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Credit Union tech-talk News
November 24 - November 28, 2008
General News
* Fiserv Launches Online Advantage
* Open Solutions Expands Relationship with CNS
* uMonitor Expands Reach of uOpen & uFund with Switchkit Solution
* Harland Financial Solutions Releases Decision Manager
* Digital Dialogue Expands to Accommodate Demand for 24/7 Call Center Services
Fiserv, a leading provider of information technology services to credit unions, has launched Online Advantage, an online banking solution that combines Corillian’s online banking and CheckFree’s bill payment services into one package. Online Advantage integrates all commonly viewed account information - electronic bills and payments, account balances, transfers and personal money management tools - onto a single screen for easy access.
Open Solutions announced an expanded strategic relationship with Consumer Network Services to provide electronic funds transfer products and services to Open Solutions’ clients running The Complete Credit Union Solution. Open Solutions is a leading provider of integrated enabling technologies for credit unions throughout the United States, Canada and other international markets.
uMonitor, an innovative financial solution services provider for member acquisition and retention, announced that it will offer three diverse deployment options for its online account opening and funding solution, uOpen & uFund. The new release of Go-to-Market Solution (GS), the Plus Solution (PS), and the Total Solution (TS) give credit unions the flexibility to implement the solution that works best for their business strategy.
Harland Financial Solutions announced the release of Decision Manager which is the latest addition to their CreditQuest risk and credit management software suite. Decision Manager enables rapid decision turnaround to member credit requests, and helps credit unions make more consistent loan decisions.
Digital Dialogue, a PSCU Financial Services company and nationwide provider of 24/7 call center operations and software solutions to credit unions, has experienced significant growth, adding 137 new staff members in the past three months and doubling its office space. Based on the recent demand for its services, the company plans to hire an additional 120 employees over the next year.
Hardware News
USB 3.0 has arrived, or at least the specification that allows the technology to start being built into devices has arrived. Offering data transfer speeds up to 4.8 gigabits per second – which is 10 times the USB 2.0 speeds - USB 3.0 is also expected to offer better power efficiency. The new standard, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is expected to be backward-compatible with earlier versions of USB. It will be built into computers and devices around a year from now.
MagTek announced the MDX compact check reader at the recent BAI Retail Delivery Show. MDX has a built-in secure MSR that incorporates MagTek's MagneSafe security architecture, which mutually authenticates the MDX scanner to the credit union's host application, ensuring the integrity and legitimacy at both points of the transaction. The unit also offers comprehensive multi-factor authentication.
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Software Updates
Cognos has rolled out new analytic software designed to provide credit unions with complete access to credit risk information across their loan portfolios. IBM Cognos 8 Banking Risk Performance - Credit Risk is a packaged business intelligence (BI) application that is designed to give managers a comprehensive view of their credit portfolio. Cognos says that their new solution plugs into an organization's existing technology environment, letting users tap into their credit risk data housed in financial, core lending and other administrative systems.
When Windows Server 2008 R2 is released next year, there will be some important features with this release. The most prominent is that Windows Server 2008 will solely be an x64 platform with the R2 release. Other important features include: Hyper-V improvements; PowerShell 2.0 will include over 240 new commands, as well as a graphical user interface; and Core Parking, which will constantly assess the amount of processing across systems with multiple cores, and under certain configurations, suspend new work being sent to the cores thus reducing overall power consumption of the system.
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Software Section Sponsored by
Raddon Financial Group (RFG)
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ATMs/Kiosks
NCR launched NCR APTRA Vision, a next-generation management and decision support system. According to NCR, the package provides credit unions with a single tool to assess the performance of their self-service and assisted-service channels for day-to-day management and strategic planning purposes. The portal extracts data from multi-vendor ATMs, self-service kiosks and teller applications across a variety of network infrastructures. This device-based data can be correlated with information on the transaction volumes, values, types and times in other channels, such as branch counters. Data is integrated, analyzed and presented in a range of graph, map or statistical formats for vendor management and business reporting purposes.
At last week's BAI Retail Delivery Show, Prognosis showed ATM monitoring software that delivers a real-time dashboard of ATM activity. For those credit unions driving devices in-house, this could be used in a command center for monitoring. The software will automatically send alerts to support personnel when problems arise. Prognosis also has software performing similar functions for Web application and IT infrastructure monitoring.
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Biometric Digest Highlights - WWW.BIODIGEST.COM
City Credit Union, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, recently purchased and implemented US Biometrics' AccessQ system for controlling physical access to entrances with fingerprint biometrics. US Biometrics introduced its "Ease Into Biometrics" and "Secure One Door" incentive programs to City Credit Union which allows them to specify, purchase and implement the system over time.
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Wireless World
The GSMA - an international trade group of mobile operators - is calling for full near field communication (NFC) functionality to be built into handsets from mid-2009, in a bid to drive the uptake of contactless payments. The GSMA's Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative has already seen trials get underway across eight countries - including Australia, Korea and the US - involving nine mobile operators, with further pilots planned in another 14 countries by 15 operators.
Diebold is now offering mobile banking services through a strategic alliance with ClairMail. Diebold will distribute and provide managed services for ClairMail's two-way mobile platform, which can be deployed either on-premise or as a managed service.
While credit unions may not be able to charge for mobile banking, mobile person-to-person payments are a different story. One large core processor plans to offer their clients the service and let them set the pricing structure. We will cover it in December issue of Credit Union tech-talk - subscribe now.
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Security Section
Unlike existing commercial operating systems, Integrity OS is designed and certified to defend against sophisticated attacks. After receiving the highest security rating by a National Security Agency-run certification program, Green Hills Software announced that its Integrity-178B operating system was certified as EAL6+ and that the company had spun off a subsidiary to market the OS to the private sector. Windows and Linux, meanwhile, are EAL 4+ certified, which means they can only defend against "inadvertent and casual" security breach attempts. Integrity-178 B meets the rigorous Common Criteria Separation Kernel Protection Profile (SKPP) standard, which guarantees that malicious code can't corrupt or harm any other application running on the system. Windows and Linux can run atop Integrity-178B, basically as virtual "guests" on the OS, while Integrity runs in hardware. Each operates in its own partition so that if one area is compromised, it can't spread to other areas of the system.
Gladiator Technology announced the release of its eSAT (Electronic Security Awareness Training) program enhancement designed exclusively for credit unions’ boards of directors. The eSAT program was originally designed to help credit unions comply with the provisions of GLBA which require periodic information security training for credit union personnel. The newest component of eSAT focuses specifically on training credit unions’ board members on topics that have been recently scrutinized by examiners, and on the role of boards in compliance with the new Identity Theft Prevention Program guidelines imposed by FACT Act modifications.
Cymtec Systems announced that it has upgraded the reporting and threat protection capabilities of its Sentry network monitoring, analysis and enforcement appliance. Sentry 3.0 software adds longer traffic capture windows and more flow analysis tools, enabling the device to provide better snapshots of network activity that can be used to troubleshoot network congestion. The appliances can block malware and questionable URLs because they are equipped with Spy Sweeper antispyware software from Webroot and Secure Computing's SmartFilter filtering tool. The appliances come in two models: the Sentry 100, which costs $3,995, and the Sentry 10, which costs $1,295.
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Leaders Roundtable
Core Systems:
Core Systems – Collaborating to Better Serve Members
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Technology and Marketing
MeridianLink has published a new white paper on their website aimed at credit unions that are considering the automation of financial services such as account opening software and lending technology. Entitled “Automating Financial Services: Is It Worth It?,” it focuses on the issues of costs versus benefits or ROI, and offers information about financing or budgeting for new technology.
More and more credit unions are launching in-store branches, and are attempting to emulate first-in-class retailers. Experts say that success with in-store branches requires that credit unions change their culture and do their best to think and act like these retailers. We will discuss some of their suggestions for running a successful in-store branch in the December issue of Credit Union tech-talk - subscribe now.
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Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
A startup company called Bling Nation plans to combine contactless-payment technology with an on-us approach to debit transactions that it says will cut transaction costs for both credit unions and merchants. The company's core technology, in development for three years, is an integrated issuing-and-acquiring processing platform designed specifically for community FIs. The proprietary system, which relies on contactless stickers that members can affix to their cell phones, will charge a 1.5% fee to merchants for each transaction. Of that amount, Bling Nation says it will collect 30 basis points as its network fee, with the credit union pocketing the remainder as both issuer and acquirer, less an estimated 25 basis points for issuing costs, primarily for the contactless inlays.
A company called WorkLight was demonstrating how credit unions can enhance their online and mobile capabilities by enabling secure interactions using consumer Web 2.0 tools such as gadgets and widgets at the recent BAI Retail Delivery Show. WorkLight says that their flagship product for financial services, WorkLight for Retail Banking, is the first of its kind to offer secure, enterprise-grade banking via consumer Web 2.0 tools, such as desktop and web-based gadgets and widgets, social networks, mobile applications, RSS feeds, and more.
Neotys, a leader in easy-to-use, cost effective stress and load testing tools for web applications, announced that Technology Credit Union is successfully using its NeoLoad to stress and load test its online banking application upgrades. The credit union routinely uses NeoLoad to test its online banking web application applying different user scenarios and simulating website access by many different users simultaneously. NeoLoad features a GUI interface that does not require scripting and supports all web technologies and application server technologies including J2EE, .NET, PHP, AJAX, SOAP, FLASH, and FLEX.
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Internet Access
NEC Unified Solutions says that their UNIVERGE SV8500 communications server gives users access to information based on their locations, devices and preferences. The UNIVERGE SV8500 scales up to 4,000 stations on a single server, and includes features such as presence, instant messaging, unified messaging, conferencing, click-to-call and single number reach. It also supports distributed workplaces through tools such as PC-based softphones and mobility clients designed to give employees access to their unified communications suite even when away from their desk.
TalkSwitch announced that its IP PBXs have been tested and approved for interoperability with Covad's Integrated Access service, a combined phone and Internet service. With Covad's Integrated Access service, TalkSwitch customers can take advantage of managed quality of service (QoS) for VoIP that extends to their premises. Pricing for TalkSwitch systems equipped for VoIP services start at $995.
Appliances that used to only power typical file and print services are now controlling phones, Internet access, and security. We will cover one affordable system in the December issue of Credit Union tech-talk - subscribe now.
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Call Centers
Avaya has launched a new service product for financial institutions called Proactive Outreach for Financial Services that is designed to help credit unions use outbound communications and self service automation. Outbound self-service is a contact center technology to deliver information to consumers - such as appointment reminders or loan collection requests - and let them complete transactions using automated menus or speech commands. Credit unions can use Avaya Proactive Outreach to initiate outbound communications via multiple channels, such as phone, e-mail or SMS.
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Conferences
Catch Tom and Bill Rogers, Associate Editor of Credit Union tech-talk at the following conferences in 2008:
June 4-5, Lake Las Vegas - Credit Union InfoSecurity Conference
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