Projects

Financial Services Technology Consortium thrives when the knowledge of our members comes together in the formation of initiatives that will better the industry as a whole. Our project ideas originate from members, industry organizations, FSTC's Advisory Council, Executive Committee, Board of Directors, and staff.

For background information on FSTC projects including: what they are, what they are not, how we run a project and what resources are required. click here. Below is a summary of some of the projects which have been completed in recent history.

We welcome your input! If you have a new project idea or would like more information about any of our current ventures, contact us. To attend an informational conference call, or for information about in-person meetings, please contact Paul Smocer, President, FSTC.

Current Projects

RFID IT Asset Phase 2
Phase 2 looks to focus on improving common processes for RFID asset tracking, with a secondary focus on monitoring and sharing information on devices shipped with RFID tags.

Records Management Phase 2
The Financial Services industry faces an explosion of electronic content. The challenge comes in controlling and harnessing the ever-growing masses of unstructured data
.
Unstructured electronically stored information, such as e-mail, documents and drafts, text stream data, messaging, web content, etc., comprises the majority of the new content our industry must manage. Financial institutions are beginning to measure their data storage requirements in exabytes, where once mere petabytes sufficed. Controlling and utilizing
this growing body of information presents challenges in three major areas identified by our members:

                1. Meeting regulatory requirements
                2. Turning data into useful information
                3. Reducing privacy risks and increasing security

The member survey in Phase I found that the vast majority of unstructured electronic content is simply stored, backed up and archived, making it impossible to gain any strategic business benefit from the data, while also making it extremely difficult to meet discovery requirements.

Phase II of the FSTC Records and Information Management Project we will build on Phase I findings to move toward the development of guidelines for preferred industry-wide approaches to these three challenges.

Software Assurance Phase 1

Software is used to control virtually every aspect of  computing, yet the assurance of the security, integrity and resiliency of software is still in its infancy. There is increasing focus by legislators, regulators and industry overseers on the application layer and the need to ensure its security, resiliency, sustainability and integrity. The current theory and practice of software assurance are both lacking in their ability to provide a high level of confidence in software security, integrity and resiliency. There is an urgent need to advance the state of the art of software assurance, specifically as it relates to application security. The industry needs to broaden security reviews to cover significantly more of the popular applications. The impact of this situation is that costs associated with leaving unchecked the challenges of immature approaches and inadequate security reviews cannot be understated. Data security breaches from compromises of the applications layer account for costs in the many billions of dollars per year. In light of the current market turmoil and call for re-regulation, there is a critical need for a top-down view of organizational requirements and technical capabilities proactively driven by the financial services community. Our goal is to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of software assurance and increase the effectiveness of the methods used by the Financial Services Industry. The FSTC Software Assurance Initiative (SAI) will address application-related issues and benefit from collaboration with BITS,  FSSCC , INFOSEC and other industry associations.

Biometrics Phase 2
Phase 2 looks to focus on improving identity proofing, with a secondary focus on improving authentication, including detailing and validating the concepts for sharing of Biometric information for reducing fraud.

Projects in Formation

Projects Under Development

Projects Recently Completed

FSTC Resiliency Model Initiative: Phase 31
The Resiliency Model serves both as a process improvement tool and a roadmap to refining resiliency capabilities for organizations and their partners. It creates unbiased common ground for organizations and vendors to develop cost-effective risk management solutions. This project assumes at its core that true resiliency is a collaborative problem, and that in our increasingly global economy, the problem needs to be addressed as an industry, rather than in isolation. With the reality of increasing, devastating business interruptions due to hurricanes and other natural disasters, terrorist threats, regional infrastructure failures, and breaches in technology security, this initiative is re-defining what it takes for the financial services industry to stay in business, no matter what the circumstances.

Improved Inter Enterprise Processing Architecture for Data Security Account Opening and Funds Transfer
This is a joint OMG-FSTC initiative aimed at examining two key financial processes, Account Opening and Funds Transfer, with the goal of minimizing the amount of sensitive personal information exchanged and shared.

Securing the Extended Enterprise Project
This project addresses how the extended enterprise can better protect non-public personal information that is shared with our service providers.

Better Collaboration Tools for Fighting Fraud - Real-time Sharing of Information for Fighting Fraud
The FSTC is launching a project to enable real-time information sharing on fraud incidents and patterns that will improve fraud forecasting, detection and mitigation.  The project will determine the feasibility and benefit of sharing models of fraudulent behavior, for better prediction and mitigation of fraud, and for better forensics investigation and prosecution support.

Capture System Calibration
This is a mini project during which we will test the current version of the Harland printed Capture System Calibration documents developed as a result of the FSTC Project.

Spoof 2007
The FSTC is proud to sponsor the “Spoof 2007� project conducted by the International Biometric Group. The project will study the capability of biometric systems to resist spoofing, an often overlooked risk to biometric systems.

Financial Services Inter-Institutional Interoperability for High Assurance Authentication (FIHAA)
 

Revitalizing Payments infrastructure
 

Collaborative Development Environment for Financial Service Firms - Software Components for FIs
Explore the possibilities and benefits around an Open Source Development community specifically for financial service firms, and standardization around a set of Software components. Benefits could include:

Mobile Payments and Banking– Architecture and Security recommendation

FSTC and its industry partners The Clearing House, The Federal Reserve, ABA, BITS, PaymentsNation, NACHA, and SWIFT are working with the telecommunication industry to develop the technology framework for a secure interoperable process that provides expanded customer service and profit center opportunities in mobile payments. This initiative will play an important role in identifying and documenting the technology that will enable banks to meet growing customer demand for mobile payments. The project has completed phase 1 which identified the current environment and documented use cases.  Phase 2 will focus on the Architecture and Security. FSTC is also focusing on how to work with other industry groups to insure more collaboration.

Resiliency Enterprise: Benchmarking For Maturity

The benefits of participating in the project is the opportunity to work with other industry experts and top-tier organizations on one of the most significant common challenges facing businesses today, managing operational risk. Additionally, participants will have the ability to influence and gain early access to the CERT Resiliency Engineering Framework (REF) methodologies and project deliverables, long before they are publicly available.

Usability Metrics
During the course of the Image Quality and usability project it was determined that there was a need to define metrics associated with the usability of check images. The efforts resulted in submissions of three metrics to the X9 Image Test Registry and the. A comprehensive white paper was also published on Field Usability Test - Presence and Legibility.

Fighting Fraud: Collaboration Tools and Sharing of Information

With the taxonomy created in phase 1, it is now possible to build out the fraud patterns associated with each fraud scheme, product and channel. Although a significant undertaking to do so, the value in having a consistent, comprehensive and industry adopted fraud taxonomy, that provides data down to the individual fraud pattern level, is extremely high.

RFID - IT Data Center Asset Tracking

FSTC has completed documenting the requirements and guidelines for IT Data Center Assets.  The requirements are available under the complete projects section.  FSTC is currently working with the IT manufactures to track which organizations are pre-tagging IT Assets and sending Advance Ship Notification to the purchasing organization.

NewID a Cross Industry Initiative on Identity Assurance

Support banks in the development and application of an industry-wide standard for federated platforms that enable financial entities to provide identity services, empowering U.S. consumers and businesses to manage identity-based transactions and events in a risk-aware, convenient, and low cost manner.

Image Quality And Usability Assurance Phase 1

Mobile Payments Phase 3

FSTC and its industry partners The Clearing House, The Federal Reserve, ABA, BITS, PaymentsNation, NACHA, SWIFT will take the framework from phase one and the Security requirements and Architecture developed in phase 2 as the basis for a recommended standard and work with the industry partners at designing a workable standard for our industry partners and a working pilot with measurable success criteria. The likely focus of Phase 3 will be on the specific infrastructure enhancements and practices; business rule consistency; and extensions beyond consumer market to B2B.

Records Management Phase I

Following the Definition Phase of a member-driven study of business and technical issues related to unstructured electronically stored content (u-esi), FSTC launched a Phase I initiative to drill down into retention and disposition practices.

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