Polaris Launches FT 8012 - the World‘s First Design Center for Financial Technology

Polaris Financial Technology Ltd, a leader in products, solutions and services that enable unprecedented operational productivity for the global Financial Services industry, launched its 8012 FT Design Center - the world's first Center dedicated to Financial Technology. The Center was inaugurated by Michael Harte, Group Executive, Enterprise Services and Chief Information Officer, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, in Chennai recently.

He also delivered the first FT Thought Leadership series lecture as part of the inaugural program. The event was attended by banking and technology experts from across the globe.

8012 FT Design Center is spread over 30,000 sq. ft and is located in the 22 acre Polaris campus on the IT Highway in Chennai. The Center is the culmination of over two decades of the company's singular focus on the Banking and Financial Services vertical and stands testimony to Collaborative Design emerging as the next big game changer for Financial Technology and Financial Institutions.

Financial Technology is arguably the most complex business globally, replete with changing paradigms in Customer Experience, Operational Efficiency, Performance, Analytics, Risk Mitigation, Integration and Security domains. Aggressive globalisation, sharper customer orientation, multiple product lines and generations of technologies have resulted in the serious need to understand and reduce complexities arising out of the above. With the rich experience and expertise developed over decades working with global Financial Institutions, Polaris has invested in creating 8012 - a Center for Collaborative Design, dedicated to developing Financial Technology and reducing complexity.


Michael Harte, a global champion for leveraging Design Philosophy to create unmatched customer experience and value, stated in his keynote, 'Design thinking is a discipline using a designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. It is an opportunity to re-frame a problem, redefine constraints and open the field to a more innovative answer. Design Thinking is probably the greatest game changer, given the complexities and conflicts that we deal with in the Banking world. People we talked to about Design Thinking immediately found similarities to Agile. When we drilled a bit deeper, it became apparent that while there was overlap, Design Thinking was strong at defining the problem upfront whereas Agile tends to leave that thinking to the product owner. When deployed right, Design Thinking has huge potential to enable banks to successfully evolve and become innovative'.

Arun Jain, CEO and Chief Architect, Polaris Financial Technology, said, 'The role of the CIO in the Bank is the most challenging and complex in today's world as it is this role that straddles the world views and perspectives of Business, Operations and the Technology function in Banks and Financial Institutions. Besides this, today's Global CIO has the supremely tough imperative to balance the bank's Acceleration agenda, Rationalization agenda and Transformational agenda. We believe Design Thinking is the most powerful bridge to balance multiple and often conflicting imperatives. FT 8012, our Design Center, has been thoughtfully created to bring the two powerful forces of Design and Collaboration together”.

The Center is equipped with a holistic array of product offerings, domain-rich solutions, proprietary frameworks and methodologies to craft impactful solutions. The entire physical space is designed uniquely to stimulate the collective genius of diverse teams, expand their thinking and explore possibilities. The Center launched five major technologies that can enable banks deliver superior customer experience and unprecedented operational productivity. These include:

1. Canvas technology that is envisaged to drive front-office efficiencies
2. Hub technology that will drive back-office efficiencies
3. Workplace technology that will bring out the collective genius of diverse teams
4. Master Process Exchange (MPX) technology to connect business and technology
5. FT Grid technology for inclusive and exclusive banking

The Design Center, 8012, is interestingly named after the coordinates of its location, 80° longitude 12° latitude in Chennai, India, and brings together Collaborative Design spaces, Research labs and Strategic Design rooms along with Intellectual Property assets in a comprehensive and engaging manner. The Center aims to provide a holistic ambience to bring business, operational and technology agenda together, unearth the white spaces and connect the dots seamlessly.

Please click http://www.polarisft.com/media/media-release/2013-April-FT-8012-Launch.asp to download the FT8012 Inauguration pictures and Logo.

About Polaris Financial Technology Ltd

Polaris Financial Technology Limited is a global leader in Financial Technology for Banking, Insurance and other Financial Services. With over 25 years of expertise in building a comprehensive portfolio of products, smart legacy modernization services and consulting, Polaris owns the largest set of Intellectual Properties for a comprehensive product suite, Intellect® Global Universal Banking (GUB) M180. Intellect® is the world's first pure play Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based application suite for Retail, Corporate, Investment banking and Insurance. Its acclaimed products, solutions and services enable unprecedented operational productivity for the global Financial Services Industry by Building, Maintaining, Expanding and Extending highly complex and Integrated Financial Technology Infrastructure.

This makes Polaris the chosen partner for 9 of the top 10 global banks and 7 of the top 10 global insurance companies. The company has a global presence through its 40 relationship offices across 30 countries, 6 international development centers and 8 fully owned Business Solution centers. Polaris has a talent strength of over 13,000 solution architects, domain and technology experts. For more information, please visit http://www.polarisFT.com/ and http://www.ft8012.com/

Meet the ‘dark‘ version of Google

The 'scariest search engine' on the internet has been revealed for peering in the darkest corners of the web and finding servers, webcams and traffic lights.

Shodan, dubbed the 'search engine for hackers', collects information on 500 million devices every month, CNN reports.

According to news.com.au, the search engine was named after the villain in the cyberpunk role-playing games System Shock and System Shock 2.

Traffic lights, security cameras and home automation systems are all hooked up to the internet and easy for the 'dark Google' to find.

One cybersecurity expert even used it to find a hockey rink that could be defrosted, traffic lights for an entire city, and the controls for a hydroelectric plant in France.

Rapid 7 chief security officer told CNN that one can log into just about half of the internet with a default password, adding which is a massive security failure."

Searching for 'default password' on Shodan brings up numerous servers, system controls and printers that use 'admin' as '1234' as username and password.

Independent security tester Dan Tentler, at a Defcon cybersecurity talk, said tens of thousands of webcams, hydrogen fuel cells used in military instillations, power meters, theatre lighting, heat pumps are all online, the report added.

Soon, replace your passwords with thoughts

 You may be spared from typing pesky passwords in the future!

Instead of typing your password, you may only have to think about it, thanks to a new wireless headset device developed by researchers.

Remembering passwords for all your sites can get annoying. There are only so many punctuation, number substitutes and uppercase variations you can recall, and writing them down for all to find is hardly an option.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley School of Information developed the device that explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a substitute for passwords.

By measuring brain-waves with bio-sensor technology, researchers are able to replace passwords with "passthoughts" for computer authentication, website 'Mashable' reported.

A USD 100 headset wirelessly connects to a computer via Bluetooth, and the device's sensor rests against the user's forehead, providing a electroencephalogram (EEG) signal from the brain.

The NeuroSky Mindset looks just like any other Bluetooth set and is more user-friendly, researchers said.

Brainwaves are also unique to each individual, so even if someone knew your passthought, their emitted EEG signals would be different.

"Other than the EEG sensor, the headset is indistinguishable from a conventional Bluetooth headset for use with mobile phones, music players, and other computing devices," according to the researchers.

Participants, in a series of tests, completed seven different mental tasks with the device, including imagining their finger moving up and down and choosing a personalised secret, the report said.

Simple actions like focusing on breathing or on a thought for ten seconds resulted in successful authentication.

"We find that brainwave signals, even those collected using low-cost non-intrusive EEG sensors in everyday settings, can be used to authenticate users with high degrees of accuracy," the researchers concluded. 

Moonshot 1500: A small server, but a big step for HP

Hewlett-Packard just had its most innovative moment in years. How do we know this? Well, the company has ushered forth a new creation under the Project Moonshoot banner, created a scripted webcast to accompany the product, and even had guys who would normally wear suits dress down in sports coats and jeans to model the product, thus underscoring its hipness.

What HP has built is a new server — the HP Moonshot 1500. It's special because it runs on Intel's lowpower Atom chips, which usually go into mobile devices. As a result, HP has been able to design an entire computer server that's about the size of an envelope and then pack hundreds of these together into a single system that basically functions as an ultracompact supercomputer. According to HP's stats, the new server uses 89% less energy, takes up 80% less space, and costs 77% less than more traditional server designs.

The HP Moonshot 1500 both is and isn't revolutionary. To its credit, HP has pushed compact server designs to the extreme and crammed an awful lot of computing power in a small amount of space. This type of system has been designed for web and cloud computing companies that tend to buy thousands upon thousands of servers and need them to run as efficiently as possible. By using smartphone instead of beefier server chips, HP has provided a product that can handle the lightweight task of feeding up Web pages without consuming a lot of electricity. (Such a server would not be as well suited to, say, processing millions of transactions or large calculations.)

The problem is that most web giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google already design their own servers and have an Asian contract manufacturer produce them. HP, though, might have a strong play if you look longer term. It's basically betting that more traditional companies will come to want and need similar computing systems as the web giants. Overall, HP wants to convey that it's an innovator again.

H-1B workers‘ shortage exaggerated

As the wrangling over immigration reform intensifies in the US Congress, the tech industry is lobbying hard to raise the limit on H-1B visas, which allow non-US citizens with advanced skills and degrees in "specialty occupations" to work in the country for up to six years.

Demand is so great that the annual cap of 65,000 was hit last week, just days after the application period opened. Technology companies support raising the H-1B quota almost five-fold, to 3,00,000, arguing universities are just not turning out enough American math and science graduates and they need to cast their net abroad to stay competitive.

Yet some US tech workers and academics say that the shortage of talent is exaggerated, that many of the jobs could go to out-of-work computer professionals in the United States, and that the programme serves mainly as a source of cheap labour.

The 2,00,000-member US chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers rejects the claim of a broad shortage of tech workers and opposes more H-1Bs.

"What these companies are doing is to replace Americans with lower-cost foreign workers," says Russ Harrison, senior legislative representative at the IEEE.

Rather than more H-1B visas, the group favours giving foreign workers permanent residency, which Harrison said would help boost wages and increase job mobility for newcomers.

In Silicon Valley, stories of ferocious competition for engineering workers and a lack of qualified job-seekers abound.

Tech companies point to an unemployment rate of around 3.5 percent for those with advanced computer and math experience, less than half the national rate, though in line with other professional occupations.

But wages in the tech industry are rising more slowly than those in the economy as a whole. For example, pay for applications software developers, a specialty in high demand, have risen just 8.9 percent in the five years through mid-2012, compared with a 12.5 percent increase for all occupations in the US economy.

"It is extraordinarily unlikely for a severe shortage to happen in a way that doesn't result in very large wage increases," said Kirk Doran, an economist at the University of Notre Dame who studies immigration and labour.

"We know what a labour shortage looks like: there should be both much lower unemployment than other professions and much higher wage growth. If either of these are not present, then I don't buy the shortage hypothesis."

Others say that when industries grow fast, wage growth can be stifled because of an influx of relatively inexperienced and lower-paid workers.

"Even if you look at data from one year to the next, it may not tell you what you think," said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a think tank backed by the pro-entrepreneurship Kauffman Foundation and others. He says sub-industries sometimes move from one category to another one, and that industries are growing more specialised, complicating the data.

IT hiring to fall in 2013: Nasscom

The additional personnel requirement in the IT sector of the country may come down by nearly 50,000 in the current fiscal as there is a large scale backlog of recruitments last year, IT-BPO industry bodyNasscom said.


"Last year we added 1.8 lakh jobs net. This year it will be 1.3 to 1.5 lakh jobs. Last year there was filling up back logs because we had shrunk our pipeline. We are still the largest employers ofwhite collar sectors of the country which has 3 million young people at the age of 27," Nasscom President Som Mittal told reporters here.

"Secondly, our business is not linear any more. There was time where for every dollar you added so many hours. But today it is IP-led and innovation, which we don't repeat (the job) which is good for the country," he added.

Replying to a query, he said the IT industry is expected to grow at 12 to 14 per cent in dollar terms in the current fiscal.

"This year we will probably add $13 to 15 billion new business in both domestic and exports," Mittal said.

According to him, the IT industry witnessed $76 billion exports and $32 billion domestic business which includes hardware last year. In 2012-13, the industry has grown 10.2 per cent in pure dollar terms and 10.9 per cent in constant currencies and 21 to 22 per cent in rupee term.

On attrition rate of the industry, Mittal said it has come down as demand and supply adjusts.

Currently, it hovers in 13-15 per cent on the higher side. Meanwhile, as a next step to its recently launched '10,000 startups' programme, the Nasscom signed a MoU with Hyderabad Angels, TiE Incubator and IIIT Hyderabad Incubator to collaborate and support the creation of a vibrantecosystem to foster technology entrepreneurship in India.

Mittal said that they are inviting of applications from innovative technology startups across the country for an insightful engagement with its accelerator and funding partners.

The Association has already received over 1,000 applications from various budding startups since the launch of the program and is expected to cross over 5,000 startup applications in the next eight weeks.