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Credit Union tech-talk News
December 22 - December 26, 2008
General News
* Vacationland FCU to Upgrade to CU*Answers Platform
* Harland Financial Solutions Integrates Compliance Review Solution with Interlinq E3
* Open Solutions and Bluepoint Solutions Announce Strategic Partnership
* eDOC Innovations Aligns with Ongoing Operations
Vacationland Federal Credit Union of Sandusky, OH has announced its intention to upgrade to the CU*Answers core processing platform, CU* BASE, in 2009. Vacationland FCU is full-service credit union with 3 locations in the Sandusky area. This well established credit union has almost 15,000 members and total assets of $110 million. CU*Answers, a West Michigan-based CUSO headquartered in Grand Rapids, also announced that it has sold out for its next year’s CU*BASE client conversion slots. CU*Answers says they have 16 clients, representing more than 135,000 members scheduled to convert to CU*BASE during the 2009 fiscal year.
Harland Financial Solutions announced that Interlinq E3, the company’s Web-based loan production platform management system, now provides complete integration with Compliance EAGLE, a fully automated compliance review solution developed by QuestSoft. Compliance EAGLE offers Interlinq E3 users an entire mortgage lending compliance process in a single system.
Open Solutions, a leading provider of integrated, enterprise-wide core processing technologies for credit unions throughout the United States, Canada and other international markets, and Bluepoint Solutions, a provider of Check 21, remote deposit capture, image-based item processing, electronic document management and multi-factor identification software technology for credit unions, announced a strategic reseller agreement under which Open Solutions will offer Bluepoint’s teller capture solution to its credit union clients. Under the name tMagic, Bluepoint's teller capture product will be available to Open Solutions credit union clients.
eDOC Innovations, a leading CUSO for e-document strategies announced its partnership with Ongoing Operations, a Disaster Recovery CUSO based in Maryland. eDOC Innovations reported that it will enhance its longstanding 2020iSync service by implementing Ongoing Operations’ state-of-the-art Virtual Appliance at all its 2020iSync Peer locations. Ongoing Operations is already servicing over 40 credit unions across the country on this platform and will bring its industry expertise in the fulfillment of eDOC Innovations Disaster Recovery strategy for credit unions who utilize eDOC Innovations custom in-house e-document strategy solutions.
Hardware News
Sonnet Technologies introduced the DX800RAID, a new eight-drive external RAID system that features a built-in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) expander that lets users connect up to 16 eight-drive enclosures to a single RAID controller. It works as a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array and features SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) 2.0 compliance and enhanced Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) data reporting for each hard drive installed in the system. The DX800RAID is available in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB configurations for $3,995, $4,495 and $5,495, respectively.
Toshiba announced the industry’s first 2.5-inch 512 GB SSD (solid state disk). The drive is part of a new family of 43nm NAND SSDs, which also includes capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. Toshiba says that they utilize an advanced MLC controller, which is also compatible with further advanced processes, that achieves higher read/write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling to optimize performance, reliability and endurance. The drives also offer AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.
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Software Updates
Fiserv announced enhanced capabilities to its Home Retention Solutions offering that enables credit unions to proactively identify and contact troubled borrowers with customized repayment solutions to try to keep them out of foreclosure. In addition, Fiserv is supporting programs such as Fannie Mae's Home Saver Advance Program, which provides an advance to cover past-due mortgage payments in exchange for a separate, unsecured loan, and the newly introduced Streamlined Modification Program, in which borrowers receive reduced interest rates or longer loan terms to make their payments more affordable.
To help organizations manage their PCs' power consumption, New Boundary Technologies offers its Green IT Solution. Using New Boundary's Policy Commander (an automated policy management product) and PwrSmart technology, the Green IT Solution not only implements power management policies, but also automatically monitors and enforces them. The solution keeps power-management settings at their approved configurations, even when users try to disable or change them.
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Software Section Sponsored by
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ATMs/Kiosks
ATM thieves are becoming more brazen and desperate - some have even resorted to pumping gas into an ATM money slot then detonating the machine from a distance. To combat these type of dangerous explosive robberies, an Australian bank is installing gas detection systems in its ATMs, which would be linked to onsite and back-to-base alarms.
CO-OP Financial Services announced it is enhancing its current Falcon Fraud Manager by adding Falcon Real-time Decisioning, an optional service that allows highest risk transactions to get evaluated by Falcon prior to deciding whether or not to authorize the transaction. The enhanced Falcon Real-time Decisioning allows potential fraud to be detected and prevented earlier, helping credit unions reduce loss.
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Biometric Digest Highlights - WWW.BIODIGEST.COM
Fujitsu announced the Stylistic ST6012 slate tablet PC that they say features the first embedded, biometric pre-boot authentication available on a slate PC. Less than one-inch thick with a 12.1-inch, anti-glare display, the slate comes with a multifunction pen and indoor/outdoor display. The slate works like pen and paper by offering the ability to write or sketch on the display, fill out digital forms, and enter data. If members need to acknowledge receipt or sign contracts, the Stylistic ST6012 tablet PC delivers with digital signature capture using automatic handwriting recognition and special software.
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Wireless World
Some Visa cardholders will be getting a taste of the future as "Visa Mobile" becomes operational on mobile devices powered by Google's "Android" on a T-Mobile "G1" phone. The application will allow select Visa cardholders to receive notifications about transaction activity on their accounts; obtain offers from merchants; and use the integrated Google mapping technology to locate nearby participating merchants or ATMs that accept Visa.
By 2020, mobile phones will be the primary Internet devices for most people in the world, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In the new “Future of the Internet” report, the firms predicts that "the mobile phone – now with significant computing power – will be the primary Internet connection and the only one for a majority of the people across the world."
According to some observers, mobile banking is set to achieve the fastest rate of mass-market penetration in recent history, even outpacing items such as credit cards, online banking or ATMs. Find out why they are predicting this phenomenal growth in the January issue of Credit Union tech-talk - subscribe now.
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Security Section
A new report from Sophos predicts that in 2009 the variety and number of attacks will continue to escalate, compromised PCs will remain the primary source of unsolicited emails, and web insecurity and SQL injections will remain the primary distribution method of malware. In addition, malicious emails with a greater proportion of legitimate looking attachments, or web links aiming to infect unpatched users, are likely to be sent. Finally, data leakage and identity theft resulting in decreased consumer trust and loyalty will continue to pose problems for organizations of all sizes.
Catbird is offering a free download that will help smaller organizations facing regulatory compliance issues and wishing to deploy virtual servers to consolidate their IT infrastructure without also losing control of their environment. The free download can protect the virtual servers on a single physical host. The Compliance Enforcer actually enforces policy rather than merely noting when and were policy wasn’t followed.
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Leaders Roundtable
Core Systems:
Core Systems – Collaborating to Better Serve Members
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Technology and Marketing
Acxiom, a marketing services company, believes that when it comes to growing and retaining deposits, credit unions should first focus on members with the highest balances. The Little Rock-based firm defines high deposit households as roughly the top 20% in terms of total balances. They are convinced that a sustained marketing campaign geared towards high deposit households can boost transaction volume, average balances and retention. By a sustained marketing campaign, they mean a series of monthly offers that rotate through the deposit and investment product lines, not just promoting one product for 60 days or less.
Lakeland, FL-based Community First Credit Union is constructing a green branch that is tied in with an existing Bruster’s Ice Cream Shoppe. The building will feature a roof-mounted photovoltaic system; a rainwater reuse cistern system that will support both water closets and drip irrigation; a lighting system that automatically dims the interior lighting when natural daylight is sufficient; and many finishes, including tile, carpet and counter tops, that are made from recycled materials.
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Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
According to the Aite Group, less than 50% of American financial institutions are currently using branch or teller capture solutions, despite numerous advantages such as the potential for: reducing over-the-counter costs, creating more opportunities for branch staff to sell to members, reducing manual processes, eliminating paper processing, creating greater internal efficiencies and addressing fraud. The research firm notes that vendors are offering solutions that allow credit unions more image capture deployment options: they can capture images at the teller line, the branch back-office, or at a central branch location. They can also choose to implement the technology as a software application or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.
Automated clearing house (ACH) payment volume rose 12.6 percent between 2006 and 2007, coming to a total of more than 18 billion transactions last year. Mercator Advisory Group attributes much of that increase to a high-volume foundation of relatively low-value, nonrecurring transactions that stemmed from a rapidly expanding number of merchants, aggregators, corporations, and financial institutions. A new Mercator study forecasts that alternative payments, including prepaid cards, new forms of credit, and programs exploiting the ACH, will comprise 35 percent of online payments by 2013. However, Secure Vault Payment (SVP), a new e-commerce payment solution introduced by NACHA, could help level the playing field for credit unions to compete against alternative payment providers such as PayPal, Bill Me Later, and Google Checkout and push the ACH network in a new direction.
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Internet Access
Spanlink Communications recently introduced three pre-packaged UC solutions. The systems, dubbed SpanCom 50, SpanCom 200 and SpanCom 200Flex, are designed to give small to mid-sized organizations affordable, comprehensive and easy-to-manage unified communications. Built on hardware and software from Cisco, the bundled solution gives Spanlink’s customers e-mail, voicemail, desktop video, fax, instant messaging and other communications capabilities in one unified offering.
Despite difficult economic conditions, a new study from Infonetics Research shows that worldwide IP PBX deployments increased between the second and third quarter of this year. In addition, VoIP phone shipments saw year-on-year growth of 25 percent, while IP softphone deliveries more than doubled between the two quarters. As a whole, the telephony market grew by eight percent over the period, hitting $2.6 billion.
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Call Centers
What constitutes a truly member-centric contact center? Some contact center experts recognize these key practices that leaders employ:
- Regularly rewarding and recognizing agents for good work.
- Training and continually developing staff via a variety of methods, including dynamic classroom, online and on-the-job learning.
- Empowering agents to make key decisions in their daily interactions.
- Giving agents the chance to work on interesting off-phone tasks and projects.
- Actively seeking agent feedback on ways to improve key processes and practices, such as recruiting and hiring, training, quality monitoring and coaching, workflows and technology, incentives and recognition, etc.
- Regularly incorporating humor and fun into the job.
- Enabling agents to work from home.
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Conferences
Catch Tom and Bill Rogers, Associate Editor of Credit Union tech-talk at the following conferences in 2008:
April 6-8, Park City - 2009 MVi Users Conference
June 4-5, Lake Las Vegas - Credit Union InfoSecurity Conference
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