BANK tech-trends News
 

 December 22 - December 26, 2008

• 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

Sonnet Technologies introduced the DX800RAID, a new eight-drive external RAID system that features a built-in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expander that lets users connect up to 16 eight-drive enclosures to a single RAID controller. It works as a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array and features SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) 2.0 compliance and enhanced Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) data reporting for each hard drive installed in the system. The DX800RAID is available in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB configurations for $3,995, $4,495 and $5,495, respectively. 

Toshiba announced the industry’s first 2.5-inch 512 GB SSD (solid state disk). The drive is part of a new family of 43nm NAND SSDs, which also includes capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. Toshiba says that they utilize an advanced MLC controller, which is also compatible with further advanced processes, that achieves higher read/write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling to optimize performance, reliability and endurance. The drives also offer AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.

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ATMs/Kiosks

ATM thieves are becoming more brazen and desperate - some have even resorted to pumping gas into an ATM money slot then detonating the machine from a distance. To combat these type of dangerous explosive robberies, an Australian bank is installing gas detection systems in its ATMs, which would be linked to onsite and back-to-base alarms.

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Fujitsu announced the Stylistic ST6012 slate tablet PC that they say features the first embedded, biometric pre-boot authentication available on a slate PC. Less than one-inch thick with a 12.1-inch, anti-glare display, the slate comes with a multifunction pen and indoor/outdoor display. The slate works like pen and paper by offering the ability to write or sketch on the display, fill out digital forms, and enter data. If customers need to acknowledge receipt or sign contracts, the Stylistic ST6012 tablet PC delivers with digital signature capture using automatic handwriting recognition and special software.

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Some Visa cardholders will be getting a taste of the future as "Visa Mobile" becomes operational on mobile devices powered by Google's "Android" on a T-Mobile "G1" phone. The application will allow select Visa cardholders to receive notifications about transaction activity on their accounts; obtain offers from merchants; and use the integrated Google mapping technology to locate nearby participating merchants or ATMs that accept Visa. 

By 2020, mobile phones will be the primary Internet devices for most people in the world, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In the new “Future of the Internet” report, the firms predicts that "the mobile phone – now with significant computing power – will be the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world."

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A new report from Sophos predicts that in 2009 the variety and number of attacks will continue to escalate, compromised PCs will remain the primary source of unsolicited emails, and web insecurity and SQL injections will remain the primary distribution method of malware. In addition, malicious emails with a greater proportion of legitimate looking attachments, or web links aiming to infect unpatched users, are likely to be sent. Finally, data leakage and identity theft resulting in decreased consumer trust and loyalty will continue to pose problems for organizations of all sizes.

Catbird is offering a free download that will help smaller organizations facing regulatory compliance issues and wishing to deploy virtual servers to consolidate their IT infrastructure without also losing control of their environment. The free download can protect the virtual servers on a single physical host. The Compliance Enforcer actually enforces policy rather than merely noting when and were policy wasn’t followed.

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Core Systems:

Core Systems – Collaborating to Better Serve Customers

COCC - http://www.cocc.com Read Joe Trafton's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/COCC.pdf

Fidelity Information Services - http://www.fidelityinfoservices.com Read John Schooler's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/FIS.pdf

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

Software and Management Associates - http://www.smausa.com Read Michael W. Taylor's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/SMA.pdf

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Acxiom, a marketing services company, believes that when it comes to growing and retaining deposits, banks should first focus on customers with the highest balances. The Little Rock-based firm defines high deposit households as roughly the top 20% in terms of total balances. They are convinced that a sustained marketing campaign geared towards high deposit households can boost transaction volume, average balances and retention. By a sustained marketing campaign, they mean a series of monthly offers that rotate through the deposit and investment product lines, not just promoting one product for 60 days or less. 

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According to the Aite Group, less than 50% of American financial institutions are currently using branch or teller capture solutions, despite numerous advantages such as the potential for: reducing over-the-counter costs, creating more opportunities for branch staff to sell to customers, reducing manual processes, eliminating paper processing, creating greater internal efficiencies and addressing fraud. The research firm notes that vendors are offering solutions that allow banks more image capture deployment options: they can capture images at the teller line, the branch back-office, or at a central branch location. They can also choose to implement the technology as a software application or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.

Automated clearing house (ACH) payment volume rose 12.6 percent between 2006 and 2007, coming to a total of more than 18 billion transactions last year. Mercator Advisory Group attributes much of that increase to a high-volume foundation of relatively low-value, nonrecurring transactions that stemmed from a rapidly expanding number of merchants, aggregators, corporations, and financial institutions. A new Mercator study forecasts that alternative payments, including prepaid cards, new forms of credit, and programs exploiting the ACH, will comprise 35 percent of online payments by 2013. However, Secure Vault Payment (SVP), a new e-commerce payment solution introduced by NACHA, could help level the playing field for banks to compete against alternative payment providers such as PayPal, Bill Me Later, and Google Checkout and push the ACH network in a new direction.

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Internet Access

Spanlink Communications recently introduced three pre-packaged UC solutions. The systems, dubbed SpanCom 50, SpanCom 200 and SpanCom 200Flex, are designed to give small to mid-sized organizations affordable, comprehensive and easy-to-manage unified communications. Built on hardware and software from Cisco, the bundled solution gives Spanlink’s customers e-mail, voicemail, desktop video, fax, instant messaging and other communications capabilities in one unified offering.

Despite difficult economic conditions, a new study from Infonetics Research shows that worldwide IP PBX deployments increased between the second and third quarter of this year. In addition, VoIP phone shipments saw year-on-year growth of 25 percent, while IP softphone deliveries more than doubled between the two quarters. As a whole, the telephony market grew by eight percent over the period, hitting $2.6 billion.

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Call Centers

What constitutes a truly customer-centric contact center? Some contact center experts recognize these key practices that leaders employ: 

- Regularly rewarding and recognizing agents for good work. 
- Training and continually developing staff via a variety of methods, including dynamic classroom, online and on-the-job learning. 
- Empowering agents to make key decisions in their daily interactions. 
- Giving agents the chance to work on interesting off-phone tasks and projects. 
- Actively seeking agent feedback on ways to improve key processes and practices, such as recruiting and hiring, training, quality monitoring and coaching, workflows and technology, incentives and recognition, etc. 
- Regularly incorporating humor and fun into the job. 
- Enabling agents to work from home.

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