Headlines:
SQN Signs Up Huntington Federal of W.Va. Wells, Others Join Symantec Phish Network Fiserv Unit Lands CIBC Mellon Trust Corp. PayPal Offering Available via VeriSign Patents for Coinstar Machines, Concept
SQN Signs Up Huntington Federal of W.Va.
Huntington Federal Savings Bank of Huntington, W.Va., is using software from SQN Banking Systems Inc. of Rancocas, N.J., to cut down on fraud at the teller window.
SQN announced Monday that Huntington had installed its Sentry: Signature software, which enables tellers to view images of customers' signatures and photo IDs.
SQN set up the system at the $397 million-asset Huntington's five branches and scanned its account holders' signature cards.
"We had a situation where the branch that opened an account and the main office would have a signature card on file, but if a customer came into a different branch, we didn't have anything to verify their signature," said Laura Hutchinson, a Huntington operations assistant, in SQN's press release.
Wells, Others Join Symantec Phish Network
Symantec Corp. has added several members to its Phish Report Network, including Wells Fargo & Co. and RSA Security Inc.
Symantec, a computer security company in Cupertino, Calif., began touting the network and the new members Monday. It acquired the network by purchasing WholeSecurity Inc. of Austin in October.
The Phish Network's participants share information on active phishing Web sites, which copy the look and feel of bank sites to steal personal information. Some participants, such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape Communications Corp., use this information to filter out these sites in their products.
The network's original participants were Microsoft Corp., eBay Inc., eBay's PayPal Inc., and Visa U.S.A. Some of these companies had similar arrangements with one another. For example, Cyota Inc., now owned by RSA, provided information directly to Netscape to block phishing sites in the Netscape Web browser.
Fiserv Unit Lands CIBC Mellon Trust Corp.
CIBC Mellon Trust Corp. has licensed fee-tracking software from Fiserv Inc.'s Interactive Technologies Inc. unit to manage client fee billing.
Fiserv, of Brookfield, Wis., announced the deal Thursday. CIBC Mellon, a joint venture of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Mellon Financial Corp. of Pittsburgh, plans to use the Advantage Fee System for aggregating data, calculating complex fees, invoicing, and reporting.
CIBC Mellon provides custody and trust services in Canada, and Mellon Financial currently uses the software in the United States.
Fiserv acquired Interactive Technologies, of Summit, N.J., in June 2005. Advantage Fee System, its sole product, manages the complex billing arrangements involved in fund management, trust accounts, and stock transfers.
Fiserv's customer base is made up mostly of community banks, and the Interactive deal gave it a way to reach larger financial companies.
PayPal Offering Available via VeriSign
PayPal Inc. has made its express checkout product available to merchants using the VeriSign payment gateway that PayPal bought from VeriSign Inc. in November.
The product lets merchants offer PayPal as a payment option but complete the transaction on the merchant's Web site. It uses the shipping and payment information a customer already has on file with PayPal. The availability with VeriSign was announced Thursday.
The VeriSign business had 100,000 small and midsize merchant customers. At the time of the deal PayPal said it planned to market its products, such as express checkout, to those customers. PayPal, a unit of eBay Inc., agreed to distribute a VeriSign authentication product to 1 million of its users.
Patents for Coinstar Machines, Concept
Coinstar Inc. has been granted patents for its coin-counting machines and business model.
The Bellevue, Wash., company announced the patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Thursday. It said it now has 67 U.S. and foreign patents.
One of the patents covers the technology that Coinstar's bright green kiosks use to communicate remotely with servicers, notifying them, for example, when the machines need to be emptied or repaired. This saves service companies time and minimizes downtime.
The other patent is for the concept of having the machines issue a voucher for coins that are deposited. When the machines are placed at a merchant site, users can take the voucher to the checkout counter to exchange for cash.
