BANK tech-trends News
 

August 30, 2010 - September 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 ~

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

IBM is developing a new deep-sleep mode for its Power processors that will allow them to draw almost no power when they are idle. IBM's Power7 chips have three sleep modes:

- nap: the voltage to a processor core is reduced by 15 percent and can come back to life almost immediately
- heavy sleep: cuts the power to all eight cores by 85 percent, but requires 2 milliseconds to bring the chip back to life
- deep-sleep: cuts power to the processor almost entirely, but it will also take considerably longer - 10 to 20 milliseconds - to wake up again

Xerox recently introduced its new WorkCentre 3550 ($1,099) for smaller offices. As a multifunction device, the printer can copy, scan, fax and print, and has these specs:

• 35 pages per minute.
• Standard paper capacity: 550 sheets. (Max: 1,050 sheets.)
• Automatic double-sided (duplex) printing.
• Color scanning.
• “Secure print” keeps documents from printing until users provide a PIN code to release the job.
• Transfer files using the print-from and scan-to USB thumb drive on the front of the device.
• Scan and fax features: network scan to PC, scan-to-email, fax-forward-to-fax/email.
• Optical character recognition software allows you to turn physical documents into editable electronic versions.
• Web-enabled device management tool.
• Energy Star qualified.
• Print resolution: 600 x 600 dpi (up to 1200 x 1200)

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ATMs/Kiosks

ATM scam artists are getting more and more creative with their methods. Below is a link to a video depicting a wireless transmitter hidden in a speaker on the ATM. In this case, losses attributed to this device were estimated to be in the $300,000 range.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3qK46L2b_c&feature=related

South Africa-based Abs Bank has launched their CashSend service which allows their customers to transfer cash from their own checking or savings account to anyone around the country via the ATM network. The service permits customers to send money from their mobile phones or their online banking accounts. The person receiving the funds first must type into the ATM a 10-digit code, or a reference number, they receive from the sender via SMS-text messaging. After doing this, the receiver types in a six-digit access code and the exact amount of cash he or she expects to receive. The sender provides the access code.

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Fiserv announced the launch of Mobile Source Capture , a new mobile remote deposit capture solution developed in conjunction with Mitek. Mobile Source Capture is a downloadable application for camera-equipped smartphones that allows users to securely take a picture of the front and back of a check and deposit the item electronically. Fiserv has been conducting customer pilot trials for mobile deposit capture since 2009. Based on feedback from those pilots, Fiserv expanded the product to include multi-item deposit capability, single sign-on authentication, and a virtual endorsement feature (the ability to place a virtual stamp on the back of the image), and a near real-time Deposit Review feature which allows quicker feedback to the phone user while ensuring the deposit is valid before it enters the deposit cycle.

Although payments with smartphones are still in early stages of testing and adoption, the Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, wants businesses that offer mobile phone payments to provide protections to individuals who use prepaid cards or have their purchases charged to their cell phone bills. They area also lobbying for the Federal Reserve Board or the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to enact new regulations offering protections for these two forms of payment. The Consumers Union called for clarity on protections for consumers who use their smartphones for mobile payments several days after Visa and Bank of America announced they will begin a mobile phone pilot this September in New York City.

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The new IBM X-Force 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report found that the total number of new vulnerabilities disclosed had increased 36 percent over the same period last year, to 4,396 for the first half of 2010. So-called hidden attacks rose 52 percent in the first half of 2010 versus the same period in 2009. Hidden attacks are where attackers hide their malicious code behind JavaScript, as well as PDF files to avoid detection. The report also confirmed that 35 percent of the vulnerabilities that affect virtualization servers also affect the hypervisor. So if an attacker wrests control of one virtual machine on a server, they may be able to gain access into other more secure virtual systems on the same server, according to the report. Finally, Web application vulnerabilities led the vulnerability disclosure list, making up 55 percent of all disclosures, with the number at anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 finds per year (which doesn't include custom Web apps). Cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection were at the top of the list.

Foregenix announced the availability of its cardholder data discovery tool, FScout. FScout’s proprietary technology identifies any unprotected and legacy cardholder data on laptops, desktops and servers across an organization. FScout works on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Open BSD/FreeBSD and Solaris. The firms says that they use intelligent scanning to identify unprotected cardholder data across an organization’s systems, including normal files, deleted files, unallocated areas of the disk and slack space.

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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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Banks can offer prepaid cards as a way to compete with issuers such as Green Dot, nFinanSe and Wal-Mart, respond to customer preferences and expand their payments products portfolio. But critics contend that promoting prepaid cards is a poor use of banks’ resources since the cards can cannibalize traditional products like checking, and are not that profitable. One institution has come up with an interesting alternative: an alternative checking account that carries a monthly maintenance fee of $29.95 and allows consumers to overdraw to a preset amount without being charged overdraft fees. It comes with a debit card as well. They contend that they capture more of the revenue and the account holder still gets the same features as they would with a prepaid card.

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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Americans prefer to access personal finance management (PFM) tools through bank websites, with security concerns trumping the advantages, such as account aggregation, offered by third party providers, according to a survey from Fiserv. The poll of 3000 online banking users shows strong interest in PFM tools for tracking and analyzing spending, with nearly 40% of respondents saying they would help manage finances. However, only five per cent of those quizzed by Fiserv have used a PFM service to track multiple accounts, suggesting security and reliability concerns may outweigh the perceived benefits. Of the PFM service users who tap aggregation to track accounts from multiple financial institutions, 48% have had trouble accessing some of their information.

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LG-Ericsson USA was just launched and plans to develop and deliver data and voice communications solutions to American SMBs and enterprise businesses that include IP PBX systems, digital, IP, Wi-Fi, SIP, soft phones, multimedia terminals, and "fully managed and unmanaged switches with a robust network management services and unified device manager platform to provide easy management," according to the company. The firm is confident that their portfolio of scalable, unified end-to-end data and voice network solutions can compete with the likes of Nokia Siemens Networks, Cisco and Avaya.

AT&T announced that new and existing VPN customers may add VoIP service to the network solution delivered over AT&T's global network cloud. This new converged solution will AT&T says “enable customers to consolidate their separate voice and data networks, reduce equipment and maintenance costs and simplify migration of these complementary capabilities to a common, secure infrastructure. By migrating to a common infrastructure, customers are able to take advantage of additional applications “as the carrier makes them available “such as unified communications (UC).” AT&T’s VoIP calling plans offer unlimited local and “on-net” long-distance calling, as well as “off-net” long distance international calling. They also provide caller ID, voice mail, conferencing, local number portability and E911.

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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According to Booz Allen Hamilton, the attrition rate for home-based agents is 10 percent, compared with the industry standard of 25 to 45 percent for on-premise agents. They also note that the medium age on-premise is 23 years of age, while at home it is 38. Remote agent proponents also like to point out that a traditional contact center demands that the organization can only hire those individuals within a 30-mile radius (approximately) of the office. If home-based agents can be used to staff a virtual contact center, the contact center suddenly has access to top-producing and specialized talent located throughout the US.

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