BANK tech-trends News
 

August 2, 2010 - August 6, 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

Lenovo introduced three new dual processor ThinkServers targeted at smaller organizations. The machines feature built in advanced RAID, Web-enabled remote management tools and hot swappable hard drive storage. Lenovo ThinkServers RD230, RD240 and TD230 are priced between $829 and $1399.

Cisco says that the new power management features in its Catalyst 3750-X stackable access switch can reduce electric bills. StackPower offers a means of pooling power supplies within a stack and making wattage available to any switch as needed. The 3750-X offers other new features, such as MACSec encryption, Smart Operations deployment software, and support for PoE+, a new method of powering devices that require more electricity than the old PoE standard can supply.

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ATMs/Kiosks

Barnaby Jack, director of security testing at Seattle-based IOActive, brought two ATMs onto the Black Hat conference stage in Las Vegas and proceeded to force them to disgorge cash. Jack's exploits - one involving physical access to the ATM machine using a master key available online, and the other dialing in remotely to gain access - focused on ATM machines from Triton and Tranax. However, the issue is not necessarily limited to these two ATMs. Jack explained to his audience that he has yet to find an ATM machine that he couldn't crack and retrieve cash from. He said both Tranax and Triton had patched these two security vulnerabilities since he brought them to the companies' attention a year ago.

While many small to mid-sized financial institutions are reluctant to invest in envelope-free ATMs in the current economic state, NCR is touting that they are making progress selling the machines. NCR says that FIs benefit from envelope-free ATMs because they increase deposits and can reduce a bank's yearly operating expenses by up to 75 percent. The Duluth, Ga.-based manufacturer recently announced that they have deployed more than 600 intelligent deposit ATMs with community FIs.

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China is leading the world in the uptake of mobile finance, with 77% of consumers using their phones to conduct financial transactions, according to a global survey carried out by KPMG. Compared with only 18 months ago, the global percentage of respondents who have used their mobile device for banking has more than doubled from 19% to 46%, while the percentage that have used it to buy goods and services has risen from 10% to 28%. Reasons for not adopting in the US were similar to online banking holdouts: 52% cited security and privacy. Lack of availability is also a major inhibitor - nearly three-quarters of respondents said that their current financial institution either does not offer banking through a mobile device or that they did not know if they offered this service.

Women's World Bank of Ghana is using digital pens and cellular communications to streamline their account opening process. The microfinance bank uses digital pens that look like large ballpoint pens and imaging technology to capture handwriting. Their staff completes account application forms with a digital pen when meeting with rural customers, and the handwriting captured on the form is routed to their core system via wireless mobile devices. The new account holder receives the paper original.

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TrustWave's Spider Labs research group said that so-called "advanced persistent" attacks are becoming more common and target even midsized organizations. Advancements in malware authoring and testing before deployment, more automation of functionality, and anti-forensics features are allowing remote attackers to stay on their victims' networks for an average of 156 days. The researchers note other troubling trends: cyber-criminals are gravitating to rootkit-style applications that can disguise their presence from operating systems, modifying stolen data to fool DLP filters, and using common ports and protocols to get data out of networks.

The 2010 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, just released by Verizon Business and conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Secret Service, says that 2009's breaches of electronic records involved more insider threats, greater use of social engineering and the persistent, troubling trend of organized crime involvement. "Most organized criminal groups hail from East Europe, while unidentified and unaffiliated persons are often from East Asia," the report said. The good news: most of the breaches were considered "avoidable" if only security basics had been followed. Verizon Business investigative experts found that only 4 percent of breaches required difficult and expensive protective measures.

CA Virtual Privilege Manager provides host access control and privileged user management for virtual machines. In other words, it enables management of root- and systems administration-level users with password management and access-control mechanisms as well as auditing and reporting of those privileged user IDs. It also provides a variety of other capabilities, including the ability to harden the hypervisor service console, and restrict user access by time of day and segregate duties on a fine-grained basis.

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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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StrategyCorps has developed a customer friendly/relationship based checking solution that they say restores recurring monthly service charge revenue based on the bundling of traditional and non-traditional benefits and doubles debit card usage. They help banks tackle checking challenges like opening too many free checking accounts, selling ineffectively, and having a complicated or undifferentiated line-up.

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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MasterCard announced that their 8,500 U.S. Debit MasterCard issuers will have the option of offering Acculynk’s PaySecure service to their cardholders for online purchases. Online PIN-debit is just emerging as a viable payment option for electronic commerce, and the Acculynk system presents the buyer with an on-screen floating PIN pad in which they enter their PIN with mouse clicks, never leaving the e-commerce site. MasterCard, which in 2009 had 27% of debit card purchase volume versus 73% for Visa, is hoping to gain incremental transaction volume should Acculynk’s product catch on with card issuers and ultimately consumers.

Some analysts believe that many consumers will only embrace alerting when they can choose the level of detail provided in email alerts. The problem is that many consumers simply don't find much value in alerts if they don't include some detail on the transaction. On the other hand, some consumers that are concerned about privacy are not comfortable with actual transaction data being included in an email and won't use alerts if that is the only choice. That is why it is advisable to offer a flexible alerting system that delivers varying levels of alert detail depending on the account, balance level, which email address is used, etc.

Trusteer announced that it has added financial malware disinfection to its Rapport service. In addition to helping prevent Trojans and zero day malware from tampering with website communications and transactions, Rapport now removes malicious code that attempts to attack browser sessions. This new capability is being provided at no additional cost to all Rapport customers and end users. Trusteer will also submit any new (zero day) malware it discovers to all anti malware vendors in an effort improve low detection rates for crime ware.

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my1voice is a virtual phone service for small organizations that provides features of a professional-quality telephone service without the overhead of installing and maintaining special equipment. You can connect teams under one business phone number that directs to unlimited extensions and enhanced voicemail regardless of location or phone type. Other features include a virtual receptionist, a toll free number, dial by name directory, professional greetings, and customized extensions. The latest version now features more auto-attendant flexibility that allows users to select the number of times the auto-attendant message plays before an information message occurs.

BT recently announced the expansion of its hosted Internet Protocol telephony service to business customers in the U.S. Now BT and Polycom are developing a full range of solutions that will be built on BT’s “UC Ready” networked IT, voice and professional services for implementations of Microsoft UC technologies. The offerings from BT and Polycom can be deployed in traditional, on-premise, managed service and cloud scenarios.

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Avaya announced a suite of new and enhanced products and services based on Avaya Aura that are designed to improve real-time, multi-media communications. The company says that their Aura Contact Center is central to the new offerings with a multimedia work assignment application targeting midsize contact centers designed to connects callers and their information to the right agent using voice, video, e-mail or chat; the solution complements Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, serving as a multimedia extension. Also, Aura Call Center Elite 6.0 is a new version of Avaya's call routing software for large contact centers that offers greater capacity along with adaptive, predictive routing capabilities.

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