BANK tech-trends News
 

July 5, 2010 - July 9, 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

Hewlett-Packard announced new blade and rack servers designed to deliver more performance while combining hardware and software capabilities to improve server reliability and lower energy costs. The seven blade servers and three rack servers include Intel's latest Xeon 5600 and 7500 series processors and AMD's Opteron 6100 microprocessors. HP has applied a new server architecture called PREMA to the ProLiant DL980 G7 rack server, which includes smart CPU caching to provide larger bandwidth to memory. The company has also improved the memory footprint in its new blade servers - the blades will include up to one 1TB of memory per server and up to 16 terabytes per rack. The larger memory footprint will help servers accommodate more virtual machines in virtualized environments. The servers include management software to better manage virtualized environments. The servers also include power management features that provide server administrators with stronger control over power drawn by servers.

Dell has created a specific site where you can shop for Dell technologies that are explicitly designed as green, from both a materials standpoint and from an energy-efficiency standpoint. The products picked for exposure must comply with various standards: Energy Star; EPEAT; TCO Certification, which combines environmental standards with ergonomics ratings; and Blue Angel, a German eco-friendliness label for technology. Vendors featured include 5dot, APC, Belkin, Mitsubishi Electronics, MobileEdge, Netgear, NuoTech, Samsun, Sony, Targus, Tripp Lite, Vizo and Western Digital. The metrics for getting onto the site include the energy efficiency of a given product, power management features, what the hardware is made out of, and recyclability.

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ATMs/Kiosks

We recently reported on Wincor Nixdorf's CINEO C6030 Teller Cash Recycler which is designed to reduce banks’ cash handling by more than 20 percent. In addition to reducing cash-handling costs, teller cash recycling machines enhance banks’ physical safety by housing funds in a centrally located automated safe, eliminating cash’s exposure. The cash-recycling market, however, is a crowded field with at least six major competitors, including ArcaTech Systems, Burroughs Payment Systems, Diebold, NCR, Talaris and Hitachi Data Systems.

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A new Javelin Strategy & Research report finds that by 2013, more U.S. adults will have smartphones than feature phones. The report entitled “2010 Mobile Banking Vendor Analysis: Detailed Comparison of Top 12 Providers and Strategies to Address Market Shifts” predicts that this will break open the mobile banking market. Previous Javelin research determined that smartphone owners are more likely to try mobile banking, see its value, use it daily, make stickier transactions and rarely abandon it. “Our data show that mobile banking is already a source of profitability for financial institutions, through account-switching and fraud safety. Downloadable apps for Androids, iPhones and other smart phones are creating a whole new ‘always-on user’ experience,” said James Van Dyke, Javelin’s President.

First Data and INSIDE Contactless announced that the companies have expanded their partnership by introducing a MasterCard PayPass contactless payment tag product. Based on INSIDE's MicroPass payment platform and containing all the functionality of a traditional credit or debit card, the new MasterCard PayPass mobile payment tag product delivers contactless payment capabilities to mobile phones. The system will be marketed and sold to MasterCard licensed financial institutions and card issuers. The tag includes new advanced adhesive backing to adhere to mobile phones better while allowing the sticker to be removed and reapplied without losing its grip.

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The new hundred dollar bill was just unveiled and it will combine the usual portrait of Ben Franklin, and some previously added security enhancements, with a pair of brand new, advanced counterfeit-deterrent security features. It features a blue three-dimensional security ribbon and an interpretation of the classic liberty bell image which, when tilted, changes colors from copper to green, making the bell appear to disappear and reappear in an inkwell. The new $100 bill will also include phrases from the Declaration of Independence and a newly designed, larger image of Independence Hall. The $100 bill "is the most widely circulated and most often counterfeited denomination outside the U.S.," according to federal authorities.

According to a new study from CIO Insight, large organizations spend an average of $61 per employee for various types of security solutions. What types of solutions caused the biggest budget drains? Here are the top five:

- Data loss prevention
- Firewalls/VPNs
- Content monitoring
- Security management
- Antivirus

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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 Raddon Financial Group survey, 60% of U.S. households are now customers of one of the top five banks, while consumers whose primary financial account is at a big bank is 37%. However, Raddon predicts that these handful of mega-banks will encounter difficulties attracting new customers as the restrictions on overdraft fees force them to pull back from free checking. While restrictions on overdraft fees may help drive consumers from large banks to community banks, the financial crisis is also playing a role, e.g., Raddon last year asked people who were not customers of the six largest banks if they were going to open an account at a large bank and the response was zero.

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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Innovative nonbank startups are targeting the consumer market and competing with traditional financial institutions, according to a new report, ‘Financial Technology Startups 2010: Giving Banks a Run for Their Money,” from Celent. Key findings of the report include:

• The market is too competitive to allow banks to rest on their innovation laurels, and consumer demands are forcing FIs to refocus their priorities.

• The report examines and analyzes 10 financial technology startups that Celent finds most promising in the following categories. Miscellaneous Financial Solutions: Expensify, GoalMine; Lending/Credit: SmartCredit.com; Online Banking/Bill Payment: Backbase, Billeo, Bobber Interactive, oFlows; Payments/Transactional: Point of Wealth Systems; Security/Risk Management: Continuity Control, Silver Tail Systems.

• FIs need to work on solidifying customer relationships, particularly in these challenging times. Many of the products showcased in the report could be sold by FIs. They have the potential to increase the stickiness of relationships and provide competitive differentiation.

According to a new report from Forrester Research, the most active online bankers in the world right now are in the Netherlands and Sweden, with 90% of online consumers in the Netherlands using electronic banking and 88% in Sweden. Other major countries ranked this way:

65% in Canada and Japan
62% in France
60% in Germany
57% in the United States
50% in the United Kingdom
47% in China
41% in Spain and Poland
24% in Italy
16% in India

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Pareto Networks is positioning its new cloud-based offering as a way to rapidly set up branch offices. It includes a device called the Pareto Branch Gateway, which can control VoIP use, video, IP address management, SSL VPN tunnels, authentication, Web security filtering and other functions. IT managers can manage these functions remotely, through Pareto's cloud. Subscription pricing starts at $228 per location, per year, for a maximum of about 20 to 30 users.

The Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering permits customers to pay per terabyte, without buying any equipment, while keeping their data local. Instead of asking organizations to send their information to a service provider's data center, Hitachi will set up its own storage arrays inside the corporate firewall. Hitachi engineers will set up the boxes, then manage them remotely via a virtual private network. Customers will pay entirely on a monthly basis, with no upfront charges.

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There are many facets to new agent training, but some centers focus on the following areas: communication skills, caller handling, escalation, product-specific training and soft skills. After each training module, some centers require a 90% correct answer rate before moving on. Others insist upon numerous side-by-side observation sessions in the call center. Of course, the seasoned agents that are partnered with the new hires should be the best and brightest. Finally some centers give new hires a couple of weeks of more side by side training and some solo time before subjecting them to QA assessments.

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