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Rackspace Introduces Data Center Colocation Services
Rackspace announced a new data center colocation business, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world. The company notes that servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.
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How to Apply Insights in Excel and What to Look out for When You Do
Microsoft is gradually rolling out a new feature for Office 365 subscribers called Insights in Excel. The tool promises to apply the power of cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning to your Excel data sets to reveal new patterns and hidden information that you may have overlooked. This brief tutorial article shows you how to implement Insights and explains some of the difficulties you may encounter when trying to apply artificial intelligence to real-world data sets.
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ThetaRay Receives Next-Gen ATM Security Award
ThetaRay, a provider of big data analytics solutions, has won the 2018 ATM Industry Association Global Award for Next-Generation ATM Security. The ThetaRay solution monitors physical and electronic activity at individual ATMs and across ATM networks, using big data analytics and advanced AI-powered machine learning technology to detect illicit and suspicious activity.
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FIs Must Think Mobile-First in Today's Omni-Channel World
As with other research covered by The Financial Brand, the PwC research found that consumers who were once online-dominant are now becoming mobile-dominant consumers. That is not the only shift that was seen. For instance, while there was a rise of ‘omni-digital’ consumers in the 2017 PwC research (digital consumers without a preference for using a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone), these consumers are quickly developing a preference for mobile banking.
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6 New Innovations in Biometric Authentication
Even with fingerprint readers built into most smartphones and many laptops, there is still a lot of room for innovation in the technology's use for authentication and payments. This article looks at some of the newest ideas being tested with many different forms of biometric authentication.
IDology Study Reveals Consumer Insights on Digital Identity Fraud
The IDology Consumer Digital Identity Study found that consumers view biometrics, knowledge-based authentication and one-time passcodes as the most secure methods of authentication. When opening an account online, consumers place a premium on security (88 percent) and ease (72 percent), with 31 percent reporting they have abandoned signing up because it was too difficult or took too long.
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Consumers Prefer Branch to Digital for Banking Advice — If It's a Good Experience
Consumers are happy with digital interactions for quick transactions, but for more substantive conversations they'd rather deal with humans, according to new research commissioned by Samsung. The study found that 77 percent of consumers prefer face-to-face interaction for at-length discussions with their FI. Even for quick questions, 53 percent would rather pick up the phone than deal with a digital solution.
What FI Marketers Can Learn from Auto Dealers
Car dealerships try to retain buyers with after-sales service. The author contends that FIs can do the same thing and discusses some of them in this article.
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Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
Zelle Forecast to Overtake Venmo This Year
Despite some concerns over its adoption by scammers, new payment service Zelle is shaping up to overtake rival Venmo this year, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. The firm expects Zelle to grow more than 73 percent in 2018, to reach 27.4 million users in the U.S., ahead of Venmo’s 22.9 million. Square Cash will trail with 9.5 million users. This growth isn’t necessarily chalked up to user preference, but rather, ubiquity.
FIs Unlikely to Process Payments with Distributed Ledgers for Now
FIs are unlikely to use distributed ledgers to process cross-border payments for now because of scalability and privacy issues, according to Ripple, one of the most prominent startups developing the technology. Distributed ledgers, an umbrella under which so-called blockchains fall, are immutable databases maintained by a network of computers rather than a centralized authority and secured by advanced cryptography. The technology’s proponents say shared record keeping boosts efficiency and reduces data discrepancies, but distributed ledgers are not yet scalable or private enough for FIs, according to the company.
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3 Major Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid
The author contends that common mistakes are beginning to emerge in cloud migrations. He covers 3 major cloud migration mistakes to avoid in this article.
vCPE and SD-WAN's Impact on Managed Business Network Services
Communications service providers (CSPs) are evaluating deployment of virtual CPE (vCPE) or universal CPE as a more flexible way of delivering virtualized services to business customers including SD-WAN, routing, WAN optimization, network address translation, virtual private networks, and firewall functionality. The power of vCPE is the combination of flexible, low-cost hardware at the customer location that can power a wide range of NFV software, including SD-WAN, routing, and security functions. Thus, CSPs can easily deploy new business services via software updates without changing the physical platform at customer locations.
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What Makes a Great Place to Work? Here's What Thousands of Employees Said
Contact centers are notorious for high staff turnover rates. This article claims that flexible hours, gym time, and unlimited vacation days are the perks that drive the best workplaces in America.
10 Knowledge Management Best Practices That Lead to Success
The author challenged his leadership team to adopt a principle that knowledge was not an option, but a core and critical process of their operational responsibility. They began their focus on searching the Knowledge Base (KB) all the time and Using, Flagging, Fixing, and Adding (UFFA) knowledge articles (KAs) into their "single source of truth" KB. He goes on to cover more best knowledge management practices.
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