BANK tech-trends News
 

September 27, 2010 - October 1, 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 has come out with three radically different new printer designs:

- the Photosmart eStation has a 7-inch touchscreen display that users can remove from the device and use like a tablet. The Android-based tablet is mostly useful for printing tasks, but it does also include a browser, multimedia features, and an e-reader.

- the Envy 100 is an all-in-one with a color touchscreen. What makes this slim-line thermal inkjet printer different is that it is completely free of PVC (polyvinyl chloride).

- the LaserJet Pro CP1025NW, which looks like a regular printer, but at 15" by 15" by 8" is the world's smallest color laser printer. It features HP’s Instant On Technology, which helps conserves power consumption.

Back to Top

Back to Top

ATMs/Kiosks

The ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) announced the publication of its best practices for preventing card trapping. Card trapping is the theft of a consumer’s card through tampering with the card reader to ensure the card remains stuck inside the card slot and cannot be returned to them after it has been inserted. In parallel to trapping a victim’s card, the perpetrator will also compromise the PIN. The new manual discusses types of card trapping devices and methods, counter-measures as well as a checklist of recommendations, such as regular checking of the ATM fascia for illegal devices which may have been attached to it.

Back to Top

Software Earnings, a provider of payments processing software for financial institutions, now offers mobile remote deposit capture. The new product, dubbed QwikDeposit To Go, lets bank customers deposit checks remotely from any location using their smartphones. iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile devices are all supported at this time. QwikDeposit To Go can be customized and rebranded as needed.

Javelin Strategy and Research believes that mobile banking has not evolved to the extent that financial institutions and mobile vendors had anticipated, yet the evolution of smartphone functionality coupled with consumers’ increasing adoption of smartphones gives mobile banking the chance to live up to expectations. Optimistic indicators such as better data plans, marketing efforts from banks, mobile capabilities, diminishing carrier dependency and continuing smartphone trends will help drive mobile banking adoption. Javelin predicts that smartphone penetration will continue at a rampant pace, thus spurring higher mobile banking numbers. Both mobile bankers and smartphone owners will steadily increase through 2015, despite current economic conditions and slower mobile banking adoption rates in 2010.

Back to Top

According to research from Gartner, about 5 percent of total IT budgets are spent on security. Gartner's IT Key Metrics Data for 2010 study also broke it down to security spending per employee, which averaged around $525 annually in 2009, compared to $636 in 2008 and $510 in 2007. Of the total IT security budget, 37 percent is spent on personnel, 25 percent on software, 20 percent on hardware, 10 percent on outsourcing and 9 percent on consulting. The surveyed organizations ranked intrusion detection and prevention as the top security priority, followed by patch management, data loss prevention, identity management and antivirus.

Microsoft announced that - beginning in early October - it will be offering its Microsoft Security Essentials solution to small businesses that use up to 10 PCs - for free. The solution was, until now, free only for individual consumers. The software requires no registration, trials or renewals and is available for download directly from Microsoft. The software giant says that this solution is better than Microsoft Forefront Client Security.

More than half of software applications developed by financial institutions, third party suppliers and cloud service providers contain security weaknesses that would leave them vulnerable to attack by hackers, according to research by software analytics firm Veracode. "Analysis shows that software quality of applications from banking, insurance and financial services industries is not commensurate with the security requirements expected for business critical applications," states the report. Cross-site scripting remains prevalent, accounting for 51% of all vulnerabilities uncovered in the testing process; .NET applications exhibited abnormally high cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Additionally, "potential backdoors" broke into the top 10 most common vulnerabilities.

Back to Top

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

Back to Top

Some marketing experts believe that banks need to focus on retention rather than adding new customers. They argue that it’s not how many new accounts you add, but how many you turn into long term profitable relationships. Quite a few banks only measure acquisition because it's very simple to do so, but account churn is very costly – yet it can be also relatively inexpensive to control. Recommendations include implementing attrition prediction models, backed-up with targeted retention campaigns. Also reducing problem incidences by closely tracking customer feedback, especially via the call center and teller lines, can help increase overall satisfaction rates.

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!

Back to Top

Mercator Advisory Group says that the total dollars loaded onto prepaid cards will climb to $672 billion over the next three years, which is more than double the $330 billion loaded onto these cards in 2009. Increased government activity, combined with growing consumer adoption, grew the prepaid market by $60 billion in 2009, and these forces will accelerate in the near future. Mercator Advisory Group predicts the Open-Loop market will almost equal the Closed-Loop market in 2011 and will exceed Closed-Loop in total dollars loaded in 2012 by more than $60B.

CashEdge announced the launch of Popmoney for Small Business, which they say is the "first electronic invoice and payment solution designed specifically for small business customers of financial institutions." Popmoney for Small Business provides businesses with the capability to pay vendors and employees electronically using only an email or mobile number.

Back to Top

A company called Aryaka offers an optimized WAN service that they say requires no capital outlay or maintenance by customers, and when WAN connections to given sites are increased customers don't have to buy new equipment. Typical real world performance would improve five to 10 times, the company says. Customers pay a flat monthly per-site fee that is adjusted for the bandwidth of the connection to Aryaka's nearest point of presence (POP). The company has 10 POPs worldwide today and says it will have 25 by year-end. The company guarantees 99.999% uptime. Customers can also reserve bandwidth for particular applications, limit bandwidth or employ weighted fair queuing.

Invincea Browser Protection shields PC users against many types of Web-borne threats by moving desktop Web browsers into a controlled virtual environment. Invincea's software detects and terminates threats in real time, captures detailed forensic intelligence about the malicious activity, disposes of the tainted environment and restarts a pristine one. The firm says that their secure browsing environment has the same look and feel as your unprotected browser, with no difference in use and negligible PC performance impact.

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"

Back to Top

inContact, a provider of on-demand call center software and call center agent optimization tools, announced enhancements to the inContact platform. They say that their cloud-based platform has been expanded to include a new predictive dialer, quality monitoring and screen recording solutions. The inContact Dialer is a campaign-based outbound dialer that makes list management as simple as uploading a spreadsheet and includes numerous campaign management tools. The inContact Quality Management system provides specific details about each agent's performance that can be used to help individual agents and provide data that can be used in training and coaching programs. Finally, inContact Screen Recording gives call center managers access to a customizable screen recording solution that works around business rules and scripting.

Back to Top