Bank Technology News articles from April 2004

Bank Technology News archives from April 2004

Mortgage: Accredited's Inner Rivals: Inside competition trumps "ordinary" tech.
April 1, 2004... The salubrious effects of rising home values and low interest rates are unmistakable at a place like Accredited Home Lenders, which focuses on originating, servicing and selling non-conforming or non-prime loans. For while it remains incredibly...

Web Navigation: Easy-to-Use Sites Bring Bank Returns.
April 1, 2004... Key for customers is user-friendliness, design bank of america's nearly eight million active on-line banking customers are enough to convince executives that its Web initiatives are paying off in terms of customer satisfaction. But Bank of...

Crime: Forgotten Fraud: Counterfeit Checks.
April 1, 2004... Banks lost $698 million from scams in 2001 only a few decades ago, fooling a bank into cashing a counterfeit check required forgery skills, a nomadic attitude and steady confidence. Modern technology, however, has since lowered the bar. "It's...

Tower Buy Sparks Debate, Inside and Out: Can Tower maintain its editorial independence under the wing of MasterCard Advisors? The consensus? There is none.
April 1, 2004... It didn't take long for industry players to weigh in on the TowerGroup buy, or for Tower to respond to my commentary on the matter. The big question: Can Tower maintain its editorial independence under the wing of MasterCard Advisors, its new...

....NewsMakers....NewsMakers....NewsMakers....(meshed brief)(Federal Reserve Bank)
April 1, 2004... At 30, NACHA Turns Heads More than 10 billion automated clearing house payments were made in 2003, according to NACHA, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Payments were valued at $27.4 trillion, or 12 percent more than 2002....

ID Theft Is Rising.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
April 1, 2004... 2003: 214,905* 2002: 161,836* 2001: 86,212* *FTC figures Copyright 2004 Thomson Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.thomsonmedia.com http://www.banktechnews.com

Loan Valuation: Moody's Gauges Loan Portfolios: CreditMark gives picture based on market sentiment.(CreditMark)
April 1, 2004... About a year ago, a risk analyst at a major U.S. bank decided to value his loan portfolio by the prevailing sentiments of the markets. The analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the bank wanted a method that was "similar to the...

Top Tech Deals.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... 1. JPmorgan cut a deal with RT Lawrence allowing the image-based check and remittance processor to offer ACH clearing through the bank's Treasury Services unit. 2. Yodlee launched AOL Bill Pay, an e-payment service aimed at AOL's more than...

A Revamped BondsOnline.com Takes on Bloomberg.
April 1, 2004... What the new service from BondsOnline.com has going for it is the difficulty in finding accurate historical and current prices for many domestic and international securities. What it may have going against it that BondsOnlineQuotes.com is not...

South Trust Takes a Whirl at Electronic Interviews.
April 1, 2004... Human resources technology is as hot as ever, with financial institutions deploying technology on all fronts, ranging from Web portals for employee information to on-line retirement planning. South Trust Corp. is implementing new software that...

India's PM Answers Outsourcing Critics.
April 1, 2004... Overseas outsourcing has gotten a lot of heat over the past year, with labor unions and politicians in the U.S. and the U.K. claiming that the practice of shipping IT and customer service work to developing countries is a job drain and...

Techies.(Appointments)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Keith Halbert was recently hired as vp and CIO at outsourcing company EDS where he will help develop long-term strategy. EDS also elected Ellen Hancock, an IT industry veteran, to its board of directors. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange promoted...

Message Board.
April 1, 2004... "The financial system can't withstand a lot of abuse. It's that fragile. Sharing information is therefore crucial." William J. Fox Director FinCEN On the need for financial institutions to share information with each other...

By the Numbers: When it comes to compliance technology spending, internal IT remains the biggest investment for financial institutions. But more firms are opting to buy rather than build.
April 1, 2004... Compliance it spending by financial institutions will finally see an upswing following a year of furious planning by firms to address legislation like The USA PATRIOT Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. A recent study by Financial Insights reports...

Policing Global Pirates On the River of Money.(Interview)
April 1, 2004... William J. Fox was recently named director of the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a Treasury Department bureau that operates as an intelligence-gathering arm on global money laundering and terrorist financing. He's a cop with a law...

Smart Cards: Can They Take On U.S. by '07?: Fraud on magnetic-stripe cards will force adoption.
April 1, 2004... Betting on the smart card after 20 years of repeated failures may seem like a dumb idea. But John C. Gould, TowerGroup's director of consumer lending and bank cards, will see that bet and raise you. "Most people would say smart cards are...

Amex Sees Green With Blue.
April 1, 2004... While naysayers debate the wisdom of smart cards in the U.S., American Express has been quietly touting the success of its own five-year-old "smart" credit card, Blue. When it was rolled out in 1999 with a Central Park gig that featured crooner...

Branch Service: Wal-Banking Made Easy: NCF is making it easy as pie for employees to serve customers inside its branches and Wal-Mart locations.
April 1, 2004... Wal-mart is about as retail as it gets, and National Commerce Financial believes it has found a way to keep customers satisfied and moving quickly by making customer service as simple as possible for employees, including its Wal-Mart-branded...

Wachovia and Partners Speed Corporate Billing.
April 1, 2004... A trio of companies-wachovia, Wausau Financial Systems and First Data-all hope to gain the spotlight in the hypercompetitive corporate payments space from a recent remittance processing alliance. But perhaps the parties that will get the most...

First Commonwealth Deploys a Wealth e-Monitor.
April 1, 2004... For scott clapper, svp of first Commonwealth Bank in Indiana, PA, wealth management has been a transactional line of work based on reacting to client demands rather than seeking business opportunity. That all changed in January when the...

Goin' Phishing: Growing e-mail attacks threaten banks' bottom lines.
April 1, 2004... Banks have battled worms, viruses, trojan horses and spyware with ample equanimity for years. But the most formidable combatant on the scam scene is proving to be purveyors of phishing, the distribution of spoofed e-mail messages with return...

Lending A Hand...To Trading Without One: BofA Joins CSFB and Goldman In "Low-Touch" Trading Space Race.
April 1, 2004... Rob flatley patrols one of the newest frontiers in trading, where thousands of shares of stocks, bonds and other instruments move electronically and a century of Wall Street tradition fades by the day. "Our clients are pushing for no- and...

Leaders Of The Pack Top Internet Sites Ranked By Ease Of Use.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Watchfire: Q4, 2003 Overall 1. CharterOne Bank 2. Bank of America 3. Key Bank 4. Wells Fargo 5. Citibank Watchfire: Q3, 2003 Small Business Banking 1. Bank One 2. National City 3. Bank of America...

The Role that e-Banking Plays in Fighting ID Theft.
April 1, 2004... On-line banking has made lives easier by reducing paper checks and statements, not to mention cutting the cost of postage and time involved writing and handling checks. Now it seems Web banking and bill payment can also cut down on identity...

U.S. Bank Can Get Satisfactions in Minnesota.(U.S. Recordings)
April 1, 2004... U.S. bank is part of what's believed to be the nation's only statewide movement to create a standard for the electronic recording of mortgage satisfactions. The new product is underway in Minnesota, and represents a move that, while simple,...

Data Integration: ING Breaks Out of Its Silos: About 5,000 employees use ING's data-integration technology, which saves the firm about $400,000 per year.(ING Americas)
April 1, 2004... The twin pressures of adhering to a deluge of regulatory issues and implementing technology that actually adds real value to the business-such as a holistic view of the customer for sales purposes-are no mean feat. And for financial services...

Experts Pummel Microsoft's Sarbanes-Oxley Play.(Microsoft Corp.)
April 1, 2004... Compliance with all the rules contained in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is proving quite a challenge, and while the act does not mandate technology implementations to cope with the new rules-internal financial reporting controls, record retention,...

Risk Management: Barra Takes Big Swing At Webifying Mitigation: Firm hopes to juice slow adoption of ASP solutions.
April 1, 2004... Often regarded as brainy, unsexy and ancillary to maximizing profits, risk management has assumed a new urgency in the banking industry, as corporate scandals continue to make headlines and recent regulations like Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley...

What to Spy In Account Analysis.
April 1, 2004... More banks are boosting revenues and reducing expenses by fully utilizing the robust flexibility of today's account analysis systems. Many of the older, mainframe-based systems are limited in their ability to set up customized pricing plans for...

Building a Strong CRM Frame.(Customer relationship management)
April 1, 2004... In order to remain competitive, financial services institutions must focus consistently on improving client profitability across total product portfolios, reducing client operations costs, lowering merger and acquisition risk for clients and...

Effective Messaging Amid Chaos.
April 1, 2004... Once upon a time, banking was a local business transacted face-to-face in marble lobbies. Today it is global commerce conducted at lightning speed between individuals who may never meet. A major contributing factor to this change has been...