines as well as SIP and PC clients. It also supports videoconferencing through any client designed for Nortel's CS-1000 (Communication Server.) Combining it with Microsoft LCS (Live Communications Server 2005) and Exchange enables it to be accessed through Microsoft's software clients and adds support for IM. However, the product does not yet integrate with OCS (Office Communications Server 2007), and requires an IBM x3550 server.

Barry Communications has launched a new managed VoIP service called “Barry Managed Services,” which comes with an Allworx phone system as part of the package. The turnkey voice and data solution includes monitoring, management and maintenance. It offers Internet, dial tone, network management, malware blocking, backup and recovery, and support services for things such as moves/additions/changes, training, and product upgrades. The Allworx phone system can be expanded to multiple sites (5 to 100 lines per location), offers IVR (auto attendant) capabilities, 3-digit or 4-digit dialing, call assistant functionality, and remote user capabilities, as well as other useful features.

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Call Centers

The hosted call center model is gaining momentum in various industries. Cost savings is one reason: remote agent costs average $21 per hour per agent, compared to an average of $31 an hour at a brick and mortar call center. Proponent say that hosted contact centers enjoy better retention rates, and are able to hire from a broader pool of skilled agents, since it is easier to support flexible hours that are more accommodating for students, stay-at-home parents, and partially-retired workers. Some contact center industry professionals have raised concerns about the productivity of agents who are working from home and how to accurately monitor them. Hosted contact center vendors have responded by providing solutions for monitoring and recording agents as well as measuring metrics to assure agents are working as productively as they would be inside a single facility.

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