BANK tech-trends News
 

October 25, 2010 - October 29, 2010

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

Complimentary Webinar

Maintaining Telecommunications & Meeting Auditor Requirements

It can be extremely difficult to maintain telecommunications with your staff and customers after a disaster. This point is evidenced by the fact that the Post-Katrina reports from all of the governmental agencies regulating financial institutions placed restoring communications quickly at the top of their lists. The FFIEC reports said that banks must:

"Anticipate disruptions in communications services, possibly for extended periods of time." 

The report also noted that "communications outages made it difficult to locate missing personnel." 

Therefore banks must develop affordable ways to quickly restore their telecommunications infrastructure. This complimentary Webinar will demonstrate how your bank can be prepared for telecom disasters without having a telecom person on staff or spending thousands of dollars on redundant phone systems.
 

What You Will Learn:

- How to inexpensively satisfy telecom disaster requirements
- How to show auditors that you can provide a backup telecom system with just 1 phone call
- How you can successfully answer every telecom disaster preparedness questionnaire on the auditor's forms.

BONUS: Every attendee will receive a sample Telecommunications Disaster Recovery Plan.

Who Should Attend:

IT staff, telecom staff, Audit and Compliance personnel, Managers, and anyone interested in maintaining telecommunications.


Date: Schedule a 30-minute live demonstration at your convenience that could one day save your business. If this isn't the easiest to use, most affordable, and most powerful inbound telecom disaster recovery system that you have ever seen, we will send you a free gift - seeing is believing!

To Register: http://www.banktt.com/webinars.htm  

Costs: Free

~ This Week's News is Sponsored by MARQUIS Software Solutions ~

Please contact John Kassing @ johnk@gomarquis.com, or call 800-365-4274 to learn more about MCIF, referral tracking or CRM solutions that you can and will actually use!

Hardware News

The SoloPRO is ioSafe's fastest rugged external hard drive. This extremely durable unit is designed to protect critical data against loss due to fire, flood or other disasters. Key features include:

• Fire protection – 1550F, 1/2 hour per ASTM E119
• Flood / submersion protection – to 10 feet water depth, 3 days.
• Theft protection - Kensington lock compatible or can be anchored with a bolt.
• Available in eSATA/USB 2.0 and USB 3.0/USB 2.0 options.
• Up to $2,500 data recovery costs coverage.

Googles Search Appliance Engine, a piece of hardware that sits behind the firewall to make corporate data searchable, was recently upgraded. With the new version, users can work within a single query box to search both within and outside of the firewall, including Google Docs and Google Sites, as well as the general search engine indexes. The new People Search feature also lets you see who in the bank is an expert on the query topics or is somehow otherwise linked to the query results. It also has an update for SharePoint 2010.

Epson announced the Epson TM-H6000IV multifunction printer with validation. The company says that the TM-H6000IV offers these features:

• Fastest printing in its class, up to 300mm/second,
• Fastest check transaction speed in its class with a greater ability to read checks in poor condition
• 99.9% MICR accuracy
• Lowest power consumption in its class and print options to reduce paper usage over 25%

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ATMs/Kiosks

Wincor Nixdorf announced the launch of the CINEO 4060 cash recycling ATM. The CINEO 4060 ATM can hold up to eight cassettes and includes a banknote storage technology that optimizes cash replenishment and pick-up by automating cash processes. Additionally, the machine provides the bank the flexibility to offer a variety of note denominations – not just $10s and $20s. The CINEO 4060 also features a larger screen, more camera options and the following security features:

• Anti-manipulation card slot
• Anti-Skimming II Module
• High-resolution cameras
• Optical Security Guard
• CrypTA Stick
• EPP V6 with privacy shield.

NCR has developed some cutting edge ATM prototypes that aim to trim user transaction times and help banks cut production costs while sprucing up their image with some cool designs. Here are three ATM designs that you have never seen before:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/150/the-atms-of-the-future.html

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Mitek Systems is now moving into mobile capture for bill payments. With their new Mobile Photo Bill Pay application, a customer can take a picture of a paper bill with their camera-equipped smart phone, and then upload the image to their bank for payment through the bank’s bill pay service. To implement mobile bill pay, a bank would need to offer a separate application for mobile phones or add the bill pay feature to its existing mobile banking app. Mitek says that their app - which is app currently available for the iPhone, but will soon support BlackBerry, Android and Windows mobile - corrects distortions and lighting problems and uses optical character recognition and intelligent character recognition technology to capture the bill or invoice’s amount, account number, invoice number, biller address and other data.

The Nielsen Company has come out with data showing that mobile banking in the U.S. grew 129% in the last two years. There are now more than 13 million mobile subscribers in the U.S., the firm says. According to a June 2010 survey, people who use their mobile phone for banking tend to be younger, male and more ethnically diverse than their online banking counterparts.

According to research commissioned by Obopay, 53% of consumers interested in making phone-based payments would consider changing institutions for one that offered the service. Meanwhile, 70 percent indicated that a service that allowed them to send and receive payments through their phone would be incentive to stay with their current institution.

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WhiteHat Security, a provider of website risk management solutions, unveiled its Threat Research Center (TRC), a team of website security experts who act as a critical component of the WhiteHat Sentinel website vulnerability management service. Specifically, the WhiteHat TRC delivers:

• Active monitoring and performance tuning of the Sentinel scanner.
• Customized assessments to provide production-safe code coverage on websites.
• The ability to remove virtually all false positives and duplicates, and prioritize all vulnerabilities.
• Daily monitoring to ensure optimal and uninterrupted coverage of new vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
• An assurance that all production websites, by far the most frequent and critical attack target, are safe.
• Access to an expansive vulnerability knowledge base.
• Custom business logic tests that analyze design flaws and validate account privileges across roles and between users.

According to the latest edition of the Kroll Annual Global Fraud Report, incidence of theft of information and electronic data at global companies has overtaken physical theft for the first time. While physical theft of cash, assets, and inventory has been the most widespread fraud by a considerable margin in previous Global Fraud Reports, this year's findings reveal that theft of information or assets was reported by 27.3 percent of companies during the past 12 months - up from 18 percent in 2009. Information-based industries reported the highest incidence of theft of information and electronic data during the past 12 months, according to the study. These include financial services (42% in 2010 vs. 24% in 2009), professional services (40% in 2010 vs. 27% in 2009), and technology, media and telecom (37% in 2010 vs. 29% in 2009).

Security experts say that organizations that use encryption can expose themselves to unnecessary risk and outages when encryption keys and certificates are not properly managed. Poorly managed encryption leads to system downtime, non-compliance and audit failures. A study by Venafi found that:

- 85% of organizations manage encryption certificates and private keys manually via spreadsheet and reminder notes
- 78% of organizations have experienced system downtime due to encryption failures in the past 12 months
- 96% of organizations use certificate based server-to-server and/or server-to-client mutual authentication for secure communications inside the firewall

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Core Systems:

Helping with Regulatory Issues and Compliance Pressures

Fiserv - http://www.fiserv.com Read John Filby's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Fiserv.pdf

Harland Financial Solutions - http://www.harlandfinancialsolutions.com   Read Jennifer Robert's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/HFS.pdf

Fiserv - http://www.opensolutions.com Read David Mitchell's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/OSI.pdf

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

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Mobile banking was a hot topic at last week's BAI Retail Delivery show in Las Vegas, but reaching the 80 million U.S. Millennials in the 18-to-29-year-old age bracket was also of interest to attendees. In an online survey of 1,675 U.S. adults, Microsoft found that given the choice, 60% of Millennials would choose never to set foot in a branch again, but to handle everything online, and 90% say they are confident they can manage their personal finances. The survey asked Millennials what they would come back to a branch for: about half (52%) said financial planners, 47% said accountants, 38% said investment brokers, and 37% said insurance agents.

Please contact John Kassing @ johnk@gomarquis.com, or call 800-365-4274 to learn more about MCIF, referral tracking or CRM solutions that you can and will actually use!

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MoneyGram and CashEdge announced that they have signed a letter of intent to integrate their respective money transfer and payment services platforms. The companies say that their strategic relationship globalizes the person-to-person payments for Cash Edge and its financial institution connections by allowing access to over 200,000 MoneyGram agent locations worldwide for cash payout options. In addition, CashEdge's Popmoney includes support for text messaging, WAP, and downloadable mobile applications, enabling banks to extend their P2P functionality to email and mobile phones.

A new Javelin Strategy & Research report entitled “2010 Online Banking and Bill Payment Forecast: How to Cut $8.3 Billion in Costs Through Channel Conversion” finds that the financial institutions can save nearly $8.3 billion dollars by converting non-online customers to online banking and bill pay – at a cost savings of $167 per consumer – and by convincing current online bankers to get the answers to half their questions online rather than through branches and call centers – at a cost savings of $8 per consumer. Other findings from the report include:

• Nearly 8 out of 10 households bank online, but adoption and usage have leveled off.
• Online bankers own more financial products, which presents the opportunity for FIs to deepen relationships by cross-selling additional products.
• Gen Y consumers prefer to pay bills – except for their mortgage – directly at biller sites.

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Following the acquisition of 3Com in April 2010, Hewlett-Packard has folded the 3Com VCX IP Telephony systems into its HP Networking unit, adding telephony to its portfolio of IT and data networking products. HP recently introduced a new version of the VCX IP Telephony system and a new series of IP telephones. HP has discontinued the NBX platforms from 3Com, but is moving forward with VCX Connect for SMBs and the VCX V7000 Unified Communications Series for larger organizations.

snom technology has introduced a new portfolio of IP-PBXs to its products with the launch of the IP PBX snom ONE. The snom ONE is available in three versions. "snom ONE free" is available for free as a download or on CD for use with up to 10 extensions. For organizations that need more than 10 extensions, two systems are available: the snom ONE yellow supports up to 20 extensions and lists for $895. The snom ONE blue is priced at $1,495 and services an unlimited number of extensions and up to five multi-tenant locations). All versions offer the same features, differing only based on the maximum number of extensions supported.

The Number Resource Organization, a group representing the world's five regional Internet registries (RIRs) that assign IP addresses, states that 95 percent of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses possible with today's Net mainstream technology are gone. "This is a major milestone in the life of the Internet and means that allocation of the last blocks of IPv4 to the RIRs is imminent," Axel Pawlik, chairman of the Number Resource Organization, said in a statement. Pawlik and many others are urging those with Internet operations to start migrating from IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) to the more capacious IPv6. The NRO is also urging IPv6 action to head off fears of a "chaotic scramble for IPv6, which could increase Internet costs and threaten the stability and security of the global network."

ADCs take over where server load balancers leave off

In the last decade, server load balancers were hailed as the solution to website scalability and availability problems. These devices balanced traffic across servers to ensure the site was available and could handle traffic spikes. If one server went down, the load balancer redirected traffic. When a site got "slashdotted" you could add more servers transparently.

Flash forward to 2010; Web servers aren't just delivering static content, they're delivering Apps. Businesses are using Web-based applications to deliver mission critical functionalities to employees and customers. Simple load balancing is no longer sufficient.

Fortunately, load balancers have evolved into Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). This new species understands application specific traffic and can optimize application server performance by offloading many of the computer intensive tasks that would otherwise bog down CPUs that could be better occupied elsewhere. This article will discuss how ADCs have taken over where server load balancers left off.

Click Here to Download the White Paper "ADCs take over where server load balancers leave off"

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October is National Ergonomics Month and some call center industry observers believe that many contact centers are in need of more ergonomic furniture. They are convinced that an ergonomic call center can help reduce loss of productivity due to injury, and create a better working environment, simply by providing ergonomic workstation tools. Recommendations include: an adjustable height monitor and keyboard, an adjustable chair, task light, and footrest, as well as training on how to properly adjust the equipment. Another option is a “sit to stand” workstation which provides both ergonomic support while sitting and the ability to raise the keyboard and monitor to standing so a representative can continue to work while stretching.

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