The project team will focus on: reducing technology risk and obsolescence; speed time to market by creating baseline successful solutions; leverage best practices from other industries; and ensure that experiences in this arena are leveraged in order to increase adoption across the financial services industry.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is maturing rapidly as one of the most impactful enablers of real-time information, location and security. This makes RFID an ideal tool for automating business processes such as tracking and inventory management of and inventory management of IT assets, locating critical documents, custody chain movement, and other essential applications.

The FSTC was asked by four of the top five financial institutions, who are member companies, to help facilitate the development of a standard process for utilizing RFID in the industry. Some of the important issues that need to be addressed in this project are:

• Numbering scheme
• Physics considerations

• Tag selection
• Tag placement
• Tag type (Gen-2) Class 1

• Tag memory capacity and classes
• Automating support and monitoring

"There was considerable interest by our membership in RFID at our annual meeting last month," said John Fricke, Chief of Staff of the FSTC. "The results of this project should help organizations of all sizes to leverage the collective experiences of industry experts, technology vendors, and other institutions."

All financial services institutions are invited to participate in an FSTC RFID project. The FSTC will facilitate a series of workshops to discuss industry needs, review potential use cases and collaborate across the industry and vendor partitions. Among the various agenda items to be discussed are: how the physics of RFID should be leveraged to gain 100% read rates including tag testing prding tag testing protocols, antenna tuning, and ng, and reader analysis. The group will also analyze the impact of various middle ware strategies and investigate optimal support architectures to minimize total cost of ownership based on automated RFID infrastructure (ARI).

"The initial meeting of the RFID group at the annual meeting showed a basic understanding of RFID," commented Patrick J. Sweeney II, author of RFID for Dummies and industry leader. "The FSTC is taking the right approach to ensure their member companies are successful. There is a wealth of existing knowledge that the FSTC can take advantage of that will help the financial industry move rapidly up the learning curve."

The results of this effort will be to ensure the scalability and long-term success of RFID in the financial industry. A major goal is to create a process where suppliers can ship assets such as servers or other equipment which are pre-tagged for financial organizations. A thoughtful approach will ensure success now and migrate seamlessly through future M&A activity, new technology releases and growth into other areas for financial institutions. The FSTC is committed to this collaborative approach to mitigate risk through research, multiple alternatives based on shared knowledge and experience.

The group expects to recommend a preferred technology standard for interoperability by year's end.