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Dell announced a new type of server that they claim has the most compute density of its kind. The PowerEdge FX2 is based on a 2U (3.5-inch) enclosure with shared power, cooling and management components, into which customers can slide different combinations of components as needed. Dell says it has the density of a blade server but is easier to manage and connects easily to direct-attached storage systems, which isn’t usually the case with blade servers. The chassis can be filled with four half-width FC630 servers, for instance, each with two 18-core Xeon E5 chips, 24 memory DIMMS, two 2.5-inch or four 1.8-inch storage drives, and a 10Gb SNA.
Intel announced upgrades to its Solid State Drive DC S3500 Series of products that now offer up to 1.6TB of capacity, which is double that of earlier models. Intel also announced it has boosted the capacity of its M.2 form factor flash expansion card so that it can be used as a mass storage device and not simply a client boot drive. The new S3500 M.2 expansion card comes in 80GB, 120GB and 340GB models.
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Hardware Section Sponsored by
MVi |
Software Updates
Low-code, rapid development platforms provide a way to incorporate user feedback into apps during development. A low-code platform is one that enables fast application development and delivery with a minimum of hand coding, and include visual tools for the quick definition and assembly of forms and the rapid build-out of multistage workflows. Large vendors such as Red Hat, Software AG and Salesforce.com offer low-code platforms, as do smaller players like Alpha Software, Claysys Technologies, Mendix and Mobideo.
MailShark is an Australian company founded by IT professionals with over 20 years of experience in combating unsolicited emails. Their MailShark free product includes email filtering, web administration interface, archive/retrieval system, unlimited domains and mailboxes, virus scanning of inbound/outbound emails, email reporting and email content search. They also offer a paid Enterprise version.
R-Studio Data Recovery Software is a data recovery application for PCs. This application is somewhat unique in that it doesn't just scan hard disks - it can also open disk images and connect to remote PCs. The software sells for $49.99, but a free trial version is available for download.
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Software Section Sponsored by
Raddon Financial Group (RFG) |
Source Technologies introduced their 6-series Personal Teller Machine (PTM) which resides in the branch and communicates with the teller platform to automate transactions. The PTM is customizable for customer authentication and multidenomination cash acceptance and dispensing, as well as check, credit, and debit card processing. The company claims that their PTM is the first self-service kiosk to offer on-demand official checks as a part of a larger teller automation solution, and that the new kiosk has the smallest footprint in the transactional kiosk industry at just over one square foot.
Asia-Pacific contributed more to worldwide ATM growth in 2013 than any other region, accounting for 83% of new installations, according to RBR’s latest research Global ATM Market and Forecasts to 2019. The study found that the global ATM market increased by 8% overall in the year to reach 2.8 million, with 205,000 new machines added. China remains the world’s largest ATM market, while North America and Western Europe each demonstrated ATM expansion of less than 1%.
NCR is working with Australia's ANZ bank to introduce what they are calling the world's first EMV-secure and NFC-enabled "tap and PIN" solution for contactless ATMs. The solution will speed up the ATM transaction, as well as allow for future functionalities, such as user authentication and ATM transaction pre-staging via mobile devices.
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ATMs/Kiosks Sponsored by
Heritage Industries |
According to a recent Javelin Strategy & Research report, in the past 12 months, 51 percent of consumers purchased physical goods using a mobile phone, up from 45 percent in 2013. Javelin estimates the volume of mobile payments is expected to grow to $7.3 billion in 2015 and reach $53.1 billion in 2019. Mobile payments also are expected to climb from 0.18 percent of overall point-of-sale purchase volume to 1.24 percent by 2019. Surveyed consumers named these mobile wallets as their favorites:
- 43% PayPal
- 31% Google Wallet
- 28% Apple Pay
- 28% MasterCard’s MasterPass
- 27% Visa’s Checkout
The bad news is that mobile device users are about 25% more likely than the general population to use the same password to access more than one online account, according to a survey of 5,634 U.S. adults, which was conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research. While the good news is that mobile devices make it much easier to add other forms of authentication such as biometrics. Fingerprint recognition is the most popular form of biometric authentication among consumers - more than a third said they would prefer to use a fingerprint to authenticate their identity online. Of course, Apple's support for fingerprint recognition has helped raise awareness for biometrics tremendously among the general public. The mobile device's camera can also be used for iris or retina recognition, and among the consumers Javelin surveyed more than 13% said eye scanning would be their preferred method of biometric authentication.
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) recently set out its Cybersecurity Assessment Observations and in them they state that senior management and boards of directors of all financial institutions must become more actively engaged in the management of risks presented by their financial institutions' critical dependence on IT. They recommend that financial institutions of all sizes participate in the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC). Many security experts are expecting that the FFIEC will soon issue formal guidance on cybersecurity risk identification and mitigation, along with specific requirements for boards of directors and senior management to take a more active role in shaping and overseeing these enhanced policies and procedures.
Hewlett-Packard is offering a new cloud-based service for smaller organizations to help them manage and protect mobile devices and PCs. HP's Web-based Touchpoint Manager service can remotely check the health of smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops. It can also issue alerts and remotely lock or wipe data from devices in case of theft. For $2 a month, a starter plan provides a list of users and devices, tracks devices on a map, and monitors hard-disk health and battery life of remote devices. For $10, users get additional features like camera management and the ability find lost devices, reset passwords remotely and wipe data. Under both plans, system administrators can track and issue alerts in case devices are close to expiration or security software is out of date.
Core Systems:
Using Core Systems to Enable Superior Financial Performance
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Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network -http://www.bpinetwork.org
Read Dave Murray's comments: http://www.banktt.com/BPI.pdf |
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VSoft Corporation - http://www.vsoftcorp.com
Read Dan Barnard's comments: http://www.banktt.com/VSoft.pdf |
ChangeIt is a Canadian-based company that provides an easy way for your customers to donate to the charities they care about by rounding up their purchases on your debit or credit programs. The company says that their platform can:
• Easily be added to any existing payment cards
• Provides industry-grade security protection
• Works with e-Wallets and mobile payments
• Enhances your corporate social responsibility program
In action, customers have the ability to:
• Track donations online and control rounding up preferences at any time
• Set a monthly maximum and receive monthly summaries of donations
• Receive an official donation receipt for Income Tax purposes for every penny donated
Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
MasterCard and Visa are working on a new authentication standard dubbed 3DS 2.0. To help combat the issues caused by weak passwords, MasterCard has also been piloting a number of commercial biometric tests, including the use of facial and voice recognition apps to authenticate cardholders, chip cards which utilize fingerprint recognition, and a Canadian trial of Bionym's Nymi wristband which authenticates a cardholder through their unique cardiac rhythm. The new standard could be adopted in 2015 and will gradually replace the current 3D Secure protocol used in online transactions.
CPI Card Group has come out with a new system called EMVReady for smaller card issuers. Available through product provider Harland Clarke, the companies say that the solution takes the customer through all the steps in the process of providing EMV cards: product training; EMV chip choice; personalization profiles; card design; key management; and the CPI Card at Once Instant Issuance solution. The system supports both instant onsite and central issuance settings.
Wepawet is a platform for the analysis of web-based threats. Wepawet uses a composition of approaches and techniques to execute, trace, analyze, and characterize the activity of code whose execution is triggered by visiting a web page. Wepawet is a free service, for non-commercial organizations, and currently handles Flash, JavaScript, and PDF files. There is also a commercial version of this service that offers additional features and detection capabilities: Lastline's advanced malware protection platform.
According to Akamai, in one recent quarter 84% of the observed attack traffic was generated from within just ten countries. Of course, the traffic may be coming from packets that originate in one country but are then routed through compromised systems in other countries. New advances in Geo-IP filtering make it easier to more granularly block traffic. PacketViper, for example, has developed technology that increases the precision of evaluating traffic in order to prevent access to and from high risk geographical areas without excluding potentially valuable customers or businesses. After deployment at the edge of your network in front of other security devices, such as firewalls and IDS/IPS, the device is configured to allow or deny network traffic based on geographical location by network port. Their filtering technology allows you to be very precise in eliminating unwanted traffic by offering numerous filtering techniques.
Nuage’s Virtualized Networks Services (VNS) product is designed to help enterprises simplify the provisioning of secure network services to branches. The company states that its VNS is an extension of its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) product for the cloud and data centers. VNS can work across both corporate WAN and Internet access bandwidth, and allows users to create templates that describe and manage the workflow of network services for applications in clouds, from any location.
NICE Systems has launched NICE Robotic Automation which is a solution that uses software "robots" to automate routine back office processes. For example, if a customer places a call to the contact center in regards to a loan, the agent would open up a request to approve it. Once the application is approved, the NICE solution automatically enters the loan details into several front and back end systems and sends an email to notify the customer that the loan has been approved.
