Bank Technology News articles from January 2006

Bank Technology News archives from January 2006

Online Fraud: Can Fear Cause Customers To Bolt From Banks?: Industry pros say calming fears can fight attrition.
January 1, 2006... Customers feel more threatened than ever by the mere thought of online fraud-including ID theft, phishing, pharming and keylogging-and some industry observers say consumers are getting ready to vote with their feet if they think their...

Trade Services: Primitive On Paper: Banks are bulking up IT to cash in on a growing trade-services market.
January 1, 2006... Free trade and globalization are modern concepts, but Beth Enslow needs a time machine to describe how the processes behind international trade works for most U.S. companies. Instead of common Web-based procurement and settlement services...

Mortgage Lending: Homefield's Surprise Prize: A project revealed an opportunity to expand into wholesale lending.(Homefield Financial)(Mortgage Cadence)
January 1, 2006... What started as a project to streamline the retail mortgage operation at Homefield Financial early last year abruptly changed course when executives realized they could use the vendor, Mortgage Cadence, to establish an entirely new line of...

Edit Index.
January 1, 2006... A Abby International 14 Aberdeen Group 21 AdminiSource 14 American Express 19 B BAI 16 ...

Better Info Security Driven By Regulatory Compliance.
January 1, 2006... The primary driver of information security is-surprise, surprise-regulatory compliance. A new survey by Ernst & Young cites the "sheer number of regulations and the consequences of not complying with them" as the reasons that information...

Data Breach Notification: States Differ On When To Sound The Alarm: Legislative action on how and when to sound the alarm when there's been an incident has lagged on the federal level, leading to a broad mix of state measures.
January 1, 2006... To all banks confronting disparate laws and regulations on data breach notification: the FDIC feels your pain. Not in sympathy, mind you, but empathy. The agency faced a data breach episode of its own earlier this year when it...

News Makers.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... PWC says the price of fraud is on the rise A PricewaterhouseCoopers corporate survey on global economic crime found that fraud costs the equivalent of $1.7 million (U.S.) per company, and totaled more than $2 billion over the last two...

Viruses And Fraud: Criminals Are Thinking Broader-and Globally: The number of attackers looking to victimize multiple firms simultaneously is growing-and European banks are the recent target. U.S. banks cannot rest easy.
January 1, 2006... A Trojan virus targeted 32 European banks in November, clearly demonstrating a shift in the tactics of Internet thieves from attacking a single financial institution to designing malware that preys on numerous institutions at once, says Amir...

Top Tech Deals.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... Number One Metavante inked an acquisition agreement with AdminiSource Corp., which will retain its brand and become an affiliate of Metavante. The move bolsters Metavante's position in printed and e-payment services. Number Two ...

The Job Landscape: Tech Workers Carrying A Heavier Workload: New business projects and security measures are putting more on the plates of corporate IT workers.
January 1, 2006... The bad news is technology workers have very full schedules, due to a much heavier workload than in the past. The good news is the workload is due at least in part to an improved business environment rather than layoffs. A recent Robert...

Techies.(Northern Trust named Nirup Krishnamurthy)(Wachovia named John McCabe as general manager)(BearingPoint appointed Joni Kahn)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... Northern Trust named Nirup Krishnamurthy evp and CTO. * Wachovia named John McCabe as general manager of its telephone and email channels. * BB&T named Bennett Bradley to lead its newly created Payments Services Division. * Russ Rausch joins...

Message Board.
January 1, 2006... "Think about it: Terrorists travel." Ariana-Michele Moore, Celent senior banking analyst, on concerns regarding security in the travel-card market. "It's old-school thinking." Jerry Silva, a TowerGroup analyst, on call-center...

Offshoring: Banks Aren't Fully Milking The Passage To India: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu says that while the number of institutions shipping jobs overseas is ballooning, most aren't producing optimum performance.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... More financial services companies across the globe are choosing to go offshore with service functions and operations, but many have yet to truly exploit the cost-savings and efficiency potential, according to a study by Deloitte Touche...

Segmentation is Bill-Pay's Magic Bullet.(Matt Lewis)(Interview)
January 1, 2006... Matt Lewis evp and general manager CheckFree Corp. About 11.4 million U.S. households are now using banks' online bill pay sites, according to Forrester Research. Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Generation X/Y users and bill-pay's...

Wholesale Mortgages: UBOC's Broker Road Becomes Automated: The lender's strategy is heavy on implementing electronic loan execution. The goal? Cutting cost and time-and eliminating paper from desks of customer-facing partners.
January 1, 2006... At Union Bank of California, removing logistical hoops from mortgage execution has jumped into high gear, with a strategy that includes adjusting the amount of paper documentation needed based on a specific loan's characteristics, with some...

Prepaid Cards: Mastercard Has Plastic, Will Travel: The credit card giant is joining the prepaid travelers-card fray, joining competitors American Express and Visa. Though still in its infancy, the market could surpass $7 billion in cards by 2010.
January 1, 2006... Until fairly recently, the travelers-check market was paper-based-a surprising trend, given the prevalence of debit cards in personal checking. Industry heavyweight American Express was the first to offer its travelers checks in plastic form,...

Call Center Service: Looking For A Handle To Reduce 'on Hold': Institutions like Provident Bank are using call routing and data mining technology to reduce inbound call duration and to improve overall service for customers.
January 1, 2006... The combination of consumers waiting on hold for a customer service rep, redialing when they get the wrong department, sifting through an endless series of IVR options and then hanging up in frustration can be a toxic mix when it comes to...

Outsourcing: BB&T Gets Help In Tapping New Markets: Corporate transactions are getting more technologically and geographically complex by the day, so jobbing out some of the work presented a simpler path to that market for BB&T.
January 1, 2006... When a multinational corporation's looking for a financial institution to handle payments or wire transfers for a newly launched Asian subsidiary, the last thing the company wants to hear is that its bank can't work on the same electronic...

Natural Selection.
January 1, 2006... The Internet boom was a big bang for Web banking technology vendors. The dot-com crash was the asteroid that blew up valuations. Five years later, Corillian CEO Alex Hart is among the pack of executives who are fighting for survival in a more...

User Glitches: Studying 'Intent' Is Rx For Service Pains: An institution's effort to tweak Web experience may not match what users really want. So many firms are turning to monitoring "intent" to forge the right trail to service upgrades.
January 1, 2006... She earns at least $150,000 a year. Unless she has a credit score lower than the family pet's, she's going to be worth as much as $2 million over the next 20 years after the bank approves her on-line application for a silver-level credit card....

Health Savings Accounts: HSAs Interest FIs, If Not Consumers: So far, consumer adoption hasn't been as robust as many hoped. But that hasn't stopped financial firms and technology companies from pursuing business in the sector.(Health savings accounts)
January 1, 2006... Health savings accounts are not yet popular with consumers. As many as a third of employers offering them aren't coughing up contributions, and only a few companies are overwhelmingly positive they'll reduce health-benefits costs. The progress...

ID Security: Badger CU Easily Verifies User Ids The University Of Wisconsin Credit: Union has rolled out a program that authenticates with little effort.
January 1, 2006... The University of Wisconsin Credit Union is tackling the sticky problem of providing two-factor authentication without unduly burdening users by using ID software that requires scant effort from users. The $780 million CU is piloting...

A Sustainable 'Ecosystem' Can Drive E-Payments.
January 1, 2006... Why manage payments migration? Three distinct trends are converging to push banks to act now. First, consumer-payments behavior, facilitated by banks responding to the Check 21 Act, has accelerated toward electronic payments such as ACH, credit...