Blog

At least once a year I like to go through a what I’m calling a ‘State of the company‘ review that answers questions as if we are starting this company from anew. It should be noted that what I try to avoid is being generic. Avoiding those scenarios like meaningless, adjective heavy mission statements and over generalized goals that don’t “walk the walk”. If we don’t take these values with us and live and breathe them, what’s the point? It is a wonderful exercise that brings what we do back to its roots and I’d like to share with you guys what I’ve been working on.

(more…)

powered by ODEO

We are thrilled to announce that Garland Heart has made it to the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies list.  What an honor!  Inc. 5000 ranks companies by overall revenue growth over a three-year (2012-2015) period.  We are humbled and proud to anounce that we ranked #3060 with 111% growth for 2016.  

Heath Stanley, VP of Consulting Services at Garland Group, took time in this webinar to discuss the new release of the E-Banking Guidance for the authentication risk assessment. Attendees learned about what needs to be included in the risk assessment as well as how to incorporate into policy and practice. For RiskKey users, Heath demonstrated a template that was created by Garland Group and could be used to jump start this risk assessment project.

Here is the PDF presentation: E-Banking Authentication RA

Thanks to all that were able to attend our webinar last Friday on Understanding Regulation E. Thanks again to Tammy Stout of Oliver-Rainey for presenting for us this month.

While working with The Garland Group, I have been able to audit both large and small shops from Dallas to my old location back in East Texas. I myself came from a small shop with daily problems, mainly in the document imaging and merchant/branch capture areas. I was surprised to see that many large shops were having the exact same problems with different core vendors when dealing with these areas of service. I always felt that being a small community bank, we were a year or two behind on the tech side of banking (document imaging, branch/merchant capture). I was relieved to see that all the daily issues I was getting gray hairs over were also being experienced in other institutions from my experience as a Security Consultant for The Garland Group. It was very interesting to see how banks handled all the different issues with these products (document imaging/merchant capture) that are becoming more in demand for faster funds availability and remote customer service.

(more…)

Avian Flu (Pandemic) has been in the news for some time on an almost continuing basis. The Garland Group conducts IT controls Reviews based on the FFIEC guidelines and this question has come up with a number of financial institutions we audit who are debating about including this item as a portion of the Business Continuity Plan.

Sorry for the lack of posting lately everybody, we’ve all been busy little bees here at The Garland Group. Lots of really great things happening here that I wanted to share with you all.