As Good as Gold

Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe

As the largest financial institution headquartered in the Western United States, Wells Fargo & Co. was founded in 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo to offer banking services to citizens in the American West. Headquartered, then and now, in the gold rush port of San Francisco, the company originally bought gold and sold paper bank drafts that were as valuable as gold to banking customers, in addition to offering money orders, traveler's checks and fund transfers by telegraph. Wells Fargo agents traveled by stagecoach in and out of the gold-mining regions of the western states, building up a client base of 2,500 communities in 25 states by the 1880s.

According to the financial institution's Web site (wellsfargo.com), in those days, it was common knowledge that wherever there was gold in the West, Wells Fargo was guarding it. Kept under the driver's seats of Wells Fargo stagecoaches were green ponderosa pine treasure boxes that housed gold dust, gold bars, gold coins, legal papers, checks and bank drafts. Robberies were a problem, and sometimes robbers outsmarted the Wells Fargo shotgun messengers tasked with protecting each box.

More than a century later, robberies — though now on a much larger scale — are still a problem. Theft along with protecting the lives of the customers and staff members in their stores are foremost security concerns for Wells Fargo corporate security professionals. “In a logical security sense, the protection of assets and customer information is, of course, a huge concern of our compromised data team,” says Jeff Gardner, manager of central monitoring station (CMS) operations for Wells Fargo. “In a physical security sense, our biggest concern is the protection of life during a robbery.”

The company has grown to have about 159,000 employees, 6,027 stores and more than 80 businesses. With such a large number of stores and a plethora of activity occurring in the stores at any one moment, Wells Fargo needed a way to manage all of its alarm panels — numbering in the thousands — from one central monitoring station.

Enter GE Security's MASterMind, an open-source software platform that helps users to manage and monitor their security infrastructures. Formerly, MASterMind was offered by Monitoring Automation Systems (MAS), an Irvine, Calif.-based provider of automation software for central station monitoring that was acquired by GE Security, Bradenton, Fla., in 2003. MASterMind's legacy version is the Unix-based B32 software, a system that, Gardner says, Wells Fargo operators were happy with, but wished was more user-friendly. Gardner explains that operators often had little experience with the Unix operating system, and it was a complicated system to master. “We wanted more user-friendly screens, and when we found out that MASterMind was Windows-based, that was a plus for us,” he says.

Wells Fargo began using the software in June 2005 after completing a 10-month conversion process that involved upgrading from the B32 software and training the 23 full-time employees working at the Wells Fargo central monitoring station. The operators, all of whom are certified through a course offered by the Security Industry Association (SIA), monitor 4,980 different alarm panels, mostly from DMP, Springfield, Mo., running throughout the thousands of banking stores. Using the MASterMind software interface, the operators are able to catalog the names of stores, addresses, phone numbers and regional law enforcement and emergency response contact numbers linked to each alarm panel and store. When an alarm sounds, the operators review the software's alarm monitoring window and can immediately find out the location and nature of the alarm within the store, call for law enforcement or other backup using the pre-determined contact number list, read and enter instructions for how to proceed and view a 24-hour history report of panel activity. The monitoring window essentially contains every piece of information an operator might need to assess and resolve an alarm situation.

Gardner says that one of the issues Wells Fargo experienced with B32 was not being able to effectively prioritize alarms, for instance deciphering an alarm caused by a brief communication system failure from one signaling a possible bank robbery.

“When the alarms hit the MASterMind server, they are prioritized. We want life alarms to be a priority, so when an alarm of that nature pops up, for example, we can designate that alarm in red,” he says. “That way our operators immediately take notice of it.” If a minor alarm sounds, such as one caused by communication failure, the system will automatically move the event to the panel's history log if it is resolved automatically within a pre-determined period of time. This allows operators to maintain their focus on priority alarms.

Also using B32, operators had to respond to every alarm. Although the process was necessary, operators were often blanketed with a constant flow of minor alarms they had to take action on or dismiss before tackling the major ones. After using the system for three months, Gardner says he observed a noticeable difference in the amount of alarms, major or minor, the operators responded to, as a result of the system's automation function. “With B32, we responded to about 75,000 alarms a month. After installing MASterMind, that number decreased from 48,000 to 50,000 a month,” he says.

Because of the software's ease-of-use, Gardner says the operators are now more comfortable and more prepared to deal with alarm situations. “Also, when we were using B32, I could not go very far if I wanted to go on vacation,” he says, because fewer operators were well-versed in the specialized Unix system. “Now, I can go away, and I know that my operators are qualified and certified and know how to handle a situation,” he says.

Gardner says he believes Wells Fargo will eventually integrate its video surveillance and security guard tour systems, both managed with other systems, into MASterMind, which also includes packaged software modules designed to manage these systems.

According to Jim Paulson, general manager of intrusion products for GE Security, MASterMind's open source configuration appeals to users in the financial, retail and education industries. “One of the challenges, particularly with banking security, is that they end up with mismatched products that they have to find a way to integrate together into one system,” he says. “The logical place is the central station. Our customers can use products from Pelco, Verint, Dedicated Micros and March Networks, to name a few. They do not have to stick with one manufacturer.”

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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