Face-to-Face Events:
May 11, 2010
Accelerating Wall Street 2010

October 3-6, 2010
Bank Systems & Technology Executive Summit 2010

October 17-19, 2010
Advanced Trading's Buy-Side Trading Summit 2010


Online Events:
March 25, 2010
Core Banking Modernization: The Path to a More Agile Enterprise

March 30, 2010
Online Account Acquisition - What are the Drivers of Abandonment and Conversion?



Bank Systems & Technology: The Blog

Featuring commentary from the editors of Bank Systems & Technology, plus Art Gillis!

Bank Tech Vendors Do Not Live By Core Alone
March 16, 2010 @ 11:16 AM | By Art Gillis

A first-time event occurred in the bank tech space during 2009. Whereas in previous years the list of popular solutions sold by major vendors included ten solutions, in 2009 the list shot up to 34. These 34 are a unique mix of applications. I'd like to have a chat with the pundits who have been using the word "commodities" to describe the offerings of core/ancillary system vendors.

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Dodd Tells PBS Newshour Why His Bill Gives the Fed Consumer Protection Oversight
March 16, 2010 @ 09:28 AM | By Penny Crosman

Senator Christopher Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, discussed his new unveiled financial reform bill with Judy Woodruff on PBS Newshour last night. Dodd's version of the bill would give the Federal Reserve the power to regulate any firm with more than $50 billion in assets and would embed a new consumer protection agency within the Fed.

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Bank of Montreal's Ambitious Growth Strategy for Diners Club Cards
March 15, 2010 @ 05:26 PM | By Penny Crosman

Out of the ashes of the old Diner's Club card — the first widely-used credit card, which was introduced in February 1950 and most recently owned by Citi — is emerging, phoenix-like, a corporate card business at Bank of Montreal that is currently the fifth largest in the world. Terry Wellesley, executive managing director and group head of BMO spend and payment solutions, stopped by this afternoon at the start of an eight-week North American tour, to tell us a bit about his group's climb from #12 to #5, and of course, its ambitions to be #1.

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New Technologies Make the Most of Banks’ ATMs
March 12, 2010 @ 09:14 AM | By

By Mary Knich, Vice President, ATM Products, First Data

ATMs remain the number-one customer touch-point for financial institutions.

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Disaster Recovery From Online Mayhem
March 11, 2010 @ 09:36 AM | By Bill Bradway

Over the past 15 years, we all recognize that the role of the internet has expanded dramatically for a wide range of industries including financial services. Internet standards have become widely accepted and the prior generation’s mix of proprietary network infrastructure solutions has been, or soon will be, replaced by web-compatible technologies. Physical terrorism and/or tragedy, such as the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center or Hurricane Katrina, significantly disrupted trading and banking activities. After the fact, some financial institutions had to make major revisions to their disaster recovery and continuity plans. Most NYC based financial institutions implemented their revised plans within a year.

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The Economic Recovery Has Begun
March 09, 2010 @ 10:30 AM | By Art Gillis

First, let me come clean with this admission. I am not a Gartner or Forrester visionary who puts a "Good Housekeeping" label on all he surveys. I'm the guy in the trenches and the quintessential errand boy who is always out there, whether it be on assignment or running errands for Mrs. Gillis. The fun part is that Mrs. Gillis also drags me out on mini vacations to take a little break and enjoy the "world."

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FDIC's Plan to Sell Troubled Loans Could Cause More Bank Failures, Bloomberg Reports
March 08, 2010 @ 10:52 AM | By Penny Crosman

To those who believe much of the recent credit crisis was caused by the securitization and sale of subprime debt to investors, paired with credit default swaps based on those obligations, the FDIC's plan to auction more than $1 billion in assets seized from failed banks next month is puzzling.

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Feb. 28-Mar. 6)
March 05, 2010 @ 10:53 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (February 28-March 6, 2010):

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Prepaid Show Dispatch: 3 Promising Prepaid Providers
March 03, 2010 @ 12:24 PM | By

By Steve Kietz, Managing Partner, Woodbury Advisors

At the Prepaid Show last week, I got a chance to meet with three promising new prepaid card companies: PreCash, Edo Interactive and Blackhawk Network. Each brings something unique to the prepaid table.

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Prepaid Show Dispatch: Visa, MasterCard Updates
March 02, 2010 @ 11:39 AM | By

By Steve Kietz, managing partner, Woodbury Advisors LLC

At the Prepaid Show last week, I had a chance to catch up with Brian Triplett, head of Prepaid products at Visa, and Elisa Corridore, global payroll card executive at Mastercard.

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Top 8 Provisions of the Senate's Financial Reform Bill
March 02, 2010 @ 09:46 AM | By Penny Crosman

As Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, tries to get his colleagues to pass his financial reform bill as soon as he can (possibly this week), we bring you the major provisions of the 1,139-page legislation.

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A Potentially Strong Alliance: Every Bank CEO's Concerns + The Undiscovered Capabilities of Information Technology
March 01, 2010 @ 04:53 PM | By Art Gillis

After 321 client assignments, dozens of seminars, and lots of private feedback from 241 blogs, I have obtained a very good feel for what is on the minds of bank CEOs every day at 8:00 AM. I never asked them the question because I was too timid. And I didn't commission a survey just to receive politically correct answers. The telling was entirely their idea, and I happen to be a very good listener.

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Prepaid Show Dispatch: ING’s Kuhlmann Explains How the Bank Opens 100,000 Accounts Per Month
March 01, 2010 @ 11:03 AM | By

By Steve Kietz, managing partner, Woodbury Advisors LLC

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Chase and Wells Respond to Card Act with Creative Payment, Pricing Models
February 26, 2010 @ 06:43 PM | By Penny Crosman

How are card-issuing banks coping in the aftermath of phase two of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which took effect last Monday (limiting fees and interest rate charges and requiring specific disclosures in cardholder statements)? According to Ted Landis, senior executive, financial industry programs for payments and strategic cost reduction at Accenture, forward-thinking issuers such as Chase, Wells Fargo and American Express are making the best of it by coming up with new card profitability models and extending alternative payments to the young and undercarded population.

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Ex-Prez Clinton Urges Card Issuers to Serve the Unbanked
February 26, 2010 @ 10:16 AM | By

By Steve Kietz

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Feb. 21-27)
February 26, 2010 @ 09:59 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (February 21-27, 2010):

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Banking Yields Growing Pains for the BankTech Community
February 24, 2010 @ 09:48 PM | By Bill Bradway

A little over two years ago (January 10, 2008, Analysis & Opinion Brief 2008-01), my analysis of the coming crisis was accurate in some areas and understated in other areas.

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The Innovation Factor: Going Lean and Green
February 24, 2010 @ 09:00 AM | By

By Patrick J. Moore, Senior Vice President, Director, Treasury Product Management, Fifth Third Bank

Just a few years ago, one of the hottest business trends in the nation was the move toward sustainable practices. If you weren’t going “green,” you were behind the curve. Then the economic crisis arrived and the prevailing focus shifted to survival.

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How to Save Money on IT
February 22, 2010 @ 05:58 PM | By Art Gillis

The last time I addressed the subject of IT cost cutting for a mass audience was April 1978, at a BAI conference in Indianapolis. Bankers filled the room, but what surprised me was the absence of napping. Most of them were taking notes because my list was long and each bullet was self explanatory. To provide you with a sense of how much we have progressed in 33 years, I'll give you an example of what was on the list — "Recycle your microfiche processing materials to extract the precious metals."

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Living with the Credit Card Act, Part I
February 22, 2010 @ 10:41 AM | By Penny Crosman

I have a friend whom I'll call Bob because that is his name. Bob is bipolar, lives in a group adult home, and was the boyfriend of my mentally ill sister who passed away two summers ago. He receives a $720 monthly disability benefit check from the government, about $600 of which goes to the group home to pay for his room and board, the other $120 is his allowance for cigarettes, snacks and such; this is deposited in his checking account with a major bank. Bob has debit and credit cards from this bank that until today have permitted him to withdraw money that he doesn't have, and then have charged him $35 a day in overdraft fees. In a matter of days, Bob would owe more than a month's income and would call me in great mental distress (guess who ended up paying these fees as well as the large credit card bills he racked up and had no means of paying). I have called the bank to suggest that Bob's card terms be changed to block overdrafts, and have been told that because I'm not Bob's legal guardian I have no say in any of the conditions of his account — that's fair enough.

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Feb. 14-20)
February 19, 2010 @ 10:10 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (February 14-20, 2010):

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New Landscape Accelerates Core Banking Changes
February 18, 2010 @ 11:39 AM | By

By Steven Reiter and Fiaz Sindhu, Accenture

Post-crisis, banks are awaking to a new world order marked by a regulatory wave requiring greater transparency, more self-sufficient customers with rising expectations, and greater competition from traditional and non-traditional players

Yet most banks' ability to respond to these forces is highly constrained. The
processes, procedures and information technology that form the foundational layer of their operations are expensive to maintain and lack the flexibility needed to meet industry changes.

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Fraud and ID Theft: Are One-Time Password Bank Cards the Answer?
February 17, 2010 @ 09:23 AM | By

By Dennis Brestovansky, president and CEO of Aveso Displays

Over the past few years, fraud and theft of corporate and consumer information have escalated dramatically, reaching devastating proportions worldwide. It’s becoming a far too frequent fact of financial life.

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Fed Governor Tarullo Asks Congress for More Bank Data-Gathering Powers
February 16, 2010 @ 10:21 AM | By Penny Crosman

In a hearing held by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs on Friday, Daniel K. Tarullo, Member, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, made the case that the Fed should be given enhanced ability to collect data from banks.

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How to Negotiate A Bank Tech Contract
February 15, 2010 @ 05:08 PM | By Art Gillis

I'm not a fly, so I don't know how vendors negotiate IT deals with banks. But I do know how to direct my clients once the choice of primary vendor has been confirmed. I basically tell them to negotiate from a position of intelligence, not psychology. Don't chisel; don't beg; don't hang on to the banking crunch as if you were a welfare recipient; don't threaten; don't tease with "better" offers from other vendors; don't make claims that your deal will put the vendor on the map. They're already on the map. In other words, be smart and be fair. Since I don't know who will be in the room from the vendor's side, I also prepare a list of "beware ofs." When I say I pick the right vendor for each client, I'm thinking long term. My clients have all walked out of the negotiations room with fair deals that are still fair today.

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Feb. 7-13)
February 12, 2010 @ 11:08 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (February 7-13, 2010):

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Why Bankers Should Make an Effort to Become “IT Savvy”
February 11, 2010 @ 08:00 AM | By Bill Bradway

In May 2003, Nicholas Carr made a big splash in the IT world by writing an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Without getting into details, Carr differentiated between IT as an infrastructure commodity, like electricity, with no competitive advantage, and proprietary technology investments, which can be the foundation for competitive advantage. The commotion over this article among my clients was noteworthy. Among his conclusions, Carr argued for “managing costs and risks meticulously” and limiting spending (on commodity IT infrastructure).

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Obama Criticizes Bank Bonuses Again
February 10, 2010 @ 08:11 PM | By Penny Crosman

In a blog entitled, "Clearing Up the Bonuses Issue," posted on the White House website, the Administration shares President Obama's latest comments on banker bonuses, which are anything but clear. In a recent Bloomberg interview due to air Friday, the President straddled a line between outrage at how much large bank CEOs such as Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein make and support for free markets and capitalism. This is consistent with speeches he has made over the past year (at least, according to excerpts from earlier speeches provided by the White House).

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Bank Tech Vendor Consolidation Will React to the Times
February 09, 2010 @ 11:28 AM | By Art Gillis

I am happy that I have never been called a visionary. The "cover boys" of past bank tech trade journals expressed their visions, only to later disappear off the leading edge of technology. It's a lot safer, and longevity is assured, if you report what you can see, hear, touch, taste and smell.

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Does the Goldman/AIG Mess Prove Volcker's Right?
February 08, 2010 @ 09:31 AM | By Penny Crosman

Kudos to Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story of the New York Times for their article in yesterday's paper casting light on one aspect of Goldman Sachs' role in the financial crisis.

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Jan. 31-Feb. 6)
February 05, 2010 @ 11:54 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (January 31-February 6, 2010):

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TGIF: iPad Commercial Parodies
February 05, 2010 @ 10:17 AM | By Penny Crosman

Apple's launch of its iPad has inspired humorous videos all over the internet. We've flipped through several, skipped most of the ones comparing it to feminine products (and the Hitler one, since someone complained the last time we posted Hitler humor), and present to you what we think are the funniest iPad parodies out there this morning.

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NY AG Files Lawsuit Against Bank of America
February 04, 2010 @ 01:12 PM | By Nathan Conz

The New York Attorney general's office announced late this morning that it has filed civil charges against Bank of America, relating to the Charlotte, N.C.-based financial institution's acquisition of Merrill Lynch. The NY AG says that the bank, former CEO Ken Lewis and former CFO Joseph L. Price, misled investors when acquiring the investment firm in late 2008.

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Banks' Struggle to Achieve Document Security
February 02, 2010 @ 05:18 PM | By

By Adi Ruppin, Confidela

Keeping electronic documents secure is a challenge in any industry, but banks have extra considerations. Checks, loan applications and monthly statements need to be accessible online. The same applies to sensitive internal bank documents that need to be shared among employees, branches, auditors and others. And industry regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley require banks to maintain an audit trail of all these documents. There are three conditions in many banks that make document security particularly hard: phishing attacks, remote workers and customer communications.

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Banks Get Lots of Hidden Value From A Core Conversion
February 01, 2010 @ 06:05 PM | By Art Gillis

This next statement may sound like professional suicide, but I have made it numerous times without regret. "I don't know how to run a bank. I rely on my clients for that."

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Volcker Explains His Bank Reform Rules
February 01, 2010 @ 10:29 AM | By Penny Crosman

Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve and chairman of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and the person credited with President Obama's recent "Volcker Rule" preventing banks from proprietary trading and investing in hedge funds and private equity, detailed his thoughts on bank reform on the New York Times' Op-Ed page yesterday.

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Deutsche Bank CEO Calls for Global Banking Rules at Davos
January 29, 2010 @ 09:11 AM | By Penny Crosman

Josef Ackerman, CEO of Deutsche Bank, told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo his views on recent bank regulation proposals at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday. "We're in a global market, we need global rules," Ackerman said, suggesting that President Obama's recent proposal to separate banks from the capital markets might not work if only one country adopts it. Ackerman supports the Basel II capital allocation requirements, but feels the Volcker rule could reduce liquidity and efficiency in the global markets.

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TGIF: Daily Show on the Obama vs. Bankers Showdown
January 29, 2010 @ 06:44 AM | By Penny Crosman

Obama wants to shrink banks, but bankers can take dividends hostage, Jon Stewart points out.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Obama Takes On Bankers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political HumorHealth Care Crisis
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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Jan. 24-30)
January 29, 2010 @ 12:34 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (January 24-30, 2010):

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Heartland Shares Lessons Learned from Its Data Breach
January 28, 2010 @ 08:42 AM | By Penny Crosman

Heartland Payment Systems has gone from data breach victim to card data security expert. Although the card payment processor suffered a data breach in late 2008, lost 50 percent of its market cap shortly thereafter, and spent more than $32 million in legal fees, forensic costs, reserves for potential card brand fines and other related settlement costs, it has since designed and implemented an end-to-end encryption system that puts it ahead of many of its peers in terms of data security. Details about the breach and Heartland's data security efforts since then are described in a paper the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia released this week on lessons learned from the Heartland data breach. (At Bank Systems & Technology's Executive Summit last year, Kris Herrin, CTO of Heartland Payment Systems, did a video interview about his company's security efforts that can be viewed here.)

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CRM in Banking 10 Years Later: Was It a Crusade or a Parade?
January 27, 2010 @ 05:17 PM | By Bill Bradway

One of the benefits of tenure as an independent BankTech analyst is the opportunity to look back and use some 20/20 hindsight to evaluate earlier analysis and forecasts.

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IWeek: Apple Tablet Should Be Well-Received By Businesses
January 27, 2010 @ 09:29 AM | By Penny Crosman

Apple's new Kindle-like tablet should be suitable for executives such as bankers, according to Fritz Nelson, Editorial Director for InformationWeek (a sibling publication to Bank Systems & Technology).

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Beware of Unintended Consequences to the Volcker Rule
January 26, 2010 @ 05:44 PM | By Penny Crosman

Although President Obama's "Volcker Rule" — his proposal that banks forego proprietary trading, investment or ownership in hedge funds and private equity firms and not be allowed to become too big to fail — could take three to five years to move through Congress and become implemented, if some version of it does get passed, it could have a profound impact on banks, said Matt Cohn, partner and leader of Capco's banking group, in an interview this week.

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Creative Banks Could Harness Location-Aware Twitter
January 26, 2010 @ 01:02 PM | By Penny Crosman

Now that Twitter has unveiled TwitterLocal — an Adobe Air application through which one can perform location-aware Twitter searches (for instance, you could follow anyone tweeting in the Los Angeles area, provided they have opted in to allow their location to be known) — it could open social media possibilities for retail banks. Perhaps a bank could see who was searching for ATMs in a particular neighborhood and use that data to install a new machine there. Or upon seeing that hundreds of Twitterers have recently purchased homes in an area, a bank might schedule a seminar on home equity loans. The opportunities seem endless.

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Ancillary Applications May Now Be Leading The Way In Bank IT
January 25, 2010 @ 04:57 PM | By Art Gillis

I don't believe it's news anymore when I tell you core system sales have tapered off in the past ten years. But here's proof. In the year 2000, 7.3% of the FI population acquired a new core system. In 2009, the rate was approximately 2%. Going forward, it may stay at 2% or it may continue to decline, but it won't increase.

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Goldman, Morgan Stanley May Drop Bank Status, NYT Reports
January 25, 2010 @ 10:26 AM | By Penny Crosman

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which became bank holding companies in September 2008 to gain government protection and access to the Fed's discount window, may now shed their bank status if the 'Volcker Rule' preventing banks from proprietary trading goes through, according to an article in Saturday's New York Times.

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Three Ways to Deter Cyber Crime
January 25, 2010 @ 08:00 AM | By

By Joe Spatarella, Online Banking Solutions

Ironically, as businesses move from risky paper check payments to a safer means of electronic B2B payments, the online banking systems through which payments are originated have become an attractive fraud target. Although businesses are using payment fraud control devices such as ACH Positive Pay and ACH Debit Filter, they only mitigate fraud after it occurs. There are at least five fresh reasons to step up the security investment.

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Jan. 17-23)
January 22, 2010 @ 12:10 PM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (January 17-23, 2010):

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Time for A Holistic Fraud Prevention Effort
January 22, 2010 @ 10:35 AM | By

By Mike Ressel, vice president of business development, Fiserv

Despite continuing effort and investment by banks to mitigate financial crime risk, fraud is evidently still a growing problem.

So what’s going wrong?

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Three Approaches to Combatting Enterprise Fraud
January 22, 2010 @ 09:07 AM | By

By David Nussenbaum, vice president, ACI Worldwide

Fraud is on the rise and it’s expected to accelerate in the wake of the global financial crisis, with not just cards but other bank products and channels being targets for criminals. Urban gangs like the Crips and the Bloods have been known to collect more than 10,000 credit card numbers a night. Right now, a gang member is likely approaching a waiter as he starts his shift. The crook simply offers the waiter a card skimmer, which is smaller than a deck of cards, and he tells him that all he has to do is swipe cards through the skimmer during his shift, and in return he’ll get paid $25 per swipe. Unfortunately people need money for gas and rent, especially in this economy, so they tell themselves they aren’t doing any harm and they go ahead and swipe the cards of unsuspecting diners.

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TGIF: Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Won Senate Seat; 1984 Apple Commercial
January 22, 2010 @ 07:49 AM | By Penny Crosman

The Fuhrer holds forth on the Massachusetts election and other current events.

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It's Time to Unite Money Laundering and Fraud Prevention Efforts
January 21, 2010 @ 02:03 PM | By

By Karen Van Ness, Oracle Financial Services Software

In the last year, the financial services industry received a rousing reminder of the profound damage that increasingly complex financial schemes and fraud can inflict on their reputation and bottom line. Analysts estimate that financial crime costs industry organizations approximately $20 billion in losses, annually. At the same time, banks are grappling with expanding anti-money laundering (AML), fraud prevention and risk management regulatory requirements, and spiraling compliance costs associated with those initiatives. In this environment, many organizations are reevaluating their compliance and fraud prevention programs and increasingly pursuing an integrated approach to achieve the operational and cost efficiencies critical to maintaining profitability.

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Startup BlackBox Offers Mortgage Data That Takes Modifications Into Account
January 21, 2010 @ 09:39 AM | By Penny Crosman

In this editor's humble opinion, one primary cause of the subprime/financial crisis was the fact that banks, capital markets firms, hedge funds, insurance companies and pension plans bought billions of dollars worth of collateralized debt obligations and engaged in credit default swaps around CDOs without knowing much about the underlying securities that were bundled into those products. They trusted the issuer, they believed the AAA ratings from Moody's and Standard & Poors, they saw their peers investing in CDOs and making a fortune, or they simply looked at the high promised returns (where else could they get a guaranteed 12% return?) and salivated. But where the underlying securities (or a portion of them) were subprime mortgages, an analysis of those loans, including the credit history and financial condition of the borrowers, could have saved some of these investors from losing big on these toxic assets.

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How to Protect Online Business Banking
January 20, 2010 @ 08:58 AM | By

By Craig Priess, Guardian Analytics

Online business banking is under attack.

While much ink has been spilled detailing consumer banking fraud and its victims, business accounts are no less susceptible to cybercrime – and in many ways are more at risk. Small business banking is particularly vulnerable, especially in the current economic climate. Why? One reason is that Regulation E of the Federal Electronic Funds Transfer Act requires banks to reimburse consumer victims within ten days of a reported fraud, but it does not protect businesses in a similar fashion. Another is the fact that these companies are often too small to have large information technology staffs on duty around the clock. Not to mention the fact that some small businesses have started to sue their bankers if not made whole to their satisfaction – an alarming but not unexpected outcome.

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The Case for Data Mapping
January 19, 2010 @ 11:41 AM | By Nathan Conz

A, um, wise man once said, "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know."

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If Testing 75 Brands of Bank Core Systems Sounds Intimidating, Relax, I'll Show You How To Do It The Right Way
January 19, 2010 @ 10:30 AM | By Art Gillis

Over the years, I have developed many good tools that I use to assist banks in the selection of a new core system. The reasons I have accumulated 36 tools containing 814 criteria are two-fold. The first is I can't stand "reinventing the wheel." The second is I don't trust myself to remember everything I did during previous projects. As a result, five months after I begin an assignment, 35 bank employees and I agree on the recommended solution. One year after the go-live date, even the bank examiners agree on the bank's chosen system.

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What Banks Need to Do to Combat Card Fraud
January 15, 2010 @ 09:49 PM | By Penny Crosman

The Aite Group reported last week that card fraud costs the U.S. card payments industry $8.6 billion per year. Although this is just 0.4% of the $2.1 trillion in U.S. card volume per year, the analyst group noted it's still a number card providers would like to reduce. There are measures banks and others in the card processing chain can take to deter card fraud experts from their dastardly work; however, many of them are costly and hard to execute.

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Microsoft: Hackers Used IE Vulnerability in Google Hack
January 15, 2010 @ 02:08 PM | By Nathan Conz

More details are beginning to emerge as the technology community further investigates hacks that originated in China that targeted Google and other corporations. Yesterday afternoon, Microsoft announced that a vulnerability in Internet Explorer was exploited as part of the hacks.

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Honor Roll: This Week's Top Banking Blogs (Jan. 10-16)
January 15, 2010 @ 11:13 AM | By Nathan Conz

Our favorite banking technology-related blog posts from around the Web (January 10-16, 2010):

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