BANK tech-trends News
 

November 29, 2010 - December 3, 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

According to Gartner if current trends continue, the energy needed to operate a server over a three year period of time will actually exceed the cost of the technology itself. The research firm recommends these five steps to reduce power consumption:

1. Use row and rack-based cooling for high-density equipment, which can reduce energy usage by up to 15 percent
2. Build and provision only what is needed
3. User air-side economizers in geographies where they work
4. Scrutinize floor layouts for optimal air movement
5. Virtualize everywhere you can, especially on commodity hardware that use a lot of electricity

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced the release of its first solid state drive (SSD) family. The Ultrastar SSD400S line, jointly designed with Intel, includes 100GB, 200GB and 400GB models that feature both 2.5-inch 6Gbit/sec Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5-inch 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces with full duplex. The technology is aimed at enterprise-class data centers. Intellectual property from both vendors was brought to bear in creating the new drive's controller and firmware, which performs ECC (error correction code) functions and wear-leveling that spreads writes out across the flash memory to reduce wear out.

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ATMs/Kiosks

Triton is coming out with a new ATM called the Traverse which holds 1,000 banknotes and runs on the Windows CE operating system. The name Traverse ends Triton identifying its ATMs by number, such as 1600 or 1800. Additionally, the machine's software communicates with software developed by linq 3 Technologies, a New York-based company that sells lottery tickets through ATMs. If a cardholder decides to play the lottery, linq 3's software generates the lottery numbers and prints the lottery ticket. The ATM supports Quick pick lotteries such as Mega Millions and Powerball, but does not dispense scratch-off lottery tickets.

According to ADT Security Solutions, the average ATM skimming attack spans a timeframe of between one and two hours and losses per incident average $30,000. ADT, which provides anti-skimming solutions, estimates that ATM skimming attacks cost financial institutions and consumers 10 times more than losses suffered during robberies. Mike Lee, CEO of the ATM Industry Association, commenting on skimming says that "we need to lobby authorities to impose stronger sentences for convictions arising from skimming, including possession of illegal skimmers. EMV compliance and customer PIN protection are key."

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IE, part of the Parseq group providing digital banking software for financial services, announced the launch of mobinetic, a new mobile banking platform. The company says that their production-ready solution can easily and rapidly launch mobile banking to market. IE's mobinetic platform can also manage and disseminate personalized location specific offers and marketing.

Billing Revolution, founded in 2007, is receiving marketing dollars from Citigroup to sponsor the vendor's Single-Click Checkout service. Billing Revolution's service, announced earlier this month, builds on a mobile Web browser checkout service it has been selling to merchants. The service allows consumers to make purchases with a mobile phone without having to enter their payment card details for every purchase.

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An Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' (ACFE) study reveals that the median loss caused by workplace fraud is $160,000, and nearly one-quarter of the frauds involved losses of at least $1 million. Typically, the frauds lasted a median of 18 months before being detected. The report noted that the financial services sector had the highest level of information and electronic data theft. The biggest problem for financial services was information theft (42 percent), followed by internal financial fraud (31 percent) and regulatory breaches (25 percent). According to the ACFE study, employees who live beyond their financial means accounted for 43 percent of the workplace-fraud cases; employees with other money difficulties accounted for 36 percent.

According to PandaLabs, in the first ten months of the year the number of threats created and distributed account for one third of all malware that exist. These means that 34% of all malware ever created has appeared in the last ten months. The average number of new threats created every day has risen from 55,000 to 63,000. However, although more malicious software is created, its lifespan is shorter: 54% of malware samples are active for just 24 hours, as opposed to the lifespan of several months enjoyed by the threats of previous years. They now often infect just a few systems and then disappear.

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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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A national poll by the Consumer Reports National Research Center has found that about one-fifth of consumers holding an ATM or debit card have chosen to opt-in to overdraft protection. The poll found that 22 percent have signed up to have their ATM/debit card transactions covered for a fee if they don't have enough money in their checking accounts to cover them. A large majority of poll respondents said they wanted the same right to choose whether to be covered by fee-based overdraft programs for check transactions.

Click Here for a personalized demo & analysis

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Competitive pressures, growth in self-service channel preferences, and relentless cost reduction demands are vaulting remote deposit capture (RDC) into the consumer mainstream, according to a new report, “The Future of Consumer RDC: Going Mainstream,” from Celent. The reports states that:

1) Desktop TWAIN scanners produce a step change in solution cost (and resulting pricing) that will, finally, make RDC broadly viable for small business and consumer segments.

2) Consumer RDC solutions have been adequately vetted to show that the technology is viable, with acceptable user experience and back office operational results.

3) Most FIs have endured FFIEC RDC audits and lived to tell. Sound risk management practices alongside modern vendor solutions result in acceptable risks.

4) With large bank product launches, consumer awareness of RDC is on the rise, and every indication suggests it's a winner. Retail RDC appears to be finally going mainstream.


Check 21, the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, has steadily generated momentum over the years, to the point where the Federal Reserve Board is making a profit on the fees it charges. Therefore the Fed has decided to cut the fees it charges for Check 21 transactions. The Fed this month said it would cut fees paid for Check 21 by 14 percent. Electronic services next year will be cut by 20 percent. However, fees for FedACH services, Fedwire Funds and National Settlement Services and Fedwire Securities Services will increase 3 percent.

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Verizon Communications is now offering its Fios customers a new service that delivers 150Mbps download speeds and uploads of 35 Mbps. Verizon's new 150Mbps service costs $194.99 per month, while their slowest tier of service on the Fios infrastructure offers 15 Mbps downloads and 5 Mbps uploads for $55 a month without being linked to a special voice and TV bundle.

Lync, the next generation of Microsoft's Office Communications Server software, was recently unveiled and includes new and improved unified communications features such as e911 and "search by skill." With Lync, Microsoft is providing better bandwidth management than it did with its predecessor OCS. However, the general feature set of corporate instant-messaging, audio/video conferencing and voice-over-IP telephony remains the same. Lync Server 2010 follows the CAL (client access license) model, where a license is required for each user. There are three license options for Lync: a Standard CAL includes instant messaging and presence and costs $31 per user; an Enterprise CAL includes everything in a Standard CAL plus audio, video and Web conferencing, and costs $107 per user; a Plus CAL includes enterprise voice telephony technologies plus everything in a standard CAL and a few features of an Enterprise CAL plus -- it also costs $107.

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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Coordinated Systems’ Virtual Observer is a powerful call recording and quality monitoring system. The VO Live feature suite allows supervisors to view several agents as they are on the call with the customer to look for coaching opportunities. The package also includes E-learning features that allow contact center supervisors to create training clips for their agents on products and services to enhance their knowledge, providing another method of ongoing training.

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