Banking Review

Google launches MasterCard for AdWords

Jason Bryce — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:19:14 +0000

Google is introducing in the U.K., and extending to more businesses in the U.S. a credit card to pay for spending on advertising through its AdWords program, the company said on Sunday.

The expansion of the credit card program follows a pilot with over 1,400 businesses in the U.S. Google vice president and treasurer Brent Callinicos said the focus of the Google program is on small and medium-size businesses to give them more flexibility and extra credit, Callinicos said.

Google has tied with Barclaycard, part of the Barclays group, in the UK and Comenity Capital Bank in the US to issue the cards which are both from MasterCard. The AdWords Business Credit card can however be used only for AdWords advertising purchases.

CIO

NAB & Verifone roll out contactless & mobile POS terminals

Jason Bryce — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:10:44 +0000

National Australia Bank has signed a deal with US provider VeriFone to roll out contactless card terminals and devices throughout Australia within three years.

NAB will also start offering special Apple iPhone and iPad PAYware cases to any business that requests them within the next two months. These will turn smartphones into swipe and contactless card payment terminals.

NAB’s working capital services executive general manager, David Gall, said a key point that would greatly encourage merchants to take up VeriFone’s contactless card terminals was that it would be cheaper than NAB’s current offering.

“We’ve got 130,000 merchants . . . Australian businesses that have terminals with us at the moment,” he said. “As terminals come up for renewal we’ll replace them with VeriFone devices. I would say we’d have a majority [of terminals NFC-ready] within the next three years or so.”

Mr Gall said the deal was expected to be worth less than $50 million, but it could quickly exceed that amount depending on how many VeriFone terminals and cases merchants accepted.

Australian Financial Review

Aussies like fingerprints instead of PINs

Jason Bryce — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:39:22 +0000

A study for ANZ Bank conducted by Newspoll found that many Australians favour the use of new but difficult to cheat technologies to access their bank accounts. In lieu of plastic cards used to withdraw money from ATMs, they would prefer retina or fingerprint scanning technology.
For survey respondents in the age bracket 18 to 34, 88 per cent are open to using digital technology for their daily bank transactions, while 75 per cent of older Aussies have the same attitude. Those who prefer eye scan technology was 67 per cent among the 1,200 plus Australians who served as the survey respondents, while 79 per cent opt for fingerprint technology in lieu of a PIN to access their accounts.
International Business Times

Credit unions launch pay to mobile app

Jason Bryce — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:36:14 +0000

Police Credit of Victoria, Teachers Mutual Bank, Hume Building Society and Queensland Police Credit Union will offer members a mobile payment application that allows people to make payments armed only with the recipient’s mobile phone number or email address.
With “Pay Anyone Mobile Banking” the recipient receives a notification that there is a payment pending, uses a code that is provided by the payer to log on to a website, and then inputs the relevant bank account details to complete the payment loop.
St George also announced it was offering a Pay to Mobile facility that only requires the payer to have the mobile phone number of the recipient to make a payment.
Banking Day

3,000 finance jobs per year could go offshore

Jason Bryce — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:30:47 +0000

In a report commissioned by the Finance Sector Union and the Australian Services Union, the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research estimate that 97,000 jobs, or more than 3000 jobs a year, may be contracted to offshore suppliers over the next 20 to 30 years.
Occupations at most immediate risk are call or contact centre workers, general bank workers (who represent 17 per cent of finance industry jobs) and software and applications programmers.
Employment in financial services fell between 2007 and 2012, though it increased by four per cent over the last two years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Banking Day

Oracle targets Aussie banks with new core platform

Jason Bryce — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 02:41:46 +0000

Oracle recently announced its new Oracle Banking Platform, a platform which NAB has already rolled out to its UBank brand. Ashwin Goyal, Oracle’s global vice president & general manager, Financial Services said Oracle Banking Platform is a complementary product to Oracle FLEXCUBE solution. “Oracle Banking Platform is built on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database technologies.”
Goyal said “As part of Suncorp’s transformation journey, they have focused first on deploying the customer capability through Oracle CRM On Demand. Phase 2 of their program will look to replace the CSC Hogan core banking system with more components from the Oracle Banking Platform.
“The Oracle Banking Platform is built on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database technologies. The solution is open and is configured through metadata, Java and Oracle ADF user experience. Banks deploying our solution will configure the product but customizations should be minimal there by enabling our customers to continually uptake new functionality that can improve their business.”
Delimiter

ANZ commits $1.5 billion to technology and branch upgrades

Jason Bryce — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:09:29 +0000

ANZ announced a major investment program for its Australian business called ‘Banking on Australia’ costing up to $1.5 billion over the next five years.
Key initiates include:
• Major five-year refurbishment program of its branches with 46 expected to be completed by the end of 2012.
• First Australian bank to conduct a major roll-out of Cisco videoconferencing within 43 remote branches, giving regional customers greater access to specialist advice.
• Launch of first Australian banking app that processes same day credit and debit card transactions – every day of the year – using an iPhone or iPad.
• Trial of ANZ mobile wallet using NFC technology on Android devices.
• Launch of mobile banking app, ANZ Transactive for Mobile, which allows businesses to quickly and securely approve large payments while on the move.
• Introduction of 800 ‘next generation’ ATMs into branches, allowing 24-hour access to many traditional teller services.
ANZ CEO Australia Philip Chronican said there will be significant investment in online channels including the immediate launch of ANZ FastPay which is a mobile banking app that allows small businesses to process same day settlement of credit and debit card payments using an iPhone or iPad.
ANZ also confirmed that it will today launch a trial of ANZ mobile wallet, which is a contactless mobile phone payments system using NFC technology on Android devices.
“A trial of an ANZ mobile wallet will kick off today. This will see 25 of our staff, including me, live testing our solution with the aim to make this available to our customers in mid-2013,” Mr Chronican said.

Westpac develops homegrown mainframe talent

Jason Bryce — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 23:55:39 +0000

Westpac’s mentoring program is paying huge dividends in the form of homegrown mainframe experts. Recognising an impending skills shortage, the bank selected mentors to train and guide younger IT staffers who showed a penchant for the decades-old technology.
Since then 10 people have gone through the program, said Glenn Bowden, chief engineer, mainframe at Westpac.
“Cobol programmers are actually not that hard to find and in fact they’re not that hard to train. The hard part is actually finding the guys who know how the system hangs together. I call them the enterprise-class professionals. We probably have about half a dozen guys in the mainframe space that are at that top level.”
He said they bank tried to look for mainframe expertise in markets like India but to no avail. Westpac outsources much of its hardware environment, including mainframes, to IBM. When one of its Sydney data centres went into total meltdown after an air conditioning fault, the mainframes stood their ground, he said.
The Australian

Offline retailers face POS hacking nightmare

Jason Bryce — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 01:36:19 +0000

AVG Australia-New Zealand security advisor, Michael McKinnon said it was not the 5.3 percent of Australian retailers that provided online shopping services which had the greatest exposure to cybercrime.

Instead, McKinnon said it was the remaining 95 percent of business owners in the retail sector whose eyes were still “on the shop floor rather than the online world,” who were most at risk of falling prey to cybercrime.

“Retailers with a sophisticated Internet presence tend to have more current ICT systems and security regimes in place, while the vast majority are largely unaware of and are unprepared for threats to their security,” McKinnon cautioned.

And, the security firm stresses that, by operating with unsecured wireless networks and weak password regimes, retail outlets are open to online attack, with a criminal, sitting in close physical proximity to the shop, simply hacking into its system.

IT Wire

RBA & APCA sprint toward a central payments hub

Jason Bryce — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:38:42 +0000

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has established a team of five to work towards a central payment hub that will eventually facilitate real-time fund transfers between different banks.

Speeding up such types of payment transfers was one of the goals set by the RBA in its Strategic Review of Innovation in the Payments System report, which was released in June. The report identified shortcomings in payments innovation in the banking sector, and made several suggestions on how to improve it. Currently, fund transfers between different banks can take several days to clear, and the RBA wants to make this a real-time process by 2016. It also wants to have the centralised hub built by 2014 to replace a complex “web of bilateral links.”

The RBA is looking to pass payments done on the centralised hub through its core settlement systems called the Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System (RITS).

RBA head of payments and policy Dr Tony Richards set up project SPRINT, which stands for “send, pay, and receive in no time,” and said the new team has been working on it for around 2 months.

The SPRINT team is now looking at all of the decisions that need to be made in the future to ensure that there is a clear path forward for real-time payments by the end of the year. In response to the Strategic Review, the Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) set up a real-time payments committee. The team, which will “evolve as required,” will be also be working with the payment industry body’s new committee.

ZDNet