THE LIAR’S
LAIR: INSIDE
BERNIE
MADOFF’S
TECH SUITE
Page 26
LAWSUIT
Does Gartner’s Magic
Quadrant play favorites?
Page 12
HEALTHCARE
Support builds for the
e-payments option.
Page 16
DECEMBER 2009
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION. BUSINESS RESULTS.
VOL. 22 NO. 12
HUMAN CAPITAL
BNY
Mellon’s
Talent
Toolkit
Getting everyone on
the same systems
increases efficiency
8th
Annual
Keeping tabs on the hiring,
training and performance of BNY
Mellon’s 44,000 employees in
dozens of countries around the
world is too important to be left
to local custom or interpretation,
and too crucial to be sidelined
even given the recession.
Sheena Wilson, BNY Mellon’s newly-appointed global
head of talent strategy, is responsible for a massive technology
project to create a global architecture to serve its global talent
development strategy, layering
several niche tools on top of the
bank’s PeopleSoft HR system.
Supporting a global talent strategy with a global tech platform, or multiple globally
available tools, is a trend among
big banks these days, analysts
say, because it fulfills two imperatives: first, it rationalizes the
costs associated with maintaining multiple vendors in each of
the primary talent technology si-
Shifting Gears, page 34
SECURITY
Out-of-Band
Authentication
Gets Outfoxed
Social engineering blamed as UK banks work to
adapt to a sophisticated new fraud threat that
begins with telecoms but leads to consumer
bank accounts being drained of funds
BTN’s annual ranking of the most innovative people,
companies and technologies leading the industry forward.
COVER STORY PAGE 18
WHERE IT’S AT IN 2009:
PAYMENTS, PFM, MOBILE
EVERYTHING, REDUCING RISK
Banks in the United Kingdom are battling fraudsters that have
found a way to compromise out-of-band authentication—an approach supported by many fraud experts—by redirecting authentication calls or texts intended to be sent to a consumer’s
phone to the attacker’s phone, and then approving fraudulent
transactions, sources say.
The problem, sometimes called phone jacking, appears to be
more serious in the UK because telecom technology and processes
make the attacks easier to pull off. None of Britain’s major banks,
responded to inquiries about the attack mode; at least one major
U.S. bank is rumored to also be plagued by the problem.
Direct Access page 33
BRANCH AUTOMATION
BBVA Branches Into Video
Video conferencing broadens access to tellers and other specialists
Customers may soon be talking
to a screen at the branch—in-
stead of a person.
Improved technology and
growing interest in cost cut-
ting have prompted several fi-
nancial institutions to install
videoconferencing systems
to serve customers, replacing
tellers in some cases or providing immediate access to
specialists who might be
working at another location.
BBVA Compass Bank is
testing a video workstation
that offers mortgage origination and investment services at
six Houston-area branches
that lack such specialists.
The system features a split-screen that shows the banker’s
face and lets customers watch
as their application is created.
“You really feel like you are
face to face with the person,
even better than face to face,”
says Compass svp and R&D
director Alejandro E. Carriles,
who spearheaded the project.
The Birmingham, Ala., unit
of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Ar-gentaria SA of Madrid has
been evaluating the Virtual
Banker system for about two
months. Shelaghmichael
Brown, a senior evp at Com-
Leading Off page 11
BY THE
NUMBERS
RETAIL REPORT
$100 billion
The amount of annual losses US
retailers currently suffer as a result of
ID fraud, according to LexisNexis and
Javelin Strategy & Research. That’s
20 times the total lost by consumers.
