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Member Driven Technologies Joins Sheltered Harbor Initiative
Member Driven Technologies (MDT), a CUSO that hosts the Episys core platform from Symitar, announced that it has joined Sheltered Harbor to enhance resiliency capabilities for CUs in the event of a major cyber incident. Sheltered Harbor, a subsidiary of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, is a not-for-profit industry-led initiative launched in 2015 to enhance the industry’s cyber-resiliency and better protect consumer accounts.
NewGround Launches ‘Revitalized’ WayPoint Diagnostic Program
NewGround has launched a revitalized WayPoint diagnostic program to help CUs understand their leadership team’s perceptions and determine their overall alignment and delivery strategy. NewGround said WayPoint performs its diagnostics based on four unique business delivery quadrants: Market Focused, Experiential, Traditional, and Product Driven.
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Dell EMC Speeds up Backups and Restores in Its Storage Appliances
Dell EMC has introduced new software for its Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IPDA) products that it claims will improve backup and restore performance from anywhere from 2.5 times to four times the previous version. Data Domain is Dell EMC’s purpose-built data deduplicating backup appliance, originally purchased by EMC long before the merger of the two companies. The IPDA is a converged solution that offers complete backup, replication, recovery, deduplication, with cloud extensibility.
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How Virtualization Is Changing Windows Application Security
This article takes an in-depth look at how sandboxes, minimal processes, Hyper-V containers, and Device Guard deliver a lot more than VMs in modern Windows.
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ATMIA and the ATM Security Association Join Forces Permanently
The ATM Security Association (ASA) and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) have signed a final agreement to join forces and work together on a permanent basis. ASA will retain its name and logo and will now fall under the governance and ownership of ATMIA.
KAL Introduces Alternative to ATM Upgrades
KAL ATM Software has announced an innovative solution to the ATM industry's long-standing dilemma of endless ATM hardware upgrades required to support new versions of Microsoft Windows. The solution, OS-Virtualization, was developed by KAL in coordination with Red Hat, VMware and Wind River. OS-Virtualization applies hypervisor, a technology widely used in data centers, to uncouple the hardware from the ATM operating environment. KAL claims that thier solution is able to run on many current ATM hardware models without requiring an upgrade to the processor.
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Will Contactless Card Payments Kill OEM Mobile Payments and Does It Really Even Matter?
The author argues that, in the longer term, it doesn’t really matter whether contactless cards beat OEM mobile payments simply because the functionality and benefits of both are essentially the same.
Network Tools for Your iPhone and Android Phone
The article states that network analyzers, remote access apps, and testing utilities are able to turn your smartphone into a powerful network tool. It goes on to zero in on a handful of standout apps that have the highest ratings, most downloads and approval of the pros.
Masergy, a leading provider of secure hybrid networking, cloud communications and managed security solutions, has launched Masergy Secure Wi-Fi. The company contends that thier new capability delivers swift and secure enterprise-grade wireless network access to both high- and low-density areas including retail and corporate environments.
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Google's New Chrome Extension Warns You About Pilfered Passwords
Chrome's new Password Checkup extension lets you know if the username and password you are using have been nabbed by hackers in the past. It then prompts you to change them if they were. Google's own database of collected credentials from public breaches contains over 4 billion usernames and passwords.
Phishers Target Anti-Money Laundering Officers at CUs
A highly targeted, malware-laced phishing campaign landed in the inboxes of multiple credit unions recently. The missives are raising eyebrows because they were sent only to specific anti-money laundering contacts at CUs, and many CU sources say they suspect the non-public data may have been somehow obtained from the NCUA. Starting Jan. 30, BSA officers at CUs across the nation began receiving emails spoofed to make it look like they were sent by BSA officers at other CUs.
Pentesters Breach 92 Percent of Companies, Report Claims
Cyber-security firm Positive Technologies claimed that its researchers breached external perimeters and gained access to companies' internal networks in 92 percent of all penetration tests carried out last year. Failure to protect web apps with firewalls, failure to patch systems, and the use of insecure WiFi networks were deemed the primary causes.
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Truity Takes the Pain out of Pre-Approvals
For the past seven years, Truity Federal Credit Union ($795.9M, Bartlesville, OK) has been turning on and off an automated credit card pre-approval program that generates new card accounts when needed and limits card growth when priorities change. The Oklahoma CU pulls credit reports every other month and assigns non-card members to tiers based on a combination of credit score, bankruptcy indicators, and Reg Z ability to repay criteria. It then typically emails members in the top tiers with an offer to open a credit card account.
Rely More Heavily on Advertising to Win Market Share
In a world with fewer branches, FIs will need to rely more heavily on advertising to win market share, according to a new study by McKinsey. Brand recall is strongly correlated with deposit share, McKinsey found.
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Meridian CU Says It’s on Target for Launch of New Online Bank
Ontario-based Meridian Credit Union said it is on target to meet the April launch of a new digital bank, saying regulators have signed off on the new offering. With approval from the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions confirmed, Meridian Credit Union has now launched a website to allow consumers to get a preview of the new nationwide lender — which is being called motusbank — before the official opening this Spring.
Same-Day and P2P Volumes Boom on the ACH While Back-Office Conversions Stage a Comeback
Growth on the automated clearing house network continued apace in 2018’s fourth quarter, boosted by same-day transactions, person-to-person payments, and online commerce. The massive network linking nearly all of the nation’s FIs tallied 5.97 billion transactions, up 8.7% from 5.49 billion a year earlier. Also, same-day ACH transactions—credits and debits combined—grew 46% year-over-year to 51.3 million from 35.2 million in 2017’s last quarter. PCP transactions totaled 37.9 million in the fourth quarter, up 46.9% from 25.8 million a year earlier.
Curve, the smart card that lets users keep all their credit and debit cards on a single card, has unveiled what they claim is the world’s first metal ‘all your cards in one’ card that opens a world of exclusive benefits tailored to meet the needs of the “Experience Generation”.
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Netsurion Upgrades SD-WAN with a Unified Network Management
Netsurion is upgrading thier Connect SD-WAN service with an all-in-one consolidated network management and security orchestration platform for distributed businesses. That product is branded BranchSDO, for branch software-defined orchestration. BranchSDO combines a number of Netsurion’s offerings to help optimize edge network connectivity, security, scalability, and costs for branch locations.
Lookalike Domains: AI May Come to the Rescue
In the world of network security, scammers often use lookalike domains to trick users to unintended and unwanted web sites, to deliver malicious software into or to send data out of victim’s network, taking advantage of the fact that it’s hard to tell the difference between those domains and the targets they look alike. Of course, you can simply register or buy out lookalike domains, but some observers think that we will soon be using AI to detect lookalike domains.
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Using Voice Technology to Enhance Service Levels
More and more, contact centers are employing voice technology to speed up the time to resolution. The author states that centers should use voice transcription to drive analytics, which lend insight into big trends that drive call volume, but points out that machine-based transcription programs are still in their infancy and natural language cognitive searching is still a few years away.
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