Bank Technology News articles from December 2003

Bank Technology News archives from December 2003

Merger Integration: BofA's Fleet Of Headaches: Benefits from acquisition will take years.(Bank of America's acquisition of FleetBoston)
December 1, 2003... Bank of america bit off a mouthful when it bought FleetBoston, and the digestion promises to be fraught with all the trials and tribulations emerge in the wake of such consumption. And when the stress of keeping pace with sweeping regulatory...

Tech Investment: E-Banking a Boon? Try Proving That.(Industry Overview)
December 1, 2003... Firms ponder Web's role and how much to invest internet banking may be catching on with consumers, but for banks, documenting any tangible cost or productivity benefit hasn't gotten any easier. Banks are asking at least one basic business...

Trading: Orc's Liquidator Floods the Street.
December 1, 2003... Software promises arbitrage precision look out, governor schwarzenegger, your Terminator has nothing on the Liquidator-the Orc Liquidator, that is. Comparisons to the newbie California governor are apt: the Web site's opening illustration...

Branches Are Back. Is This Banking's Big Break?(Industry Overview)
December 1, 2003... Each year banking has a different technology theme. Ten years ago it was the thin client phenomenon. That was followed by data warehousing, middleware, the Internet and customer relationship management. This, in turn, ushered in the pursuit of...

....NewsMakers....NewsMakers....NewsMakers....(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... 'Tis the Season to be Speedy Patience is less necessary a virtue this holiday season for credit-card clients looking to use their plastic. Consumers spend an average of 1.24 seconds waiting for authorization for a transaction, says Visa...

SECURITY: Biometrics Takes Hold Overseas: Significant hurdles remain to adoption in the U.S.(Industry Overview)
December 1, 2003... Overseas banks have been very proactive in using biometric products and services for everything from employee verification to consumer authentication. In Europe, for example, where ID fraud is taken as seriously as it is in the United States,...

Top Tech Deals.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... 1. SIA has signed an agreement with Verizon that gives association members competitive pricing, terms and conditions. 2. Fiserv inked a deal with Factual Data to provide expert analysis of applicants' FICO scores. 3. VECTORsgi, which...

Banks Look for a New Way to Value IT Investments.(Mercer Oliver Wyman study)(Industry Overview)
December 1, 2003... Measuring the value of IT investments is an issue institutions have struggled with for years. Now, a new study by Mercer Oliver Wyman, a financial services management consultancy based in New York City, delves into some of these issues. ...

Check 21 Imaging Deep In The Heart of Texas.(uses Imagesoft Technologies' Titan e2)
December 1, 2003... Cullen/frost bankers is a rela-tively small bank holding company with $10 billion in assets in Texas, but its moves to become Check 21-enabled by installing a new electronic imaging and archiving system will give it big bank capabilities. ...

JP Morgan Treasury Joins Xign in e-Payments Deal.
December 1, 2003... JP Morgan treasury services, a unit of JPMorgan Chase, has partnered with Xign Corp. to provide an e-payables product for the financial settlement of business-to-business commerce. The deal will offer a global electronic invoice and payment...

Odds & Ends.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... SunGard eProcess Intelligence and Check Free Financial and Compliance Solutions are redefining their distribution and marketing relationship for reconciliation and exception processing. After seven years, the two will now separately develop and...

PayPal's Pioneer Plants a New Seed.(Elon Musk)
December 1, 2003... One of the fathers of electronic payments, Elon Musk, is bellying up to the bar at a Silicon Valley startup that hopes to help small businesses manage a key part of their operations. Musk, the former chairman, founder and CEO of PayPal, became...

Techies.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Kenneth Klipper was named CEO of BrownCo., the on-line brokerage unit of JPMorgan Chase. Gerard Callaghan was appointed evp and CIO of US Trust, a subsidiary of Charles Schwab Corp. Kevin Gillick, head of corporate marketing for the Datacard...

Message Board.
December 1, 2003... "For DMVs considering biometrics, it's not meant to be punitive [against drivers]." John Dorr, vp of marketing, Viisage Technology on states' sensitivity to privacy issues over maintaining face-recognition or fingerprint biometrics in...

By the Numbers.(Financial Insights' projections )
December 1, 2003... The financial industry is emerging from a period of considerable media attention on identity fraud in the U.S. Part of the hoopla was fueled by a lack of realistic data and objective analysis of the number of identity fraud incidents and the...

Fifth Third Catering To 'Special Agents'.
December 1, 2003... Jeff Trachtman's job requires him to keep track of two different ways to build relationships with customers: through his own institution, Fifth Third, and through its network of correspondents. The institution's vp of bank card products says...

Lenders Look to Cost Cutting as Refi Boom Wanes.
December 1, 2003... It would be an exaggeration to say mortgage lenders have run out of new ways to nab market share, but with the mother of all refinancing waves starting its descent, more and more firms are looking for ways to increase efficiencies in order to...

Foundation Source Teams With Mercantile: Bank's 'Family First' helps manage philanthropic trusts.(Norwalk, CT-based Foundation Source)
December 1, 2003... Call it a perfect storm of giving. On one front: the massive transfer of wealth from the post-war generation to baby boomers and their heirs, a process that began in the late 1990s and is expected to continue until the middle of this century....

ITS.Netrix May Herald Rise of the SuperTrader: New desktop coordinates wide-range of communications.(Syntegra's multimedia desktop device)
December 1, 2003... Just when traders thought they couldn't track any more details on their desktops, along comes ITS. Netrix, which raises the bar to a whole new level. With its color-coded system that allows traders to prioritize clients, Syntegra's...

Charter One Rings in Holiday With Stored-Value Card.
December 1, 2003... Financial institutions are discovering stored-value cards have worth, and Charter One is hoping to jump out in front of the pack by offering gift cards for free-and by bringing stored value to the Internet. The institution has unveiled...

Misys's e-Trade Finance Product Promises Efficiency.
December 1, 2003... Misys has huge hopes for its product, e-Trade, which promises to help global banks transfer trade finance systems and operations management to a single point of control. Consolidation to this hub eliminates costly form duplication and...

Lifestage Marketing: Keeping It In The Family.(Wintrust, a holding company for nine community banks in the Chicago metropolitan area )
December 1, 2003... Wintrust's data management and new software enable marketing to the right clients and their relatives institutions of all sizes long for the benefits of one-to-one and lifestage-based marketing. Wintrust is combining data management with new...

Closing Fast: RBC Mortgage is betting the best way to boost mortgage volume in a cooling market is by making friends with brokers. So it's offering them access to its Internet technology.(Chicago-based RBC Mortgage is deploying Web-based technology that will give brokers and account execs fast and easy access to product information, qualification, pricing and rate locking)
December 1, 2003... RBC mortgage is playing for time in a game where the shot clock keeps getting shorter and shorter. But players in the mortgage biz know if speed and ease of fulfillment can be added to a fair and competitive offer, a closed mortgage is that...

BCP Bank's Building Blocks Of Success.(Banco Comerical Portugues)
December 1, 2003... Like many growing community banks, bcpbank is grappling with the headaches of compliance, customer service and client retention. But unlike other community banks, this upstart's nimble customization of its leased Fiserv platform has been so...

Workforce Optimization: An industry-wide desire to ramp up efficiency has banks eyeing technology that automates when and where employees are deployed. Could waiting on teller lines be a thing of the past?
December 1, 2003... After Standing In A Line 16-deep Served by two tellers discussing Mel Gibson's hairline-his movie "Maverick" is playing endlessly on a lobby TV-the average bank customer might be forgiven for wishing slow death to any bank that makes them hurry...

On-line Banking: Scotiabank's Tropical Bet.
December 1, 2003... It must have something to do with the whipping winds, which pelt parts of Canada with snow nearly year round. But clearly Scotiabank, Canada's second-largest bank, relishes doing business in the balmy breezes of the Caribbean Basin. Scotiabank...

As On-Line Banking Grows, So Does Internet Fraud.
December 1, 2003... In many ways, on-line banking is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that banks can save money and time by steering willing customers to the Web-and it's a cheap method of cross-marketing new products. The curse is that the Internet creates...

Productivity: IT Upgrades Cut Waste.(Industry Overview)
December 1, 2003... Chris Siliba has been busy lately. The vp of retail applications for the Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank's information technology group just oversaw $13 million in computer upgrades for its nearly 950 branches, including new Windows-XP...

Cyber-Ark Signs ING Direct, Comerica and KeyCorp.
December 1, 2003... Since cyber-ark unveiled the newest version of its patented Vault technology on November 1, it has reeled in at least three financial clients, as well as one casino. ING Direct, Comerica, KeyCorp and Mohegan Sun all have announced plans to use...

The Fight to Stop the Rise Of ID Theft.
December 1, 2003... As we press forward into the first decade of the 21st century, identity theft has grabbed headlines and negatively impacted both individual consumers and financial services companies. From the credit grantor's perspective, it is the hundreds of...

E-Payments Can Boost Debt Collectors' Cash Flows.
December 1, 2003... With an increase in past-due and delinquent accounts spurred by layoffs and decreasing incomes, debt-collection departments have taken on more work, creating a need for improved ways to expedite receivables and maintain consistent cash flow....

How to Stop Payroll Fraud.
December 1, 2003... Fraud of one type or another occurs in almost every business today, costing American businesses about six percent of revenues, or $600 billion annually, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Small businesses are often the...