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Jeff Carter either is either in charge of selling the most transformational technology that will come to banking, indeed to human identification, in recent memory, or he's the most delusional former banker you'll ever meet.
September 1 -
Getting skeptical small business customers on board with remote and mobile deposit capture is a worthy goal, but it may require overcoming about a billion hurdles. These are the customers that write 70 percent of the paper checks still in the system, but also the ones most worried about the $1 billion in check fraud losses the American Bankers Association found in 2008. "A lot of our [bank] customers are very skeptical of RDC," says Aaron Calipari, director, product management at FIS. They're not the only ones. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council issued guidance last year warning banks that check alteration, forging and counterfeiting risks could increase with the implementation of remote deposit capture technology, and warned that bank regulators would be looking closely at how banks addressed these risks.
September 1 -
In the age when malware and man-in-the-you-name-it (middle, browser, computer, etc.) attacks are laser focused on small business bank accounts, the best case is a solution that most regional and community banks can't afford. "Banks need to integrate their Web banking platform with their fraud management systems," says Robert Pavich, vp of fraud prevention solutions at Digital Resolve. "But few regional or community banks have the IT resources to achieve this integration."
September 1 -
Loses at small and mid-sized businesses from fraudulent electronic funds transfers are on the rise; that's because criminals increasingly target organizations with hefty account balances but that lack large IT and security operations. Consider the case of the Duanesburg Central School District in New York, which perfectly fits the profile of today's victim. It lost $3 million when hackers tapped into its NBT Bank account earlier this year.
September 1 -
The fact that Quantum National Bank was able to use a product called Gladiator RTA to locate and avert losses due to outbound connections made by internal malware didn't make the specter of potentially severe losses any less frightening.
September 1
Authentication is the name of the game when it comes to bank security, and every advance in bank technology creates corresponding demand for security. Online payments, remote deposit capture, mobile payments, and even check and branch transactions are subject to continually-evolving fraud, and demand continually evolving security. The FutureNow List showcases the state of the art, and state of the industry, in 2010.
The tales of cyberheists and hacks afflicting banks and bank accounts almost cease to surprise anymore, and regulations and risk management hogged most of the headlines this year. But the pace of attacks on corporate accounts hasn't slackened, neither have the incidents of more mundane theft like check fraud. Some 73 percent of organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2009, the highest percentage of organizations reporting such fraud since the Association for Financial Professionals began surveying its members six years ago. Some of the instances almost seem like parody: SecureWorks reported a check counterfeiting scam dubbed the "Big Boss" ring that created fake checks from images siphoned by hacking into a check verification and lockbox vendor; coincidentally, when the Financial Services Information Sharing and Assistance Council held its war games exercise earlier this year, they subjected participants to almost the same scenario.
And while old-school payments like checks and ACH are under cosntant attack, the industry is lurching, pilot-by-pilot, and one implementation at at time toward mobile banking and payments, The industry has yet to see a major mobile banking hack or breach, but the smart money wouldn't bet against it. But at the same time, new security technologies and topologies advancing to fill the voids. Biometric security, particularly voice and iris identification, are getting major play these days, with banks big and small investing in pilots. The 2010 FutureNow list calls out five security technology vendors that are tackling these problems head on. Some, like Jeff Carter at Global Rainmakers, are visionaries who paint a picture of the future of authentication and transaction security that's worthy of a movie plot. Others, like Digital Resolve and FIS, have advanced their fraud detection and prevention products to meet the evolving needs of the market, in these cases community and regional banks that need to secure business customers in both online banking and remote deposit capture. Tackling a range of bank security issues-from the big picture of the future of authentication to the everyday work of securing online banking-this year's FutureNow List has something every banker can learn from.
