Bank Technology News articles from February 2006

Bank Technology News archives from February 2006

Authentication: The Big Security Choice: To Be Visible or Not?: WaMu, Boiling Springs take different security paths.(Washington Mutual Inc.)(Boiling Springs Savings Bank)
February 1, 2006... When the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council established its two-factor authentication guidelines in October 2005, it gave the industry until the end of 2006 to conform. Two banks at opposite ends of the size spectrum-Washington...

Fraud Scoring: An Early Look at Corporate Trouble: D&B, Experian products gain bankers' attention.(banking industry and to control fraud against them)
February 1, 2006... Banks have long analyzed pros-pective corporate customers before extending loans. But that analysis is usually contained to the creditworthiness of the firm and, in the case of small businesses, the principals involved. Now, new technology...

Broker Servicing: Help for a New Biz: Holding loans longer necessitates new tech.(using Trakker for loans management)
February 1, 2006... Steve Stripp hopes to make his job and the lives of his staff a little easier, even though his business is becoming much more complicated. Like a lot of mortgage brokers, Stripp, who's an executive at Absolute Home Mortgage Corp. in West...

Edit Index.(financial services and securities)(Illustration)
February 1, 2006... A Aberdeen Asset Management 26 Absolute Home Mortgage 19 AITE 16 AOL 25 Axciom 12 B Bank of America 17 Bank of New York 12 BankRate 24 Barclays 29 BITS 12 BlackSpider...

CheckFree: A Payments Revolution 25 Years in The Making.
February 1, 2006... The evolution of electronic payments has come a long way. By 2010, Forrester projects 52 percent of U.S. online households will be paying bills over the Internet-with Gen Xers and Gen Yers comprising 67 percent of electronic bill presentment...

Risk Management: BITS Offers Outsourcing Report Card: Pooled outsourcer assessments offer banks and vendors uniform reviews of risk management capabilities.
February 1, 2006... A BITS-led consortium of banks and service providers is launching a program this month that aims to create standardized IT outsourcer risk-management assessments to aid banks in shopping for vendors. The BITS Financial Institution Shared...

News Makers.(suspicious-activity reports for banking industry)(bank customers usually use online banking)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... SARS Secrecy Softens: Sharing Data Is Now OK Banking regulators are permitting institutions to share information on suspicious-activity reports with corporate parent organizations, even overseas headquarters. Previously, the Financial...

Health Plan Finance: U.S. Bank Seeks Out a Healthy HSA IT Bench: The bank's entered into a partnership with Subimo to share tech tools that will help the financial institution offer healthcare finance to its institutional clients.
February 1, 2006... In a nod to the growing importance of health-savings accounts, U.S. Bank has partnered with Subimo of Chicago to offer its platform of health decision-support tools to the bank's institutional clients' employees and retail customers. Under...

Top Tech Deals.(Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. acquires Townsend Analytics)(Countrywide Financial Corp. contracts with Unisys Corp.)(Symantec Corp. acquires IMlogic Inc.)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Number One Lehman Brothers is looking to improve execution management for institutional investor clients, and part of the effort is its purchase of Townsend Analytics, which sells RealTick-a multi-broker, multi-asset, direct market access...

Storage Problems: Info and Productivity Have Jammed the In-Box: Research shows people are spending so much time sifting for old information in email archives that it's causing them to fall behind on regular work.
February 1, 2006... Email was supposed to replace inter-office messages, sticky pads and while-you-were-out slips as a quick, efficient way for employees to communicate and send simple information back and forth-stuff like meeting times, appointments and reminders...

Techies.(PassMark Software appointed Jeff Scheel)(The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. promotes Anna Ewing)(Tokyo Stock Exchange appoints Yoshinori Suzuki )(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... PassMark also appointed Jeff Scheel as corporate development officer where he will manage strategic partnerships, expand international business and oversee deployment of voice authentication solutions. Nasdaq promoted Anna Ewing as evp of...

Message Board.
February 1, 2006... "We're not cannibalizing dollars from other aspects of online marketing." Yahoo!'s Justin Merickel, finance category manager, noting firms are instead earmarking funds from "traditional" marketing dollars. "I'm one of those...

Biometrics: What's Around the Bend? It's All On the Inside.: Use for retail customer applications remains slow, but security standards are pointing the way for rising adoption for internal and corporate treasury operations.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Despite its infancy and a low public profile, biometric auth-entication technology still has the potential to elevate into mainstream banking and payments use, says a new report from the Aite Group in Boston. Just don't expect it to come from...

BofA's New Toolbar Aims to Club Phishers.(Bank of America Corp.'s Kathie Claypool interviewed)(Interview)
February 1, 2006... Kathie Claypool svp, e-commerce group Bank of America Corp. Even though fear can sometimes trump reality, Bank of America's Kathie Claypool says combating the impression of Internet crime is of vital importance, especially given her...

Wealth Management: Taking the veil off ultra-wealth stealth: A group of cashed-out executives channel their disappointment in mega-money counseling into a solution private bankers can use for a rich client's query: How much am I worth?
February 1, 2006... It's a nice problem to have, but it's still a problem. The growing diversity of investments made by ultra-rich clients of private banks and top brokerages leave these Daddy Warbucks unsure of what they're worth at any given time. The...

Small Business: Heritage's Shopping Remote Capture: The Kansas community bank is allowing small business customers to deposit checks electronically and remotely, allowing the bank to stretch beyond its traditional footprint.
February 1, 2006... As complicated as the technology behind remote capture may be, Heritage Bank has found the selling point to its small business customers is as simple as a roadmap. "We have a heat and air conditioning customer who's saving 45 minutes per...

Search Engines: Out Of Banks' Plain View: Google, Yahoo! and MSN are trying to convince banks to ramp up search-engine advertising and optimization. So far, banks have not been big-time adopters.
February 1, 2006... Searching for "computers" on Google one January evening brought up a trove of hits on the usual suspects: Dell, Gateway, Apple and CNET. "Trucks" produced front-page links to Chevrolet and GMC, along with a sponsored tie-in to Nissan's bad-boy...

Click Fraud.(being faced by search engines)
February 1, 2006... If a financial institution puts down its per-click cash on paid search engine ads, is it always paying for potential customers? In some instances, the bank could instead be augmenting the unethical marketing strategy of a competitor that...

Security: Aberdeen Doles Out Web-Safety Business: Years of acquisitions created a network of systems that were making Internet security increasingly problematic. Aberdeen's answer? Tap a managed security provider.
February 1, 2006... Faced with systems spread among eight new investment businesses gained in as many years across Europe, Australia, Asia and the U.S., Simon Hicks, the group systems manager at Aberdeen Asset Management, had a huge task in front of him:...

Enhanced Mobility: Remote Access With Remote Upgrades: SGC Financial's putting financial functions on Blackberrys, without heavy IT infrastructure.(SGC Financial and Insurance Services using ClairAccess from ClairMail)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2006... Part of providing customer service outside branches and offices is the ability for reps and customers to quickly gain actionable account information, and SGC Financial and Insurance Services hopes the pathway to that information includes...

Developing Standards: IFX Gains Speed As Message Standard: Businesses are expanding and automating, and that means more systems integration. IFX may replace proprietary message formats with a simpler standard.(International Financial Exchange Forum)
February 1, 2006... Managing message formats has always been a challenge, given the traditionally proprietary nature of systems. And it's not getting any easier, as institutions embark on huge technology projects on a number of fronts. That's led many financial...

Treasury Services: If You Don't Build It, They Will Go: Sagging revenues and product maturity have convinced many institutions they can't justify cash management innovations. They'll be sorry; attrition may be the result.(LaSalle Bank Corp. (Chicago, Illinois)'s automating its cash management procedure)
February 1, 2006... Cash management services at ABN Amro's LaSalle Bank have been fairly robust for the last several years-the bank migrated clients of its DOS- and Windows-based products to a Web portal prior to Y2K-but management remains on the prowl for...

Data BPO Can End Restless Nights for CIOs.(Column)
February 1, 2006... Ask any CIO at a financial institution what keeps him or her up at night and you'll likely receive a variety of answers. But when you take those different answers down to their root cause, odds are you'll find they all lead to one thing: data....