During the last 10 years financial institutions have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to focus on business intelligence; the ability to gather, understand and use information relevant to their operations. Business intelligence is essential in helping a financial institution, providing the means to stay ahead of its competition by supporting the means to quicker, measurable, accurate and more informed decision-making.

For its second year at the conference, financial technology consultant CUTEK will host an after-hours party and display more of its products than last year at the 2007 Symitar Educational Conference and Technology Expo in San Diego, this August. The free entertainment will feature disco era group Village People and American Idol singer William Hung.

Fraud detection provider SQN Banking Systems recently installed its SENTRY: Signature system at Southbridge CU in Massachusetts. SENTRY: Signature displays captured electronic signatures and photo IDs to fight fraud at the teller station.

Telhio CU has chosen Coveo Enterprise Search to streamline information access to internal procedures documentation.

Nevada FCU has installed Alexys Corp.'s Team Pro task and project management system for compliance, IT governance and reporting needs. Team Pro is task management software that allows CU and bank employees to easily record tasks in a relational database, allowing them to be prioritized, assigned and completed with detailed documentation of pertinent discussions, notes, attachments, and a record of the time spend on each task. Alexys Corp. is based in Stoneham, Mass.

The following are members of The Credit Union Journal's Technology Panel. They are all given the opportunity to respond to reader questions, in addition to providing input to our technology coverage.

First Hawaiian Homes Federal Credit Union here converted its core processors to USERS DataSafe system on January 1, 2006.

CoreTrac, provider of ResourceOne member relationship management solution, announced that four credit union clients of CUsource, LLC, a Great Falls, Mont., CUSO, have contracted for ResourceOne. The new credit union clients are: Avanta FCU, Billings FCU, Summit CU and Sky FCU.

Fujitsu announced it has begun to test-pilot its biometric palm sensor at ATMs for the largest private bank in Latin America, Banco Bradesco S.A. The system, known as PalmSecure, shines a beam of light through a customer's palm to read each user's unique pattern of veins. The sensor captures the pattern and matches it against an ATM user's pre-registered palm print to authenticate the user's identity. Fujitsu is also selling the scanners for security in financial institutions, universities and private residences. The Fujitsu PalmSecure can be connected directly to the USB port of a notebook PC, or embedded into desktop PC keyboards.

Southbridge CU has implemented SQN Banking System's SENTRY: Signature anti-fraud software with its core processing system. SENTRY: Signature displays captured electronic signatures and photo IDs detecting fraud at the teller station. The signatures can be used for a broad variety of applications, including branch display, exception from item processing, and automated signature comparison. Southbridge CU is a $150 million CU with 13,000 members.

Entrust FCU has signed a three-year agreement for Web-based and call-center-based lending solutions with PSCU Financial Services. PSCU Financial Services' Web-based AnyTimeLender solution delivers immediate loan decisions and interfaces with most core processor systems, the company said.

Desert Schools FCU said it will implement Bharosa's anti-fraud and multifactor authentication solution for its online banking. The $2.6-billion credit union will use Bharosa Tracker, real-time fraud detection software that will run behind the scenes, as well as the company's multifactor authentication system for identification of users. Bharosa is a privately held start-up based in Santa Clara, Calif.

Mortgage technology specialist Financial Industry Computer Systems, Inc. (FICS) implemented a new solution to its Commercial Servicer solution to ease reports to GSE investors.

Look for Internet-based telephones to become the secure and reliable "standard," according to one credit union here.

ATLANTA -- Atlanta Postal CU said Tuesday it has signed with Configuresoft to integrate the company's ECM Management Extension for Assets. The system will allow the $1.6 billion credit union to centralize and correlate data from different areas that were previously resource intensive and time consuming to manage. The system expedites decision making and improves accuracy of asset management and data discovery because all relevant information gets assembled in a single report. Configuresoft is based in Colorado Springs.

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. (07/25/06) -- First New York CU said Monday it has implemented Integrated Media Management's TotaleAtlas document presentment solution to create member and lending forms through integration with its core processor Summit Technology Systems and its image product, TrueImage. TotaleAtlas is a turnkey browser-based solution that eliminates the process of either storing paper and manually retrieving it, or physically scanning and indexing. First New York CU is a $180 million credit union with 27,000 members.

CUNA Mutual Group, in order to stem rising losses on credit and debit card programs, is telling its credit union clients they must deploy stricter fraud-detection systems in order to keep their insurance coverage.

Essentially, what CU*Answers owner-clients want, they get, and what they wanted was a method to deal with electronic documents and archiving. What they got was a majority interest in Reed Data Inc. (RDI), of Midway, Utah, said Randy Karnes, CEO of the CU-owned data processing and networking CUSO here.

PayPal is test-piloting a MasterCard-branded virtual debit card that could expand the number of merchants accepting its payments.

What is keeping credit unions from capturing more of the auto loan market?