Monetary System will be in attendance at the Bank Horizons 2007 introducing NJ bankers to E-Board, the electronic document management system for modern-day bank boardrooms.

If you are at the exposition, come by and stop by our booth. We will be demoing E-Board to visitors and as well as discussing with banks how they can transition into the 21st century. Also, visitors will have the chance to win prizes - including cellular headsets and flying monkeys that we have.

The Bank Horizons event is scheduled to take place on October 16th at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center, 97 Sunfield Avenue in Edison, NJ. You’ll find the Monetary System at booth #312 in the exhibition hall, directly adjacent to the food court.

The internet long ago succeeded in commoditizing a large number of insurance products. Now a new company, Facilitas, Inc. is attempting to do something similar with consumer banking. The on-line tools now available on-line through Bankswitcher.com help consumers cope with the dread and drudgework associated with switching banks by providing them all the paperwork they need to do so easily, and all in response to a simple questionnaire. While the list of banks for which Bankswitcher has pre-compiled information already available is presently short, it’s certain to grow. Since this tool has the potential to cut both ways, positioning yourself to defend against its threats, and take advantage of its opportunities naturally starts with an assessment. We suggest that you direct your browser to http://www.bankswitcher.com/ and do a little comparison shopping yourself.

Master Chief Banks Here!

While you might not understand who Master Chief refers to — Halo 3 , I’m sure quite a few teenagers and college students do. With video games being a major interest of the younger generation, First Mutual Bank based out of Washington State came out with an idea to attract the attention to the younger generation. By doing this, teenagers would feel comfortable banking at the institution, since the bank shows that they have at least a basic understand the goals and interests of teenagers.

Hopefully, the bank has a full marketing campaign that goes with the signage. Definitely, an idea would be to offer new customers a discount on the purchase of the video game. Teenagers would probably be interested in that type of free gift, than the typical toaster oven that is usually given as the free gift.

With Apple’s iPhone and now recently released iPod Touch, banks need to seriously consider a strategy in regards to mobile devices. While banks start planning and upgrading their their online banking site to be mobile friendly, they need to remember not to ignore their main public site.

The public site already contain quite a bit of important and useful information. That information can be very helpful when a customer is anyway from a computer. Whether they are on travelling for business, vacation or just going down the street to grocery store, they can get information about branch locations/hours and contact information of someone at the bank by just logging on to the bank’s mobile friendly public website. And if your bank is part of an ATM network, customers can use locate near-by fee-friendly ATMs without needing to go out-of-network ATM.

What is Phishing?

“the practice of luring unsuspecting Internet users to a fake Web site by using authentic-looking email with the real organization’s logo, in an attempt to steal passwords, financial or personal information, or introduce a virus attack; the creation of a Web site replica for fooling unsuspecting Internet users into submitting personal or financial information or passwords” - Dictionary.com

Can you identify which site is real and which is fake? It isn’t always easy to tell the difference between the two. Try your hand at the McAfee Phishing Quiz, http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/.


Banks really need to make sure that they educate their customers not to respond to request emails and websites that request account numbers, social security number and other financial/personal information. And that the customer can always call the bank to check to see if the email or website is a legitimate.

E-Board - A Simple, Secure, Send and Share Solution

The vision of E-Board is to make it easy for organizations to publish documents and reports for the board of directors and upper management to have access to.

We continue with this vision in this latest release of E-Board. We added features that wanted to see in the product. While the list of changes is too long to go over, here are some of the key ones.

• An updated the UI interface to make it cleaner and easier to navigate.
• New tools to allow administrators to group users and restrict access to reports.
• Ability to further organization your reports with the ability to have sub-folder support.
• Collaborate on web-based documents with other directors. Track and compare different versions of the document.

With these new changes and features in E-Board 3.0, we at Monetary System believe that you’ll understand with our clients find E-Board an indispensable tool for distributing information to their directors and management.

A few weeks ago, we introduced a presentation during a banker’s conference. The goal of the presentation was to be about a 10 minute introduction about Web 2.0 and some simple ways for the bankers to take those concepts and apply them to their organization.

Download the presentation (slightly modified) in PDF format.

Feel free to post a comment below if you have any questions about the presentation.

Welcome to the Monetary System’s blog. We will be posting about issues and trends community banks should be aware of.