Industry Insights

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• Migration

All financial institutions are engaged in some sort of migration project (hardware, software, communications, etc.) at any given time. In particular, payment systems that underwent their last major updates in preparation for the Year 2000 are now being evaluated for updates and upgrades.

• New transactions, growing transaction volumes

New products (such as contactless cards, mobile payments, chip cards, etc.) often result in changes to payment systems software. EMV processing can mean increased system overhead from more messages per transaction and more calls to the HSM.

• Fraud

Financial organizations must continue to combat fraud. Institutions that formerly used rules-based fraud detection are shifting to newer neural network fraud detection systems—new systems that will require thorough testing to validate that the fraud detection systems perform correctly even when system resources are stressed.

• Compliance

Complying promptly with mandates is often challenging, but especially as institutions try to cope with the demands of accomplishing more work with static (or dwindling) personnel resources.

• Hardware changes
• Consolidating hardware
• Switching host software platform
• Upgrading host hardware
• Adding new devices (ATMs, POS)
• Changes to communications infrastructure (new routers, new switches, new communications protocols)
•  HSM upgrades (new vendors, EMV, new encryption methods)
• Software changes
• O/S upgrades and updates (patches, new releases, security updates, etc.)
• Mandates (interchanges, card associations)
• Host software changes (patches, new requirements, updates, new product/transaction offerings)
• Payment system changes
• Database changes
• Database relocation
• Database migration