FCFCU

On September 1st, Financial Center will be making significant upgrades and improvements to its BillPayer service in online banking. Members will find a new appearance and interface for BillPayer that will make paying your bills online easier than ever.

One important change is how payments will be processed after September 1st in BillPayer. Previously you may have scheduled your payment a certain period of time before it was due to allow sufficient time for it to be delivered on or before its due date. 

Now, the pay date that you designate for your bills will be the date that you want the payee to receive your payment. When scheduling your payment, BillPayer will give you the next available date you can send a payment to your payee. You will also have the ability to schedule future or recurring payments.

If you have questions, please contact Member Services at 317.916.7700 or 800.473.2328.

View an online demo of the new BillPayer system.
 

In a recent survey released by Fiserv, one of the largest Bill Payment processors in the nation, one of the largest deterrents to online bill payment usage is “understanding how it works”. So, I’ll answer that concern for Finance Center FCU members.

Setting-up BillPayer involves just a few simple steps:

• Entering a payee list
• Scheduling payments
• Maintaining payment schedules or amounts

First, a member adds payees to their Bill Payer list, by entering the details from the bill they receive (Payee Name, Address used to pay the bill, Payee Phone number, and Payee Account Number). These details are used to match the member’s bill with the most efficient means of payment for that payee. Payment means include: Same-Day payment, electronic payment, and Paper check payment.

Payment Scheduling can take multiple forms depending on how the member configures the payment schedules. Each form meets a variety of member needs.

• One-time payments
• Recurring payments
• Biller directed payments (coming to Financial Center in September)

One Time Payments - In this form, members set the amount and date of the payment each time it needs to be made. This is necessary for bills where the amount varies with each bill, or when the member wants to control the date the bill is paid. This method provides the member with the most control, but also requires the member to interact with BillPayer the most.

Recurring Payments – This method is great for bills where the amount and due date only change once or twice a year. Utility bills with “budget” payments, insurance premiums, or other fixed payment bills fit well in this method. The member sets the amount of the bill and the due date. The system then pays the bill this amount by the due date with the frequency the member assigns (Monthly, Quarterly, Annually, etc.). This method requires occasional member interaction such as when the billing amount changes.

Bill Directed (coming to Financial Center in September) - This can be either One-time or Recurring. This is the next advancement in Bill Payment services. This service enhancement allows billers (payees) to present their bill through the Bill Payment service (e-Bills). The due date, amount due, and payment method are all part of the presentation of the bill. The member can review the bill and then direct the Bill Payment service to pay the bill. In some cases this Method will allow the BillPayer service to use the Biller presented information to manage the entire payment process. So, if the amount varies on the bill the amount paid would automatically vary without the member interacting with BillPayer at all. This method is great for reducing the amount of US Mail and for bills with variable amounts such as telephone or cell phone bills.

Found this article and thought I should share.

Just when you thought you'd seen it all, a new and particularly nasty form of Internet phishing, called tab-nabbing, poses a new identity theft threat to web users.

Phishing happens when a scammer deceives you into giving away information about yourself, mostly account details such as username and password.

Usually via an email or a link on another web page, they direct you to a bogus site that looks exactly like the genuine article -- like PayPal or Amazon for example -- and captures your login details when you try to sign in.

The crook can then use those details to sign on and remove money or make purchases on your account.

All of these previous online phishing scams rely on the user being fooled into clicking a link, whereas the tab-nabber plays a different and much less obvious trick.

If you're a regular Internet user, you'll know how tabs work. In your browser -- for example, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome -- they allow you to have several pages open at once, and to hop from one to the other.

Sometimes, when you click on a link in one page, it opens the new page in a separate tab, and it's not unusual to have half a dozen or more tabs open at once.

You even forget which ones you had open, which helps the tab-nabber immensely.

The way this particularly evil form of Internet phishing works goes like this:

• You already have a couple of tabs open when you land on a page controlled by the tab-nabber (though you won't know this).
• While you're viewing this page, the tab-nabber accesses your browsing history to see which sites you regularly visit that have value to him -- again like Amazon, PayPal or an email account like Gmail.
• Tab-nabber then changes one of your tabbed pages to mimic one of these sites, complete with what looks like the genuine logo on the tab itself, hoping, when you return to this tab, you will think you must have visited that page earlier and just forgotten.
• Even better, from the tab-nabber's point of view, you may really have just visited the genuine site (your bank, for example), left it open in the tab, and then returned to it to discover you seem to have been logged out.
• Either way, the aim is to get you to think you're logging in again and, hey presto, the scammer has pulled off his cunning Internet phishing trick.

Two key aspects make this much more effective than previous online phishing scams:

First, you don't have to click a link to get to the bogus page; you just click on what looks like a genuine page tab.

Second, it uses sites you habitually visit whereas phishing emails often seem to come from organizations you've had no dealings with, so you would immediately suspect something was wrong.

Making this scheme more effective, if you do your banking online, the bank often will actually sign you out if there's no activity on their page, even if you still have it open in a tab. It's not unusual to be asked to sign on again.

However, two other things give the tab-nabbing trick away: First, although the page may look genuine, the Internet address or URL (the name of the site given in the address bar at the top of your browser) won't.

So, the real Amazon home page for instance will show "amazon.com" but a bogus page will have something quite different, even if it has the word "amazon" in it.

Third, the little padlock icon that appears in your browser (usually bottom right or beside the address bar), when you visit a secure website, will generally be missing.

Still, it's a wicked deception, highlighted recently by a specialist who works for Mozilla, the organization that makes the Firefox browser. You can see his video demonstration of tab-nabbing (sometimes also called "tabnabbing" or "tabnapping") here if you have Adobe Flash installed.

What can you do to ensure you don't fall victim to this new type of Internet phishing? To be doubly-secure, here's what you should do.

1. Get into the habit of glancing at the address bar for every page you visit or revisit. This makes good secure-surfing sense anyway.
2. Look for that padlock on what should be a secure site page.
3. After visiting a secure page, close it when you're done, rather than keeping it open in a tab.
4. If a site invites you to sign on again, close the tab and re-key the correct address.

Any one of these four steps should help steer you clear of a tab-nabbing scam -- and if you have security software integrated with your browser, that should flag bogus sites too. With Internet phishing, you just can't be too cautious.

Source (http://www.scambusters.org/internetphishing.html  or http://www.scambusters.org/ search for Internet Scambusters #395)