News

Beginning 2009 a new cashier system has become available at petrol stations. Shell is the first company on the German petrol market, offering a combined Cashier-Teller service approved by the Central credit commission (ZKA). With the "Integrated Cash-Mana­gement System" (ICM System) the customers' cash can be placed directly into a safe, in return the cus­tomers automatically receive their change. The em­ployees have no access to the cash - even less any robbers interested in stealing the monetary contents. At present there have been about 900 Shell stations outfitted with the ICM System in Germany and since its introduction the number of robberies has declined by 35 percent.

First of all, the petrol station can now offer the cus­tomers an additional service. Every holder of Giro­cards (formerly known as ec-Karte) can draw cash at the Shell petrol station same as at any automatic teller. Second of all, monetary funds are nolonger freely available at these equipped Shell petrol sta­tions. That means, the money received is locked down in a safe to which employees have no access and the return cash is given back as part of the system's cashier function. So the cashiers have no access to any cash themselves. Therefore, the security at Shell petrol stations has improved much to

the advantage of employees as well as customers. Several robberies, in fact, have been prevented because of the closed Cashier-Teller system. By the middle of this year Shell will have equipped up to 1300 stations with the new so-called Integrated Cash-Management System. Through the ICM System the entire monetary transactions can be handled completely. NOVOSEC AG has supported Postbank from the beginning of the project in relevant topics like its conception and the implementation of controlling for monetary logistics.

We are glad to welcome our long-term employee, Mr. Michael Schober to the Management Board. Mr. Schober has been an integral part of our team from the start of NOVOSEC AG and he was substantially involved in building up the project work sector.

Starting today, Postbank offers its customers a new se­curity feature whose implementation was su­per­vised to a large degree by NOVOSEC. In time for the holidays, Postbank is one of the first private banks to offer their customers the possibility to individually con­fig­ure an upper limit for cash withdrawal with their cash cards at cash dispensers abroad. The card limit can be changed via online banking as well as over the phone. The new limit is effective within minutes.

The possibility to adjust the card limit for cash withdrawals at automated teller machines (ATMs) abroad serves to protect Postbank customers from card misuse. It complements the measures already taken by Postbank to increase the security at ATMs and to protect their customers from financial damage.

Skimming describes a technique where a fraudulent criminal spies out card data to fabricate a copy of the card. The card data is obtained by manipulating a

cash teller's card reader so that the card's magnet strip data can be copied to a forged card. In addition, the entering of the card PIN often is filmed by a pin­hole camera hidden in a plastic panel mounted above the keyboard.

While the stolen data is insufficient to withdraw cash from domestic ATMs (German ATMs have additional safe­ty measures), the criminal can use the forged cards at cash machines abroad, lacking those fea­tures.

"It is here the card limit becomes effective" says Jürgen Weiß, CEO of NOVOSEC AG. "Whenever the customer is in Germany, the foreign card limit should be set to zero. When going abroad, on holiday or on a business trip, the card limit can be adjusted shortly before the withdrawal, using the online banking portal. Afterwards, the limit should be reset to zero im­me­di­ate­ly."

One of the largest German investment companies has awarded NOVOSEC AG the task of converting the monthly statistics for the inter-trade organization BVI to the new and standardized XML-format FundsXML. FundsXML was developed by the FundsXML Standard Committee (FSC) as an open and free standard for funds information.

The services provided by NOVOSEC comprise the overall application design and the implementation of the statistics generator. This includes the data read­out from a database and the conversion of the data into FundsXML-compliant output files.