BANK tech-trends News
 

January 17, 2011 - January 21, 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

Samsung is releasing two new laser printers: the printer-only CLP-325W, and the multifunction CLW3185FW. Both offer small footprints, Wifi networking, quiet operation, Polymerized Chemical Toner and energy-saving features. The printer-only model will be priced at $199, with its multifunction cousin coming in at $399. Samsung says that their Polymerized Chemical Toner technology offers high-quality 2400x600 dpi printing.

InfoWorld announced its 2011 "Technology of the Year" award winners. For blade servers and storage, the winners were:

- HP Blade System c7000
- Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVS

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ATMs/Kiosks

United Overseas Bank in Singapore is the first bank worldwide to use HD quality ATM Digital Signage to communicate with consumers and passers-by. Netpresenter software is used to display broadcast quality videos, photos and news on the screens of 200+ ATMs throughout Singapore. The screens at the ATMs (above the teller machines as well as the ATM screens itself) display multimedia video, clips and photos – for example information on fixed deposit rates, saving rates, travel insurance plans, home financing, car financing, asset management, travel services and plans, credit card offers, discounts to restaurants and shopping, etc. Not all screens display the same information. Videos are streamed into the ATMs at night using a 3G connection. For those instances when the wireless connection is down or limited, the software solution has an auto-resume feature.

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The WiGig Alliance wants to replace all cables - except power/charging cables - with wireless that is fast enough to run any and all home network and device protocols: storage; video; network; PCIe; and USB. Running on a wi-fi backwards compatible chipset, they are proposing a 60 GHz, wide channel (57-66 GHz), power-efficient, 7 Gbps raw (4.6 Gbps payload) wireless channel. WiGig products may start appearing late next year, but detractors are not so optimistic about a wire-free future because they say that high-frequency signals can be easily stopped by many walls. Meanwhile, proponents argue that WiGig will still be a huge improvement over today’s slow Wi-Fi.

Android is now the leading choice among recent buyers of smart phones, according to Nielsen’s latest numbers. As of November, some 40% of U.S. adults who had purchased a smart phone within the preceding six months opted for an Android model. By contrast, the corresponding shares for Apple’s iOS and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry system were 26% and 19%, respectively. Many analysts believe that these numbers leave developers of payments and mobile banking apps little choice but to take all three contenders into account.

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Independent security research and testing firm NSS Labs released its most recent Network Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) Comparative Group Test Report for the fourth quarter of 2010. Security equipment gear from Check Point, Endace, Fortinet, IBM, Juniper, McAfee M-8000, NSFOCUS, Palo Alto Networks, Sourcefire, and Stonesoft was tested. They found that:

- Security effectiveness, using the default factory-shipped settings, rose to 62 percent. However, some default settings reached a mere 31 percent effectiveness.
- The improvement in security came with a price: performance of these devices decreased overall.
- A number of multi-function gateways rose to comparable effectiveness as dedicated network IPS gear.
- Tuning is required, adding an average increase of 21 percent more protection.

Blue Coat Systems, a longtime provider of Web security and WAN optimization solutions for large enterprises, has introduced the Blue Coat ProxyOne appliance, which is targeted at small and midsize businesses. The Blue Coat ProxyOne appliance integrates Web filtering, inline malware and antivirus scanning, and on-box reporting to enable safer use of Web 2.0 applications, the company said. They also include preconfigured policies and deliver automatic software upgrades and immediate security updates. Pricing for the first year starts at $8,999 for 100 users, which includes the appliance, software licenses, automatic security updates and 24X7 support.

Neurotechnology released MegaMatcher 4.0, a multi-biometric software development kit (SDK) that integrates fingerprint, iris, facial and palmprint biometrics in a single, high-performance SDK that requires no add-ons. In MegaMatcher 4.0, Neurotechnology has incorporated palmprint technology along with the latest versions of their VeriFinger (fingerprint), VeriEye (iris) and VeriLook (facial) biometric SDKs – all of which are now built on a common architecture and feature a common programming interface.

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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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Serendio gathers and analyzes consumer reviews, ratings and statements from a broad range of Web sources to build a picture of the consumer banking experience. They issue a BankInsight report quarterly that provides analysis on topics such as credit cards, mortgages, online banking and mobile banking. In their 4th quarter report, Serendio found that:

- Twitter continues to be a dominating social media channel and banks with their own Twitter channels score higher satisfaction ratings in the overall study than FIs who don't have their own Twitter channels.

- Mortgage continues to dominate the conversation, but although sentiments were highly negative around the end of October 2010, they are now becoming more neutral.

- Credit card, the second most talked about product, has generally positive sentiments around it.

- Online banking continues to have net positive sentiments around it while experiences vary from bank to bank

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A new report from Aite Group forecasts that Cash use, which has been declining in U.S. payments transactions, will continue to do so through 2015. But it is far from vanishing. While 30% of consumers use cash less often than they did two years ago, 20% use it more often. Gen Y is the only generation more likely to use cash more often today than it did two years ago. Consumers’ use of cash will decline by a total of 17%, or 4% per year, between 2010 and 2015, dropping to slightly more than US$1 trillion.

FamilyMint.com is a website geared towards kids 6 - 16 that allows them to learn by managing their own money in a safe, virtual environment. Parents act as the custodians of the money. The website exists to help improve financial literacy of kids within the family setting, and offers a free and premium version of access.

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Smaller banks that want to use Web conferencing systems for training purposes lost one alternative recently when Dimdim announced that they will be shutting down their free system (up to 20 attendees) on March 15th when they will be absorbed by Salesforce.com. However, there are still a few open source or free web conferencing alternatives:

- http://www.bigbluebutton.org
- http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings

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Buzzient offers social media analytics software that can integrate with Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center. Buzzient automatically harvests, stores and analyzes social web content about your bank, products, topics and competitors from a wide range of social media sources. The system can send posts meeting your criteria to the contact center software for routing without any front-end agent intervention. Your agents can also triage posts using the application and send those requiring intervention into the contact center in an ad hoc manner. Automated forwarding can be triggered by different criteria such as user-defined keywords, custom defined sentiment levels, specific social media sources, or even the particular authors. If customer contact is required, agents can click a link in the message to launch Buzzient and interact with the customer via the social media channel they used, and a history trail of the interaction is kept for reference.

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