World's No. 1 ATM manufacturer NCR to build a new manufacturing plant in Brazil

World's No. 1 ATM manufacturer NCR is to invest R$73 million to build a new manufacturing plant in Brazil that will create 250 new jobs.NCR says the site will produce cash machines for Brazil, Latin America, and Caribbean markets, with production slated to being by the end of the year. The new plant will take over production currently outsourced to a local contract manufacturer.

Brazil is the third largest ATM market in the world and is expected to grow 16% by 2012. NCR says the new factory will look to design and engineer specific products to meet the needs of Brazilian financial institutions, including capabilities for biometric ID and cheque printing.

Bill Nuti, NCR's chairman and chief executive officer, comments: "With this new capability, we believe we will be better positioned to take market share by providing leading hardware, software and service solutions, tailored specifically to meet the needs of our customers and fulfilling our goals of growing our business, while lowering our operating costs."

NCR has been undergoing a major shake-up of its global ATM manufacturing over the past two years in an effort to cut costs and improve productivity. Earlier this month, the firm announced plans to relocate all North American manufacturing to a new site in Columbus. In March, NCR finally called time on manufacturing at its site in Dundee, Scotland, as it shifted work to new sites in cheaper European locations.

Russia's Kaspersky Lab warns of ATM virus threat

MOSCOW, March 25 2009 (Source : RIA Novosti Web address http://en.rian.ru/) - Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab warned on Wednesday of a new virus that hackers could use in ATMs to gain access to bank accounts.

"This is a malicious program intended to infect and survive in ATMs. It is possible that new malware will appear, aimed at illegitimately using banking information and removing funds," the company's head of global research and threats analysis, Alexander Gostyev, told RIA Novosti.

Earlier on Wednesday another Russian anti-virus company, Doctor Web, said that a virus had been discovered in closed networks of ATMs of several Russian banks, which is able to collect information from bank cards.

Gostyev said the virus is a Trojan that is able to infect the popular American Diebold brand of ATMs, used in Russia and Ukraine. Judging by the programming code used, there is a high probability that the programmer comes from one of the former soviet republics, he added.

However, he said that if any ATMs have been infected, "their number is minimal."

He also said that while individual bank cardholders are not able to tell whether an ATM is infected, banks can run a program to find out if their machines are at risk.

EMV

EMV is a standard for interoperation of IC cards ("Chip cards") and IC capable POS terminals and ATMs, for authenticating credit and debit card payments. The name EMV comes from the initial letters of Europay, MasterCard and VISA, the three companies which originally cooperated to develop the standard. Europay International SA was absorbed into Mastercard in 2002. JCB (formerly Japan Credit Bureau) joined the organisation in December 2004, and American Express joined in February 2009. IC card systems based on EMV are being phased in across the world, under names such as "IC Credit" and "Chip and PIN". The EMV specification is also the basis of the Chip Authentication Program, where banks give customers hand-held card readers to perform online authenticated transactions.
The EMV standard defines the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards and IC card processing devices for financial transactions. Portions of the standard are heavily based on the IC Chip card interface defined in ISO 7816.
The system is not compatible with the original Carte Bancaire smart cards systematically deployed in France since 1992. However, the French Carte Bancaire now also uses the EMV standard.
The most widely known implementations of EMV standard are:

VSDC - VISA
MChip - MasterCard
AEIPS - American Express
J Smart - JCB