Phishing
I had one of those ‘synchronicity’ moments just as a colleague asked me about phishing and mobile banking because Brendon McGee wrote and covered the very same topic moments after the question was posed to me.
This brings me to think about one of the biggest questions in mobile banking today: Does the mobile channel for delivering financial/banking data increase or decrease security issues for a bank and its customers?
There are examples of SMS assisting with security concerns when it functions as a delivery mechanism for one-time-PINs for internet banking or in the case of the German mTAN system, for authorising internet banking payments.
Some banks offer alerts in almost real-time, for transactions and account balances. These types of services can provide a consumer of an early warning of unauthorised transactions on their accounts rather than relying on a historical monthly account statement.
During my course of speaking with banks that offer mobile banking services, the feedback regarding security is that it's similiar to other channels of content delivery. There can be risks, however a strong core security principle is the key to protecting against fraud and this is independent of channels used or offered.
If you’ve not discovered it already, Brendon’s Mobile Banking blog can be found here.
Death by Meeting – Feels like we all go through this!!
This is probably relevant not only to IT folks, but also to all those poor souls who feel like a good part of their life is getting wasted attending meetings.
My x-boss recently recommended me this book "Death by Meeting” by Patrick Lencioni. I wouldn't say, yet, that it has immensely helped me as I haven’t put the recommendations into use but I can say it has changed my perspective, in a positive way, on meetings. Patrick provides an excellent take on meetings and how they are approached today and instead of framing it like any other “Help the manager” book, he weaves a story and tries to bring out the essence of his ideas using the story as the backdrop. One thing it does is it makes it a more interesting read compared to many other books that I’ve bought and lie in my “To be Read” pile.
Two main points regarding meetings that comes out of the book.
a) Create conflict in meetings and don’t try to use meetings just to get a consensus. Without conflict, it makes the meetings very boring as there is no drama involved. But I think care has to be taken not to make it overly dramatic. I think he calls this positive conflict and uses an analogy with movies where most of the successful movies have conflict, tension that make the viewers engrossed and feel like they are involved.
b) He recommends using different kinds of meetings to accomplish different things. In our organization we tend to distinguish different kinds of meetings but there is no structure to how we distinguish them. One thing to keep in mind is that this structure author recommends may not be applicable to all organizations, especially one like ours where developers have schedules and projects that they are working on and daily checkin meetings won’t be as meaningful.
- Daily checkin – Quick five minute meeting with quick updates from all team members.
- Weekly catch up – Quick round up and then focus on few agenda items, established based on earlier roundup, that are of higher priority for rest of time left in the 1/1.5hr scheduled time
- Monthly strategic – These meetings are where pre defined agenda exists and topics are discussed in detail to determine strategic direction. These meetings need to have a lot of exchange of ideas and not just be a monotonous capture of each person’s thoughts.
- Quarterly offsite – This helps managers to step away from office and discuss strategy, personnel, competition etc.
Hopefully I can start applying the principles in my meetings and will update on how it worked….
SySAM, take 3
First things first, I want to wish everyone a belated 'Happy Holidays' and wish everyone a 'Happy New Year'. 2007 was a busy year for me, and as we start off 2008, my gut tells me it's going to be just as busy as last year if not more so. Now, having said that, I wanna blog about SySAM one more time.
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More 2008 Thoughts...
Will 2008 be the year of Connecting Users in the Enterprise?
Personally I think 2008 will be a great year and this is why...
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On your marks... Get Set... Go!
The PowerBuilder Team, including my collegues John Strano and Dave Fish are going to accelerate your developement in the first two months of 2008 by presenting an educational webcast series. They will be holding webcasts covering a range of topics from Windows Forms and Web Forms, to Smart Clients.
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Royal Bank of Scotland launches 'emergency cash' ATM service
Just before Christmas, Royal Bank of Scotland launched a great new service – emergency cash service – if you lose your cash card, you can get up to £300 out of an RBS ATM using a one-time-PIN. I can envision that service being a real life saver.
I think that a great add-on to the service would be to have the emergency cash PIN sent to your phone (once you’ve confirmed the number), so in the panic of having lost your card, you don’t have a PIN to remember.
More on this story over at Finextra.
Hello World
What better way to start the New Year than with a new blog! It’s a great honour to join the growing ranks of bloggers at Sybase, and hopefully you’ll find the commentary here interesting enough to give some feedback.
The aim of this blog will be to cover the area of Sybase I work in, which is the Sybase 365 mCommerce team – so I’ll be looking at products and trends in the mobile banking and payments industry.
But before I do that, I will follow the tradition of the first post, and give you a little background about me.
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