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Credit Union tech-talk News
March 23, 2009 - March 27, 2009
General News
* CarQuotes Launches Advanced CU Car Buying & Loan-Generating Portal
* Harland Financial Solutions Expands Business Continuity Suite
* CU*Answers Offers Fee Income/Waiver Analysis Tool
* COCC Partners with MarkMonitor
* HEIT Adds Key Personnel
CarQuotes Corporation, one of the nation’s leading automobile buying services and a credit union partner since 1979, announced the launch of an advanced credit union car buying website. Developed with input from credit unions and their members, as well as from online automotive research firms including J.D. Power & Associates, CarQuotes.com provides credit union members with a simple way to find the right car and obtain an immediate discounted price while giving credit unions a co-branded loan-generating portal.
Harland Financial Solutions has launched Shared Recovery Services to deliver a simple, low cost alternative for its credit union clients using the UltraData Enterprise core system in a service bureau environment. Shared Recovery Services enables UltraData Enterprise service bureau clients to partner with one another, sharing facilities and data connections, in the event of a disaster.
CU*Answers, a West Michigan-based CUSO known for providing its flagship data processing system CU*BASE, announced a new analysis tool that allows month to month service income comparisons, making it easier to decision on “when to change” versus “when not to change.” The Fee Income/Waiver analysis provides a dashboard view for credit unions so that they can view trends across all members to see how their activity plays out in fee income for the credit union.
COCC, a leading provider of next generation technology services for credit unions, has partnered with MarkMonitor, a leader in enterprise brand protection, to help mutual clients protect their brands in the face of increasing Internet-based fraud. COCC will market the MarkMonitor anti-phishing services under its Sentry Services Suite of risk management solutions.
HEIT, an information security and compliance Managed Services Provider (MSP) with an exclusive focus on the financial industry, has added Ken Totura as Vice President of Sales. HEIT has also added other key personnel, including a Director of Network Operations Center (NOC), Controller, four NOC information security engineers, and a Master Business Continuity Planner (MBCP).
Hardware News
Cisco Systems just unveiled its Unified Computing effort, including the company's move to offer its own server hardware. Taking a step into the server market, where it will compete with Hewlett-Packard and IBM, Cisco announced the UCS B-Series blades, based on upcoming Intel Nehalem processors. Cisco also is teaming up with software partners such as Microsoft, VMware and BMC to provide technology for its new system. Cisco will prepackage, resell and support Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as part of the Unified Computing System. For its part, VMware is providing virtualization technology to the new system and BMC is contributing resource-management software.
There are literally hundreds of ways to reduce IT costs, especially when it comes to hardware. Now may be the time to try something new to save costs that don't compromise the systems you manage and the capabilities you deliver. We will cover some money saving hardware tips in the April issue of Credit Union tech-talk - subscribe now.
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Software Updates
Between Exchange server on the back end and Outlook e-mail client on the desktop, Microsoft controls about 65% of the enterprise messaging market. Naturally there are many alternatives for smaller to mid-sized organizations. Here are six Exchange alternatives:
- CommuniGate Pro (CommuniGate Systems)
- Kerio MailServer (Kerio Technologies)
- MDaemon Pro (Alt-N Technologies)
- MailSite Fusion (MailSite)
- Scalix Enterprise Edition (Scalix, a Xandros company)
- Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Professional Edition (Zimbra, a Yahoo company).
JDiskReport is a disk auditing utility that you may want to consider for your toolbox. It is a Java applet that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It serves up pie charts that you can click through to find your biggest directories, and the amount of audit space consumed by files of various types. This freeware also shows the list of 100 largest files, least recently modified files, and most recently used files, which provides a good way to find large and obsolete files.
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Software Section Sponsored by
Raddon Financial Group (RFG)
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ATMs/Kiosks
Security researchers from Sophos have discovered sophisticated malware that siphons payment card information out of ATMs made by Diebold and possibly other manufacturers. If installed, the three trojans contain functions that permit them to log information recorded by an ATM's magnetic card reader. In response, Diebold has offered a software update as a precautionary measure. The Sophos researcher said this appears to be the first time malware has been uncovered that specifically targets ATMs, and that the malware could only be installed by someone who had physical access to the ATM.
Allpoint Network says that they are the first surcharge-free ATM network in the United States to offer iPhone and Android applications for locating the 37,000 surcharge-free ATMs across its network. The new applications join a suite of other services including a 24 hour speech phone system, mobile web friendly locator, and GPS download functionality for Allpoint website searches.
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Biometric Digest Highlights - WWW.BIODIGEST.COM
Hitachi recently presented an overview of the use of biometric ATMs in Japan. These ATMs use palm and vein recognition, rather than fingerprints. Users hold their hand over the terminal and it recognizes them via the unique map of arteries and veins in their hand. Hitachi claims that the system works with false positives down at 0.0001%, one in a million, and false negatives at 0.01% or one in ten thousand.
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Wireless World
Global mobile banking take up is set to soar over the next five years, with the number of people using the technology growing from 20 million in 2008 to 913 million in 2014, a CAGR of 89%, according to Berg Insight. The research firm believes that mobile banking will mainly serve as an extension of existing online services in Europe and North America as handsets become more widely used for Internet access. By 2014, their research forecasts that mobile banking will attract 80 million users in North America.
According to Javelin Strategy and Research, mobile bankers use mobile phone features at an increased rate compared to all consumers with mobile phones, suggesting they would be likely to adopt a unique mobile product, the mobile wallet. Among mobile bankers, 89% use text messaging compared to only 58% of all consumers with mobile phones.
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Security Section
IBM is introducing software that lets network administrators manage multivendor desktop security agents via a single console. Proventia Endpoint Secure Control (ESC) aims to support software security clients for multiple vendors in four areas: system protection, data protection, configuration management, and system maintenance. Initially, Proventia ESC will support anti-virus software from TrendMicro that can be deployed on the ESC agent and fully managed via the ESC management platform, but IBM says it plans to add more vendors and more products over time.
At the recent Visa Global Security Summit, Visa's chief enterprise risk officer Ellen Richey told attendees that payment card data fraud rates remain near historic lows despite economic woes and high profile compromises, and called for continued industry investment, collaboration and innovation. Richey outlined four critical priorities:
• Accelerate global data breach preparedness with greater PCI DSS compliance
• Actively engage consumers in the process of protecting their data
• Increase collaboration across the payment system to close security gaps and share critical information more quickly
• Reduce the value of stolen data through investment in new authentication measures
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Leaders Roundtable
Security:
Protecting Member Data at Rest and in Motion
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Technology and Marketing
Some analysts believe that now is the best time to target small businesses and point to statistics that show that the average small business generates $60,000 of deposits, and 60% of small businesses provide at least some fee income. We will take a deeper look at small business benefits and marketing approaches in the April issue of Credit Union tech-talk - subscribe today.
Las Vegas-based Community One Federal Credit Union is rolling out free online services, which they call eServices. One aspect of eServices is eCommunity which is Community One’s new email marketing program. This is a permission-based email program that allows the credit union to send special offers and product information to members and non-members.
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Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
Personal finance site Wesabe has launched a Web-services-based version of its money management platform for credit unions. The SpringBoard platform lets credit unions offer their members the range of money management tools and community features available on Wesabe through their own websites.
Online PIN debit continues to move from concept to reality as HomeATM ePayment Solutions announced its PIN pad and POS device, the Safe-T-PIN, has achieved certification under the Payment Card Industry PIN Entry Device (PED) 2.0 standard. The device, which attaches via a USB connection to PCs to allow consumers to make PIN debit transactions on Web sites and to do person-to-person money transfers online, is the first of its kind to win PED 2.0 certification.
The TowerGroup says that the gross dollar volume of the U.S. noncash person-to-person (P2P) market in 2008 was $1.1 trillion. They define P2P as a consumer-initiated transfer of funds to another consumer using multiple channels and payment methods. Their research also found that:
• Over 3 billion P2P transactions occurred in 2008.
• In 2008, checks represented over $1.013 trillion of the noncash P2P payments in the US and cost financial institutions an estimated $255 million to process.
• Account-to-account (A2A) transfer volume will reach a projected $127 billion in 2012.
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Internet Access
FaxCore’s FoIP-in-a-Box has received a 2008 Product of the Year Award from Unified Communications magazine. The FoIP-in-a-Box appliances are designed to be easy to deploy solutions for migrating fax transmissions to an IP-based network. FaxCore is a strategic partner of Dialogic and deployed the first commercial installation of the Brooktrout SR140 FoIP product.
Egress Software Technologies announced the availability of Switch which is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) encryption service. Egress Switch allows an information owner to package their sensitive information using AES 256-bit encryption on any type of media such as a CD/DVD, USB stick or file. Once packaged, the secured information can be sent to a recipient either electronically through email, web, FTP, or physically through regular mail or in-person. The owner can then set or change security policies independent of the package through a service in the cloud.
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Call Centers
Varolii, which specializes in outbound communications, has introduced three new outbound communications products:
- Varolii Call Me Now
- Varolii Generations
- Varolii Contact Center Agent
The firm says that they are all designed to get people who are hard to reach to reply. Varolii Call Me Now allows recipients respond to SMS messages via text so Varolii can then either connect them with an agent or complete the conversation with an automated voice call. Varolii Generations is a solution designed for targeting specific demographic groups For example, you can alter the channel (SMS, voice and email), voice treatment, message patterns and previous response outcomes, such as time of day or male/female voice, depending on which demographic group you are targeting. Finally, Varolii Contact Center Agent automatically notifies agents to ensure staffing requirements are met. All three products use Varolii ID to send tailored messages to individual recipients – and all are dispatched using the features of the new unified Varolii Interact Platform.
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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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