Crisis may increase banking vulnerability

Problems with liquidity and customer retention aren't the only challenges that banks will face in 2009, reports Bank Systems & Technology.

A report from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu: "Protecting What Matters: 6th Annual Global Security Survey", says the pressures brought on by the financial crisis are actually increasing banks' vulnerabilities to data breaches.

According to the firm, tighter budgets, a greater concern over internal security breaches due to lower employee morale and complacency after a decrease in overall attacks over the past year, may expose global financial institutions to an increased risk of data breaches in 2009.

Bank of New Zealand has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on IBM System z mainframes to try and solve environment, space and cost issues related to its data centre, says Banking Tech.

With Red Hat and IBM solutions, Bank of New Zealand claims to have reduced its hardware footprint, power consumption, heat and carbon emissions and costs, including an expected 20% cost reduction over the life of the platform.

Bank of New Zealand was close to reaching capacity in its data centre and needed a new solution that could maximise space and resources while keeping costs down.

Punjab National Bank announced the successful deployment of the country's first-ever 100% core banking system assisted by technology partners, Infosys, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, writes Telecom Tiger.

The system was completed four months ahead of the schedule, says the firm.

The system uses Infosys' Finacle software, a database platform from Oracle and enterprise servers from Sun Microsystems.