BANK tech-trends News
 

January 10, 2011 - January 14, 2011

• 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 ~

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 and Lenovo updated their PC lineups for the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Lenovo announced the IdeaCentre A320, an all-in-one that is 18.5mm at its thinnest point and starts at $699. For the small business market, they launched the B570 and B470 models. As for HP, they are rolling out a series of business desktops, while the HP Envy 17 was updated with better cooling and updated processors.

ioSafe announced the availability of the ioSafe Rugged Portable plus Data Recovery Service. The Rugged Portable is available in aluminum HDD and SSD and titanium SSD versions. The HDD version is available in capacities between 250 GB and 1 TB while the titanium SSD version is available in capacities of 256 or 512 GB. The company says that their drive will keep data safe from moisture, chemicals and extreme environmental and weather conditions. Should a drive break for any reason while under warranty, ioSafe will repair or replace the drive and, if necessary cover up to $5,000 of the cost of third-party forensic recovery services.

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ATMs/Kiosks

Skimming techniques are getting more sophisticated every day as evidenced by the latest discovery of a fake keyboard that is placed over an ATM's legitimate one and by some accounts is virtually undetectable. It works in conjunction with a fake magnetic strip reader that can be manufactured from low cost spare electronic parts and sends the mag strip info to the criminals in real time.

A British cabinet member has proposed allowing cardholders to make charitable donations through the United Kingdom's network of ATMs. Many details need to be worked out, but in theory the donation option would appear on the ATM next to buttons for withdrawals and deposits. ATM owners and operators in other countries also have used their ATM network to raise funds for charities. For example:

- Kontanten AB, a Stockholm, Sweden-based ATM deployer, raises funds for breast cancer research
- Wells Fargo Bank has used its ATM network to accept donations for San Francisco-area charities
- HSBC Bank permits charitable giving through its ATMs deployed in Mexico
- Servibanca, which is based in Colombia, accepts charitable donations through its ATM network

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According to Trusteer's research, mobile users are the first to arrive at phishing websites, and mobile users accessing phishing websites are three times more likely to submit their login info than desktop users. As soon as a phishing website is broadcast through fraudulent email messages, mobile users are most susceptible because their devices are "always on" and they are most likely to read email messages as soon as they arrive. Why do mobile users trust phishing websites more? Trusteer says that one explanation could be that it's harder to spot a phishing website on a mobile device than on a computer.

FaceCash is a mobile payment system that is available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones and allows consumers to use their cell phones to make purchases at the point of sale. Users of FaceCash begin by signing up online with a photo and pre-funding their account with money from a traditional checking or savings account. Their FaceCash payment account then gets tied to a unique bar code that can be displayed on a smartphone or self-printed card for making purchases at participating merchant stores. When that bar code is scanned, the merchant is presented with the consumer's picture for verification. FaceCash is part of the ThinkLink network, and merchants need only an Internet-connected computer and a barcode scanner.

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Visa announced improvements to its security capabilities which will help improve its ability to detect and prevent global electronic payments fraud. Upgrades to Visa's global processing platform – VisaNet – have allowed Visa to develop new fraud models that enhance the speed and accuracy with which Visa detects attempted payment card fraud. Examples of how Visa's investments enhance fraud reduction capabilities:

- Visa Advanced Authorization is better able to detect "high speed fraud," where criminals attempt multiple transactions within a very short time period – minutes or even seconds apart. Because Visa's network is not only able to process thousands of transactions per second, but also instantly recall and analyze millions of pieces of information in its memory, Visa is able to identify emerging fraud trends as they happen – not hours or days later.
- A new cross-border model takes advantage of Visa's global transaction perspective to increase fraud detection for transactions occurring outside a cardholder's home country. By being able to build "models-within-models," Visa is able to better focus on specific transactions types, fraud types and Visa product types. The new modeling capabilities are so powerful that it allows Visa to detect more than three times the amount of fraudulent cross-border fraud than previously identified.

According to Fraud Fighter, a leading provider of counterfeit detection and fraud prevention solutions, quite a few transactional documents are verifiable using ultra-violet light. Beyond U.S. and international banknotes, everything ranging from drivers’ licenses, passports, social security cards, credit cards, money orders, traveler checks and more can often be authenticated using a UV detector. Plus the equipment does not require network connections or Internet access - you simply plug it in and turn it on.

In a recent survey conducted by the Information Security Media Group, more than 75 percent of banks surveyed said they first learned of fraud from their customers. The survey included 230 financial institutions and found that only 23 percent of participants learned of fraud through their own auditing processes. In the survey, 55 percent of participants claim to still use manual reports to find fraud, but many said that they plan to invest in authentication technologies, intrusion prevention technologies, fraud case management systems, neural net fraud detection technologies, and end-to-end encryption in 2011.

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Security:

Securing the Bank from the Inside to the Outside

BrandProtect - http://www.BrandProtect.com Read Michael Kiefer's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/BrandProtect.pdf

Diebold - http://www.Diebold.com Read Scott Harroff's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Diebold.pdf

FaceTime - http://www.FaceTime.com Read Sarah Carter's comments: http://www.cunews.com/FaceTime.pdf

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

HEIT - http://www.goheit.com   Read Jeff Simpler's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Heit.pdf

Indigo Identityware - http://www.indigoidentityware.com Read Thomas J. Rheineck's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Indigo.pdf

mFoundry - http://www.mFoundry.com Read Carlo Cardilli's comments:     http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/mFoundry.pdf

Millennial Vision - http://www.mviusa.com Read Scott Cowan's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/MVi.pdf

Network Box - http://www.networkboxusa.com   Read Pierluigi Stella's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/NetworkBox.pdf

Ongoing Operations - http://www.ongoingoperations.com   Read Hugh Smallwood's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/OGO.pdf

S1 Defense - http://www.S1defense.com Read Bruce C. Smalley's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/S1Defense.pdf

Savant Protection - http://www.savantprotection.com Read Paul Paget's comments: http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/Savant.pdf

TriGeo Network Security - http://www.trigeo.com   Read Michelle Dickman's comments:   http://www.banktt.com/roundtable/TriGeo.pdf

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Remote teller systems (RTS) have been around a long time, and are often deployed in branches that operate in high robbery risk areas. With RTS, tellers are ensconced in a secure back room and interact with customers via video screens and pneumatic tubes. However, some financial institutions that have implemented RTS - especially at retrofit branches - have encountered some negative feedback. To help overcome customer resistance, some institutions have giveaways to first-time users, and add greeters to provide training and help make sure the customer experience is smooth and positive.

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Dynamics has won the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Best of Innovations Winner for Personal Electronics – the first time a payments technology has received this award. The Citi ThankYou Prestige 2G Card will be the first credit card to use their technology. The card will feature two buttons on the front of the card that allow cardholders a new way to redeem reward points with the push of a button at the time of checkout. The card customer has two options: if they select the button "Regular Credit," they can pay for their purchase with credit as they normally would, or they can select the "Request Rewards" button that would allow them to request to redeem points or cash rewards with a swipe of the card. When the cardholder presses one of the buttons, the card is activated, and the corresponding light will turn on to confirm the option selected.

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OpenDNS is an industry-leading Web content/security/DNS tool that is completely Web based, and comes with different plans, ranging from Free to Enterprise. With OpenDNS, you can filter content, prevent phishing, block page bypass (Enterprise only), protect against malware (Enterprise only), delegate administration (Enterprise only), and much more. You will have detailed daily reports as well as archived logs and statistics. With Web content filtering, you can select from more than 50 categories and prevent the use of proxies for bypassing filters.

Having multiple WAN (wide area network) connections for your branches may be costly, but it greatly increases reliability. A handful of vendors - Ipanema and Talari among them - offer products that balance traffic across multiple WAN connections with the goal of routing traffic across the most appropriate link for the type of traffic being sent. By constantly monitoring each WAN service, their gear knows which offers the best connectivity and can combine them to create a unified, reliable WAN.

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Research firm Gartner is forecasting a rise in hosted and software-as-a-service applications in call centers: by 2012, 65 percent of customer support conversations will occur "in the cloud." By 2013, they predict that at least 75 percent of contact centers will use some kind of hosted software application. It appears that call centers are overcoming their fear of not having direct control over hardware, and appreciate not having to put out a large capital investment for new call center systems.

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