BANK tech-trends News
 

December 6, 2010 - December 10, 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

Results from a new PC reliability survey of 79,000 users conducted by PC World show that ASUS scored “better than average” in five categories for laptops and in two categories for desktops. Dell and Hewlett-Packard scored very poorly, but there was a silver lining for both of them. PC World broke out the product lines into home and business for Dell and HP, and both scored much better for their higher-quality business machines. Commenting on the survey, one analyst recommended that smaller organizations not buy Dell or HP laptops or desktops at retailers such as Best Buy or Office Depot because he believes that those machines are of inferior quality and offer poor service. Instead you should buy them directly from the company over the Web and make sure you purchase a machine from their business lineup and get business-class support.

Comelit USA's HFX-700M is a two-wire color video intercom system that has a capacity of two doors and four inside audio or video stations. The solution is designed to be easy-to-use and affordable. The company says that their system is plug-and-play and requires only two wires, of any type, for easy installation. Standard features include door release with built-in relay, manually adjustable camera angle and internal all-page intercom capabilities.

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ATMs/Kiosks

For banks deploying ATMs in outdoor locations where impact from weather elements is a concern, Diebold has introduced the Opteva 522 exterior cash dispenser, an ATM with a durable, weatherized exterior. The new model is built with a rugged weatherized housing and offers heating as a standard capability, as well as optional air conditioning. The Opteva 522 exterior cash dispenser includes a touch screen that consumers can use while wearing gloves. It also features a five-cassette capacity and software that allows banks to respond proactively to maintenance issues.

Wincor Nixdorf released the results of its first annual consumer survey which shows that the majority of surveyed consumers indicated they would prefer to conduct banking transactions at their ATM, with more than 74 percent of respondents citing they hope one day their ATM will offer all of the functionality and services as their teller. Additionally, the majority of respondents said they prefer depositing money at their ATM, as opposed to traditional face-to-face interaction with the teller. Other key findings include:

* Banks that offer envelope-less cash/check deposit have a competitive advantage: 63% of the entire sample agreed that, if all else was equal, and one bank offered envelope-less cash and check deposit and another didn't, they would prefer the bank with this functionality
* Consumers go out of their way to use ATMs located on the premises of a bank because they want to avoid fees and feel that this is a more secure ATM environment
* 86% of respondents agreed that ATMs features and functionality are important to choosing their bank
* Respondents want all of the service and features currently at a teller to be available at the ATM and the majority would visit the ATM more often if they could purchase other items such as stamps
* 73% of consumers who do not have intelligent deposit at their bank are interested in this feature - and would use it about three times a month if it was offered to them

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Discover Financial Services is readying the rollout of interim Zip contactless payments stickers and cards. The Zip offerings will function as a bridge to more sophisticated forms of mobile payments, according to the company. Discover, which signs large merchants directly, says Zip is accepted at more than 100,000 U.S. locations, including participating locations of McDonald’s, Burger King, 7-Eleven, Dairy Queen, The Home Depot, and others. However, Zip should not be confused with Discover’s participation as the payment card network in the new mobile payments venture dubbed Isis from wireless phone companies AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA.

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eIQnetworks has launched ForensicVue, which they say is the first real-time forensic search engine to provide security analysts with the ability to search every piece of security data on their network. ForensicVue enables analysts to quickly search large amounts of security data in numerous formats, including log events, vulnerabilities, configurations, performance, availability, net flow, file integrity, USB monitoring and system compliance data and correlate it via a single console. The software can also capture and store common queries in a comprehensive library so that historic data can be applied to any data set in the past, present or future.

Police in Milwaukee, WI, report they have made arrests in all but two of the 22 bank robberies that have occurred in the city in 2010, a 91 percent clearance rate that law enforcement officers credit in large part to comprehensive training received by employees. The Milwaukee police say that the training helps tellers stay calm during a robbery, preventing holdups from turning violent and allowing employees to gather crucial information about a suspect that can often give police a head-start on their investigation.

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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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Mercator Advisory Group's "Credit Cardholders: A Seismic Shift In the User Landscape" report shows that many consumers are steering clear of credit cards and electing to use other payment types, even hard cash, for the purchase of goods and services. Highlights of the report include the following:

* General purpose credit card ownership by households dropped significantly between Mercator's 2009 and 2010 surveys, a drop corroborated by external sources. Reported private label card ownership also dropped. The speed of these declines - about 12 months - is particularly notable.

* GP credit card ownership declines were broad across income groups, and interestingly among middle age and older consumers, people usually considered in their peak earning and spending years.

* Many payment card users say they are trying to reduce interest-accruing credit card balances, and many report they are succeeding. As in the 2009 survey, most express the opinion that these changes are permanent.

* Just over half of all consumers indicated they had heard of the CARD Act. For a credit card price-conscious segment that is aware of the CARD Act, there is a correlation with decreased card usage.

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Travelex Currency Services, a New York-based foreign exchange currency provider, has launched a reloadable MasterCard-branded Chip and PIN card that American travelers can use to withdraw funds from EMV-compliant ATMs in Europe. EMV-compliant ATMs do not accept magnetic-stripe cards issued by U.S. banks and used by American tourists. The so called Cash Passport will still include the traditional magnetic stripe to accommodate merchants who don't accept Chip and PIN.

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eOn Communications announced the availability of the eConn IP-PBX, a server-based IP platform based on applications and features from the company’s earlier Millennium PBX, but built on commercial off-the-shelf hardware and utilizing the Linux operating system. Designed for growing small to mid-size businesses with scalability from 10 to 1,000 users, eConn supports traditional TDM technology (T1, E1, ISDN PRI and analog trunks), as well as SIP trunks and telephones. In addition to a comprehensive list of telephony features (500-plus features), eConn ships with the IP Messenger unified messaging and unified communications platform. Features include auto attendant, IVR, text-to-speech, follow-me, remote login, screen pops, instant messaging, hot desking and presence management.

Some telecom experts believe that small to mid-size organizations should take a closer look at cable companies for their telecom and data needs. They point to Cox Cable's success - Cox says it has more than 250,000 business customers, and is offering a mix of voice, data, Internet, hosted VoIP and Ethernet services. Cox's larger cable competitors - particularly Comcast and Time Warner Cable - are taking note. Analysts note that there are two challenges to cable coverage: 1) the lack of ubiquity which means that organizations looking for a single national provider are unlikely to find a cable company to meet those requirements, and 2) penetration within coverage areas. Cable companies' build out is largely residential, and in most geographies, extending that to cover business locations requires some significant capital expenditure.

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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HyperQuality has released the new enhanced version of its contact center quality assurance workflow software, ClearMetrix 2.0. The company says that ClearMetrix provides complete centralized analysis of all recorded caller interactions irrespective of the vendor platform. The software includes features such as enterprise wide root cause analysis capability, comprehensive quality and business metrics using a set of configurable reports, extension of evaluation, calibration and audit capabilities to any authorized remote personnel with Internet access and quality strategies through Form Design Studio with support for conditional logic, weights, penalties, caps, bonuses, floors, auto failures, and non-scorable attributes.

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