Qatar Islamic Bank to beef up security with NCR

Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB), the first Islamic financial institution in Qatar, and NCR, a consumer transaction technologies provider, have signed an agreement under which QIB will purchase the NCR Skimming Protection Solution (SPS) in an effort to proactively address today’s ATM skimming challenges and deliver maximum protection and convenience to its customers. 

As part of this project, QIB will enhance the strength of its IT infrastructure with the use of security firewalls and network access control, as well as refresh its data centre switches and its entire telephony system.

QIB has already implemented Solidcore Suite for APTRA, an ATM white-listing software that proactively protects ATMs from insider attacks by preventing the introduction of unauthorised code on the network and maintaining its integrity and availability.

“Our agreement with NCR will deliver the latest software and hardware technology to help protect QIB banking platforms so we can sharpen our focus on productivity and protect our clients' data – a key pillar of our business strategy and a continuous improvement we have in plan,” said Ghazi Qarout, Qatar Islamic Bank's Chief Information Officer. 

“NCR brings a unique vision for transforming our IT Infrastructure and ATM channel through software platforms, consulting and hardware enablement, helping us speed our innovation, improve our customer experience and build on a roadmap deemed for success.”

With this new project, QIB will be among the first large financial institutions to move their self-service network to the Microsoft Windows 7 platform, which when combined with the Solidcore solution can result in superior security, putting QIB in an advantageous position to offer great experiences to its customers.  

QIB has also introduced new security measures for Internet and mobile banking in line with a directive from the Qatar Central Bank. QIB customers must now use “One-Time-Password” (OTP)* authentication to further secure online banking.
Customers can receive OTP codes in two ways: using a smartphone application called “QIB Aman” or via SMS.

*OTP is a password that is valid for only one log-in or transaction. As it is only effective for a short period of time and is no longer accepted thereafter, it is considered an effective method of combating software which attempts to fraudulently capture a customer’s log-in information.