Vendor Views: Online Exclusive

Jorge Fernandez
President and CEO
Level Four Americas

The real cost of ATM fraud in the US is approaching $200 million a year. Fraudsters are getting smarter and more sophisticated while banks and customers are bearing the pain. We are not just seeing "shoulder surfing" -- we are instead experiencing a more subtle but potent move towards electronic fraud. Other regions around the world are replacing magnetic stripe payment cards to address this rising tide of fraud, in adherence with the EMV standard (see article). The U.S. is not. As such, the fraudsters will look to the U.S. as a new area of opportunity for their activities. The fundamental problem in the U.S. is that the magnetic stripe is not secure. The answer is to replace the magnetic stripe with a chip, making the card smarter than the criminal.

Smart chip card deployment is a long-term strategy, which will require multi-year implementation. As such, the coming year may well see an increased interest in the US in this technology, but we do not see any major movements towards implementation of EMV in the next 12 months.

Kazuhiro Matsumoto
Executive Vice President & General Manager, Advanced Technologies Department
JCB Co., Ltd. (Tokyo)

The JCCA (Japan Credit Card Association) has set a goal of 100,000 EMV-standard smart card-ready point-of-sale (POS) terminals in Japan by the end of March 2005 and 400,000 by the end of March 2007, which covers over 90% of the transactions generated by the total POS terminals in the Japanese market. Part of the impetus for change comes from Japan's National Police Agency, which recommended in December 2004 that the financial services industry adopt the use of smart cards in order to prevent credit card crime.

EMV-capable POS terminals will increase at a rapid pace from 2005. We can also anticipate increasing numbers of terminals able to handle both contact and contactless interfaces. However, as there is currently no de facto standard for contactless credit (such as EMV for contact credit), the POS terminals may be required to support the demand of a diverse range of contactless systems.

Kevin Kelly
Vertical Market Manager, Financial Services
Mercury Online Solutions (Bainbridge Island, Wash.)

Bank customers will experience digital signage through large-format screens displaying dynamic imagery and messages that provide an interactive delivery of information on everything from the latest checking account and mutual fund offerings to the local weather and sports scores.

Romir Bosu
President
Compushare (Santa Ana, Calif.)

The majority of de novo banks and banks that are in the market for a new phone system will select VoIP solutions over the standard PBX solutions that were implemented in the past. Community banks will also look to create a centrally located network management facility to control IT administrative costs. Banks will look to utilize their available LAN bandwidth and computing power by installing real time, internal monitoring solutions at their own site.

John Carlson
Vice President, Marketing
Avistar Systems (Redwood Shores, Calif.)

While video conferencing and collaborative technologies has been used by industry pioneers, they will become a "must-have" for financial services market. The banks and financial institutions have ample bandwidth to deploy these technologies. Retail banks can make experts accessible via video conference by customers at bank branches. Portfolio managers can embed video into e-mail and PowerPoint presentations. Morning meetings can be broadcast to hundreds of employees. Risk managers can gain access to experts, worldwide, to complete complex derivatives trades. Operations staff can better manage outsourced environments.

Scott Weiss
CEO
IronPort (San Bruno, Calif.)

We'll see even more potent viruses to send ever more spam. We'll see even more potent viruses that have not only a profit motive, but also a criminal intent. It might get even worse. There are organizations in the world who view it as their mission to disrupt western economies. And while blowing up a building or hijacking a plane has a big psychological impact, they make only a tiny blip in Western economies. Imagine if someone harnessed the same techniques used by the virus nerds but instead of a profit motive, they had a political motive to cause havoc in Western economies. Imagine if these viruses wiped out the hard drives of every infected PC, or took over a PC's idle processing power and linked thousands of PCs together as a massively parallel supercomputer to process nuclear bomb making calculations. But it will get better, because 2005 will also be the year of the preventive security system.

Jerry King
Vice President of XML Development
DataDirect Technologies (Bedford, Mass.)

The coming year will bring many new developments to XQuery, the highly anticipated language for querying and creating XML documents, that will ultimately lead to a complete overhaul in the way banking software applications are built. Primarily queried from relational databases, business-critical data is increasingly required to be exchanged and processed as either XML data, or a combination of XML data and relational data. Recognizing this, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed XQuery as a uniform language for data exchange. In the same way that SQL provides a query language for relational databases, XQuery will provide a common language for accessing both XML and relational data stores. The promise XQuery brings to dramatically simplifying and accelerating data integration and querying XML is unprecedented. The emerging standard will revolutionize data exchange and the way applications are developed, deployed and utilized.

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