Fraud concerns over contactless cards

The transition to a cashless society came a step closer this week with the unveiling of Barclays' 'contactless' debit cards, which allow customers to pay for items costing less than £10 (R150) by simply waving their cards over a reader, states Times Online.

However, concerns have been raised that customers will be more exposed to card fraud as stolen or lost cards will not require a PIN to make payments.

In some cases, customers could find they are liable for up to £50 (R752) of any losses.

In its efforts to promote green computing, BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking has implemented a new GPU-based architecture that the firm says simultaneously reduces electricity consumption and accelerates calculation times, writes Wall Street & Technology.

A significant portion of the calculations, about one teraflop (one thousand billion calculations per second), performed for its global equities and commodity derivatives division is transferred to a graphical-processing-unit-based platform.

This allows a 100-fold increase in the amount of calculation achieved per watt. This new platform, containing two nVidia Tesla S1070 modules consuming 2kW, will replace more than 500 traditional CPU cores consuming 25kW.

Interbanca has selected SunGard's Reech RiskHedge for the valuation of its complex portfolios, reports Banking Technology.

Reech RiskHedge will be employed to help Interbanca's risk department compute the value at risk of its positions.

Delivered on an application service provider basis, Reech RiskHedge will help Interbanca keep entry and support costs low, while maximising the speed of implementation.