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According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, the total production unit costs of the penny and nickel exceed their face value; in fact changing the metal composition of the nickel, dime, and quarter could potentially save between $8 million and $39 million per year. However, the GAO noted that the U.S. Mint previously estimated potential savings of $83 million per year by changing the nickel, dime, and quarter to a plated steel-based coin, but also determined that it was not viable to change the quarter because less-valuable foreign coins would have similar characteristics to a steel quarter and could be used as counterfeit quarters. There are no current plans to change the composition of coins partly because associations representing selected industries that use coin acceptance machines are against the changes. By some estimates, there are about 360 billion coins in circulation — about two-thirds of them pennies.
The Network Time Protocol (NTP), one of the oldest Internet protocols dating back to 1985, is used to synchronize computer clocks. Unfortunately, NTP is subject to distributed denial-of-service attacks and it can even be used to compromise servers. Microsemi is releasing two appliances it says are hardened against attacks and have better redundancy. The company says that their S600 and S650 SyncServers use "NTP reflector technology." Their appliances only respond to properly formed NTP packets in a specialized FGPA chip which means that they are impervious to DDoS attacks against CPUs.
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Netbox Blue offers a Social Risk Management platform that scans for inappropriate communications in social media, using pattern matching technology. The software can identify and capture social media, IM, collaboration and search communications, and help prevent issues by matching communications with pre-defined patterns before posting. It can also archive social communications alongside traditional data sources like email. The company was recently purchased by Bloomberg.
Some observers believe that machine learning is the best way to fight fraud in real time with the goal to accurately block card transactions at the point of sale or time of online purchase. Here are some factors that the system's algorithm would consider:
- trustworthiness of the vendor
- cardholder's purchasing behavior including time, location, and IP address
- buying history
- recent activity at the merchant's site
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Chip card readers and updated software make an ATM EMV-ready, unless the machine is older and requires additional memory or greater processing power. Here are the ballpark EMV upgrade costs:
- $1500 - $2000 for an onsite machine tech visit to upgrade the software
- $2,000 - $3,000 for a software and chip card reader upgrade
- possibly thousands more (or purchasing a new machine altogether) for hardware upgrades
An estimated 45% of U.S. ATMs are operated by financial institutions. To help address their needs, the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) announced that it has formed a new committee group specifically for financial institution ATM deployers. The group says that even if your bank is not yet a customer of ATMIA, you are invited to participate in a meeting of the new Financial Institution ATM Deployers Forum – to get a better sense of how involvement in ATMIA committee groups can benefit your bank.
Diebold is introducing a new mobile-enabled self-checkout concept that they say combines the core capabilities of the ATM with the convenience of contactless mobile payments and self-checkout. In action, consumers scan items they want to purchase while shopping in-store via their mobile device. Upon check out, they tap their phone at the self-checkout unit to pay for the items. Payment is made via preloaded card information found in the consumer's mobile wallet, within the retailer's mobile app, or cash inserted into the terminal. Cash back can also be offered through the checkout terminal, which can function as an ATM.
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Lexmark is getting into the mobile onboarding field with software that is a voice-driven. The company says that their solution incorporates mobile capture, authentication, workflow, instant decisioning, and digital signature capture. Their goal is to easily add new customers via natural voice recognition with a virtual collaboration session to eSign an application instantly.
Javelin Strategy and Research has come out with a new report that shows that in 2015, the number of the number of U.S. adults who banked weekly via mobile exceeded the number who banked in the branch. They proclaim that mobile banking has experienced "incredible growth," e.g., in 2015, 25 million U.S. adults began to use the mobile banking channel for the first time. The research firm concludes that "FIs will need to continue to innovate to outpace this increasing mobile banking adoption."
FINANTEQ's new banking app, SuperWallet, aims to combine mobile banking, payments, and m-commerce. The Polish company has launched in Europe and is looking to come to the US They plan on partnering with retailers to offer a wide range of services and goods within the app. Once the shops inside the app are authorized, there is no need for login or password, and the app can also deliver offers and discounts.
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The FFIEC just closed comments on its Cyber Assessment Tool with some calling for a revised version 2.0 of the assessment tool. While the FFIEC originally said that the tool is a voluntary cyber-risk assessment aid, New York, Texas, Massachusetts and Maine have either specifically mandated use of the Cybersecurity Assessment Tool for compliance with state regulatory guidance or have said that a mandate is on the way. Some security experts are calling for the tool to evolve to become more closely aligned with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Meanwhile, the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center have developed their own complimentary tool to help assess cybersecurity maturity.
The Fast Identity Online Alliance (FIDO) has granted certification to Eyeprint ID which is a mobile biometric authentication technology from EyeVerify. The Kansas City, Missouri-based company says that their solution transforms a selfie snapped with a smartphone or tablet into a digital key in less than a second, using the device's camera to image and pattern-match visible blood vessels and other micro features in and around the eye. The feature can be directly integrated into a device or application using the company's software development kit. The FIDO certification means that Eyeprint ID is interoperable with other products and services that support FIDO specifications.
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Addressing Insider Threats, Cyber Attacks & Data Security
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Accellion - http://www.accellion.com
Read Yorgen H. Edholm's comments: https://www.cunews.com/Accellion.pdf |
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Allied Solutions - http://www.alliedsolutions.net
Read Ann D. Davidson's comments: https://www.banktt.com/Allied.pdf |
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BrightPoint - http://www.brightpointsecurity.com
Read Ajay Nigam's comments: https://www.banktt.com/BrightPoint.pdf |
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Easy Solutions - http://www.easysol.net
Read Daniel Ingevaldson's comments: https://www.banktt.com/EasySolutions.pdf |
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EnableSoft - http://www.enablesoft.com
Read Richard Milam's comments: https://www.banktt.com/EnableSoft.pdf |
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Info@Risk - http://www.infoatrisk.com
Read David Trepp's comments: https://www.banktt.com/This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. |
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InfoSight - http://www.infosightinc.com
Read Brian Smith's comments: https://www.banktt.com/InfoSight.pdf |
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Millennial Vision - http://www.mviusa.com
Read Scott Cowan's comments: https://www.banktt.com/MVi.pdf |
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Onbase by Hyland Software - http://www.onbase.com
Read Steve Comer's comments: https://www.banktt.com/OnBase.pdf |
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Pwnie Express - http://www.pwnieexpress.com
Read Paul Paget's comments: https://www.banktt.com/PwnieExpress.pdf |
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Venminder - http://www.venminder.com
Read Aaron Kirkpatrick's comments: https://www.banktt.com/Venminder.pdf |
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To encourage children to save in era of low interest rates, some FIs have significantly boosted the rates paid on the first few hundred dollars of balances. Others setup programs whereby parents can contribute to the rate bonus. To provide an extra incentive, some FIs match parental contributions up to a certain point.
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Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
IBM has been chosen by the Federal Reserve Bank to help modernize their automated clearing house services. The Atlanta Fed serves as the central operator for the ACH network. While they already support same-day settlements, the upgrade will help the Fed adjust and scale up as more FIs shift to quicker settlement times. The Atlanta Fed has already been using IBM's Financial Transaction Manager to handle electronic checks for the past few years and now will merge in ACH and electronic check payments into the system. Fortunately, banks will not need to make any changes to their payments systems in order to use the new system which my take up to three years to come online.
Aire is a British company that offers lenders an alternative credit-scoring engine that provides them with data on thin-file borrowers. The company is expanding to the US in 2016 and claims that their solution is more robust and holistic than the traditional FICO scoring model. During the online loan application process, Aire conducts “virtual interviews” with potential borrowers similar to a human interview, and will focus on with credit cards and auto loans initially.
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A hybrid WAN is a wide area network where multiple technologies - MPLS, VPLS, point-to-point circuits and Internet VPN - are integrated to deliver the end-to-end solution. However this can result in wasted bandwidth as backup Internet circuits remain unused simply sitting idle as they wait for a failure on the MPLS network. As more sophisticated SD-WAN offerings come online, bandwidth in the network becomes available as a pool of capacity. The SD-WAN software "knows" not just what types of connections are available, but is able to make forwarding decisions by analyzing end-to-end latency, packet loss, jitter, throughput bottlenecks, etc. The bottom line is that SD-WAN solutions hold a great deal of promise in reducing the operational burden of deploying and managing WAN solutions.
Aryaka ONE is a cloud-based SDN (software defined network)-like service from Aryaka. The company states that their software-defined, cloud-delivered WAN, built on a secure private multi-tenant network, can be deployed in minutes. They contend that MPLS is a legacy tool that is expensive, slow to deploy, and too expensive. As is the case with mainstream SDN technology, users of Aryaka ONE must have switches and routers with programmable interfaces and decoupled control and forwarding planes. Once in place, the platform features guaranteed latency, Quality of Service, instant bandwidth scaling, TCP optimization and other features.
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Last week we predicted that WebRTC, which enables web browsers to support voice and video calling without special software on the client, will grow in popularity in call centers in 2016 and beyond. But WebRTC proponents are also predicting that it will make inroads with mobile applications because it can be fairly easily ported to iOS and Android and embedded within specific applications. This is what American Express did when they added video support from their iPad self-service application. Some industry analysts are predicting that many more apps will adopt WebRTC to initiate mobile calls rather than having users call into their toll free numbers.
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