BANK tech-trends News
 

July 26, 2010 - July 30, 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 ~

Profitability Referral Tracking Full-Contact CRM

MCIF CRA/HMDA Compliance

MARQUIS delivers proven solution to over 750 financial institutions worldwide that are truly Easy, Complete, and Affordable. 

 

What the nation’s leading consultants are saying about Marquis!

“I was absolutely blown away the first time I saw ReferralTrax. Its sheer simplicity of operation masks an unbelievably sophisticated CRM engine that has no rival in the commercial marketplace. ReferralTrax chops the competition off at the knees…”

Randall Putala
SDMI

“Marquis is consistently listed by my clients as the best in class for MCIF software, support and service. I recommend Marquis to any marketing department looking for robust functionality in an MCIF - backed by world-class service.”

Constance Anderson
Consultant/Speaker

“The folks at Marquis truly know what they're doing! And, they are a class act."

Mike Neill
Michael Neill & Associates

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

Fujitsu has just come out with a new energy-efficiency entry level server: the Primergy TX100 S2 which is based on the Intel Xeon processor 3400 series. The new hardware draws zero watts during its off state, and it can still be managed in that state and preconfigured to shut off and turn back on during specific timeframes. The company claims that the server has been validated for 5,000 reboot cycles.

In a related story, system builder Super Micro Computer has updated its server portfolio with a series that is optimized for the new Socket C32 AMD Opteron 4100 Series processors and comes with highly efficient power supplies. The new 1U Twin and 2U Twin2 systems are designed with two dual-processor nodes per 1U and share a 920-watt Platinum-certified power supply, which means the supply is at least 94 percent efficient. The company claims that the platform can deliver 4-core and 6-core performance at less than 6 watts of power draw per core.

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ATMs/Kiosks

According to research firm Ovum, financial institutions should look to expand their ATM networks because the use of cash in retail transactions is growing, not contracting. The group says that "there are over 40 percent more U.S. dollar bills available compared with the beginning of the millennium. Given the fact that most cash is being distributed by ATMs, this channel is expected to grow." Ovum suggests that banks reduce their ATM costs by deploying cash-recycling ATMs, installing anti-fraud systems and using ATM remote monitoring.

Wincor Nixdorf is rolling out a module that alerts ATM deployers that a skimming device has been attached to the machine’s card-entry slot. The Anti-Skimming II recognizes a wide variety of skimmers placed on the outside of the machine, and it detects skimmers inserted inside the card reader. After detection, it sends a silent alarm to the ATM owner. Anti-Skimming II replaces Anti-Skimming I, and both are part of the ProTect portfolio.

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Forrester Research says that 11% of Americans are now mobile bankers. Their North American Technographics Payments and Financial Products Survey found the following interest levels:

- 19% in branch and ATM locations
- 16% in text alerts
- 13% in bill pay
- 12% in funds transfer and mobile check deposits

Meanwhile KPMG's research show different numbers: their study found that nearly 1 in 5 Americans use mobile banking (19%) and that 10% in the US have made a purchase from a retail mobile website using their phone. KPMG believes that mobile banking is the first wave of mobile commerce, and that retail mobile commerce is following about a year to 18 months behind.

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According to Michael B. Benardo, chief of the FDIC's Cyber Fraud and Financial Crimes Section, the top five fraud threats of concern to the FDIC are:

1. Malware and Botnets
2. Phishing
3. Data Breaches
4. Counterfeit Checks
5. Mortgage Fraud

The Open Information Security Foundation (OISF), project with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as a consortium of private organizations, has unveiled Suricata 1.0, an open-source IDS/IPS engine that will compete with the popular Snort tool. Suricata uses a multithreaded architecture and supports IP reputation and signatures, which allows it to flag traffic from known nefarious origins. It also offers automated protocol detection.

Not surprising, free products are more likely to be popular during a recession, and that applies to security software as well. By some estimates, free programs dominate the top four security software deployments, with Avast Free Antivirus at 11.45 percent; Avira AntiVir Personal Free Antivirus, 9.19 percent; AVG Anti-Virus Free, 8.6 percent; and Microsoft's Security Essentials at 7.48 percent.

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Online & Mobile Banking:

Driving Customer Growth

CashEdge - http://www.cashedge.com Read Manish Vrishaketu's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/CashEdge.pdf

eEminder - http://www.eeminder.com   Read Thomas Utsch's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/eEminder.pdf

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

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

Javelin Strategy & Research - http://www.javelinstrategy.com Read Mark Schwanhausser's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Javelin.pdf

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

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According to a recent national study by Moebs Services, consumers who are frequent users of overdraft (OD) fees could save money by bridging their cash gap with a 14-day payday advance loan, rather than paying checking account OD fees. Moebs' figures show that there are 19 million consumers who use payday lenders, compared to 13 million consumers who frequently use overdrafts. “Based on these study findings, we believe that bfinancial institutions should consider reducing their OD fees to less than $20,” said Moebs. “Because 90 percent of an institution’s revenue comes from OD fees, they could increase their revenue and their volume by lowering OD fees. This would enable them to maintain their revenues at the 2009 level.”

Profitability Referral Tracking Full-Contact CRM

MCIF CRA/HMDA Compliance

MARQUIS delivers proven solution to over 750 financial institutions worldwide that are truly Easy, Complete, and Affordable. 

 

What the nation’s leading consultants are saying about Marquis!

“I was absolutely blown away the first time I saw ReferralTrax. Its sheer simplicity of operation masks an unbelievably sophisticated CRM engine that has no rival in the commercial marketplace. ReferralTrax chops the competition off at the knees…”

Randall Putala
SDMI

“Marquis is consistently listed by my clients as the best in class for MCIF software, support and service. I recommend Marquis to any marketing department looking for robust functionality in an MCIF - backed by world-class service.”

Constance Anderson
Consultant/Speaker

“The folks at Marquis truly know what they're doing! And, they are a class act."

Mike Neill
Michael Neill & Associates

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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BillFloat just launched its service, which is similar to Bill Me Later which grants transactional credit for online purchases. With BillFloat, a consumer who needs more time to pay a bill can use the service to have the biller paid in full, then take up to 30 days to pay BillFloat back. The service, which runs $4.95 to $10 per transaction, is meant to work with obligations like utility and cable bills, not mortgage or car payments. To collect from consumers, the company uses the ACH to debit their accounts. The company says that for the 47% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, their service is far better than account overdrafts and payday loans.

Bank of America is set to debut a new online-only account that offers free banking to consumers who dispense with paper statements and branch-based transactions. Set to be introduced next month, the new account will charge a $8.95 monthly fee to consumers who want access to paper statements and tellers.

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Dell, through its Kace unit, is making available free Web browser security software that works by creating a protective "sandbox" on the desktop to isolate the user's desktop from malware or other harmful actions that might be encountered browsing the Web. The Dell Kace Secure Browser tool uses "re-direction" so that browser activity is shifted to an alternate area of the computer to isolate and contain harmful code. The 10MB security software, available for download from Dell's Kace site, is based on the current Firefox browser and Adobe Flash and Reader Plug-Ins. The security tool also lets the user create whitelists and blacklists of websites allowed to be visited.

A company called Teo announced a unified communications (UC) platform that relies on a Linux-based server to provide multiple applications including voice mail across a variety of devices. Teo, which has been making telecom equipment for 30 years, said the Teo UC relies on a single server, a single administrator's portal and a single user interface to track calls, e-mails, voice mails and more. Teo UC does not include Web conferencing but supports other systems. Teo UC also includes an emergency 911 console view to help a central administrator know where an emergency call was initiated in an organization, and to track other information useful to emergency response crews.

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Customer Interaction Solutions magazine announced its IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award winners:

Autonomy - Interaction Control Element (ICE)

CosmoCom - CosmoDashboard

Fonality - HUD Queues for Call Center Edition

HyperQuality - ClearMetrix

Ifbyphone - Call Distributor

inContact - inContact

LiveOps - LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform

Mitel - Contact Center Solutions

NICE Systems - SmartCenter for the VoIP Contact Center

Noble Systems - Noble SIPhony

OAISYS - Tracer

RingCube Technologies - vDesk

Sangoma Technologies - NetBorder Call Analyzer 2.0

ShoreTel - Enterprise Contact Center 5.1

Syntellect - CIM

Toshiba America Information Systems - Strata Call Manager

USAN - Hosted Call Center Solutions

Varolii - Agent Connect

Varolii - Queue Management

Verint Witness Actionable Solutions - Impact 360 IP Recording

Verizon Business - VoIP Inbound with Local Originations

Zeacom - Communications Center

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