Bank Technology News articles from June 2004

Bank Technology News archives from June 2004

Payments: EU Growth Beckons Tech Firms: Credit card, remittance companies line up.(European Union)
June 1, 2004... A collective yawn was stifled across the Western European banking sector last month when the 15-member European Union added 10 states and 75 million consumers, mostly from the former Eastern Bloc, to its growing girth. But not payments firms,...

Compensation: Banks Aim To Stem Huge Losses: Waste claims up to eight percent of incentive pay.(NWFCS's solution)
June 1, 2004... Firms are losing lots of money because incentive payments like bonuses and commissions are being calculated inaccurately by antiquated spreadsheets and old compensation models. A growing number are turning to technology that's popular in the...

Cash Management: Securing The Middle Market: With Microsoft, Bank One writes the book.
June 1, 2004... Plenty has been written about how banks ignore small businesses, obsessed as they are with keeping the biggest corporate clients happy, even though demands for better pricing of cash management services makes these big accounts less profitable....

Edit Index.(Illustration)
June 1, 2004... A ACH Solutions 28 ActivCard 42 AIG 28 Ambient 18 Axalto 38 B Bank Austria Creditanstalt 1 Bank One 28, 38 Bank of Almeda 51 Bank of America 34 ...

If You Want Customers To Stay, Don't Charge For Bill Pay.(Banking industry pricing policy)
June 1, 2004... The adage "the best things in life are free" couldn't apply more than for bankers toying with reinstating fees-eventually-for on-line bill payment. While many banks presently do not charge customers for on-line bill payment in a bid to...

Determining Roi: Rise Of The Phantom Branch: Wells Fargo uses branch simulation to determine when cash-dispenser deployment makes sense.(Return On Investment)
June 1, 2004... Wells Fargo saved nearly $3 million on a recent cash dispenser deployment project, largely because it predicted how the dispensers would perform and how many would actually be needed before deployment-without much of the piloting methods...

News Makers.(Banking Industry)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Something Smells Phishy At least 970,000 Americans have been defrauded by phishing attacks, at a cost of $1.2 billion to U.S. banks and credit-card issuers, shows a Gartner survey of 5,000 U.S. adults in April. And phishing is eroding...

Security: Risk Of Improper Disposal Of Computer Trash Grows: Wamu found out the hard way that special care is necessary when discarding software and hardware.
June 1, 2004... Between Washington Mutual getting blackmailed after selling computers with sensitive information and now another firm's ATM disk drive showing up on eBay, banks might need to think harder about how they trash their computers. Properly...

Top Tech Deals.(Banking Industry)
June 1, 2004... Numberone Metavante made a pair of acquisitions, buying Advanced Financial Solutions, a check- imaging provider, and NYCE, which Metavante says will give it access to the nation's second largest PIN-based debit network. Numbertwo ...

Mergers & Acquisitions: 'Virtual Data Rooms' Speed Up Deals: Digitizing deal data is proving a good way to reduce the time and expense of completing due diligence.
June 1, 2004... Major investment banks including the likes of Bank of America, PNC Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Suntrust and National City are shaving up to a month of due diligence on mergers and acquisitions by turning piles of data sheets into electronic files....

Population And GDP Of The New EU Member States.(Gross domestic product)(European Union)(Illustration)
June 1, 2004... Population GDP Per-head GDP as (in millions) (in % billions) % of EU Average Cyprus 0.7 13 80 Czech Republi 10.2 136 57 ...

Gadgets: New Squawk Egg Tracks The Dow Jones Average: The Ambient Orb turns color based on the market performance, one of its many uses.
June 1, 2004... People hungry for stock market information have tried just about everything to track how the market's doing at any given moment-looking at the pony express, flag signals, telegraphs, tickers and the mayor's own self-titled financial data and...

Techies.(Appointments)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2004... Technology veteran John Blakeney joined Kansas City-based Commerce Bank as CIO and svp, overseeing the information services and technologies division. Elizabeth Green joined specialty mortgage banker Paragon Financial as CIO. Mortgage...

Message Board.
June 1, 2004... "Some banks are starting to offer incentives to their lower paid employees." Ariana-Michele Moore, an analyst at Celent, on the increase in banks' whistleblower provisions to prevent fraud. "There's no physical dimension to...

On-line Bill Payment: Cost-benefit Ratio Still Not Clear Among Respondents: Less than half of banks surveyed were happy with their current bill-payment processor-and some may switch.
June 1, 2004... The big dilemma for banks when it comes to on-line bill payment is: Should it be free? And if so, for how long? The answers, according to a recently published report from Celent Communications, are difficult to ascertain, but given current...

Making Cyberspace A Safer Place to Roam: Do IT executives have enough on their plate? Allen thinks they need to take a second helping-and dig in.(Interview)
June 1, 2004... As CEO of BITS, the technology arm of the Financial Services Roundtable, Catherine Allen has her hands full wrestling with member concerns on cybersecurity, crisis management coordination, fraud reduction, identity theft, IT outsourcing,...

Institutional Custody: Union bank corrals E-Ballot functionality: Calls for greater transparency, more responsible mutual fund investing fuel demand for technologies supporting on-line proxy voting.
June 1, 2004... In a time when there's a high priority on regulatory compliance and calls for corporate transparency in mutual funds, pensions and other types of institutional investing, proxy voting is becoming much more complex. Some institutions, such as...

Treasury Management: Cfos Get A New Lens To Examine Risk: FIs are considering new technology that gives an enterprisewide assessment of risks, currency exposures and trade balances.
June 1, 2004... SunGard Treasury Management Systems is hoping to break into the financial services arena with AvantGard-Liquidity Express, a solution that overlays existing systems and is intended to give an enterprisewide aggregation of risks, exposures and...

Profitability: Two Banks Beef Up Operations With S1: Charter One and Valley National sought to improve call handling, cut paperwork and reduce training of customer-service reps.
June 1, 2004... While evidence mounts that banks are starting to loosen the purse strings a bit when it comes to technology investments, expectations for what that investment will yield are still high. To secure buy-in from top brass, those arguing for a major...

Managing Customer Growth: At Citizens' Core, A Better Processing System: OSI helps the growing community bank retain its local bank flavor in spite of growth spurts By David Ng.
June 1, 2004... One of the principal draws of community banks has always been the level of personalized service customers can expect when they walk into a branch-tellers who know your name, loan officers with your financial data at their fingertips, and small...

The General of BofA's Army: With a penchant for decisive action, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis has used multiple banking channels to boost deposits, retain customers and sidestep land mines. With an uncertain IT climate and the Fleet merger ahead, Lewis will once again be put to the test.
June 1, 2004... Anyone who's sat before a professor who uses the Socratic method learned at least one thing. Whether the class is American history, Asian literature or Eastern philosophy-you'd better be ready and alert at all times, because you never know when...

High Growth, On-line and Off.
June 1, 2004... BofA says a large part of its strategy, particularly related to electronic channels, is based on constantly polling consumers about their service and building a large archive of usable data. The results reveal a bank that's asking lots of the...

The Enemy Within: With employee fraud expected to cost financial services firms up to $2.4 billion in 2004, banks are getting serious about fighting back with a host of technologies that promise to help them unearth criminals lurking inside.
June 1, 2004... It's the dirtiest of a bank's dirty secrets, that pernicious and persistent threat that dare not speak its name: insider fraud. Bank managers may argue existing employees are more than trustworthy and that background checks ferret out dishonest...

Security: Firms Flirt With Out-of-band Authentication: Banks weigh whether this cumbersome technology is worth the bother for consumers, particularly for on-line banking.
June 1, 2004... With passwords going the way of the dodo bird, banks are weighing the next generation of technology: out-of-band authentication. It may be practically hacker-proof for e-commerce, but will Web-banking consumers find it practical? The...

On-line Currency Services: Direct Fx Pitches Service To Small Banks: The offering, which uses Bank of Ireland's network, provides choice in a woefully underserved market.(Direct Foreign Exchange Inc.)
June 1, 2004... Direct Foreign Exchange Inc. is trying to bring the lucrative, high-margin business of foreign exchange and currency services on-line to an underserved niche of small, regional and local community banks in the U.S. with the help of the Bank of...

On-line Banking: U.k.'s Old Guard Catching First Direct: The branchless bank had a big head start, but now the U.K.'s traditional banks are gaining ground fast.
June 1, 2004... First Direct, a pioneer of electronic banking in the U.K., is being squeezed between the Internet offerings of the mainstream British banks and the better rates offered by stand-alone 'Net banks and supermarket banks. But First Direct,...

Social Engineering: Plugging The Holes In Human Firewalls: The Intense School's one-week e-course helps banks make sure staffers are following security procedures.
June 1, 2004... The weakest link in a bank's security system is more likely to involve human failings than faulty firewalls. To protect against this, there is growing interest in a type of penetration testing known as "social engineering testing," or...

E-Mail Filters: Banks Building Fences Keep Out the Riff-Raff: Northern Trust and City National are using technology that offers flexibility in the fight against junk mail.
June 1, 2004... Financial executives on the front lines of battling spam are sounding a warning to executives who hold the purse strings-make sure any outsourced solutions are smartly custom-fit and strongly engineered to block unwanted messages. Sources...

Cash And Carry: Retail Atm Turns10, But Do Banks Care?: A decade ago, banks owned the lion's share of these machines, but today's their share is less than 50 percent.
June 1, 2004... The retail ATM-those nonbank-based cash-dispensing machines that beckon consumers from every corner-celebrates its 10th anniversary this month, but you won't see many banks at the birthday bash. "Initially, banks were the perfect match and...

Risk Management: Moody's Takes on Default Guesswork: RiskCalc 3.1 seeks 'absolute measure of risk' in middle market.
June 1, 2004... Moody's KMV expects its new 3.1 version of its popular RiskCalc product, which offers default-prediction technology focused on private middle-market companies, to become an industry standard, particularly among regulators. And, well, why not?...

Don't Overlook Quality When Devising Check-Image Exchange.
June 1, 2004... As the day for the enactment of Check 21 legislation draws near, and banks all over the U.S. finalize their plans for conducting image exchange, they must be careful not to overlook one critical factor: image quality. It is becoming...

The Offshoring Stampede is Fraught with Potential Pitfalls.
June 1, 2004... As the presidential election campaign heats up, the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries has ignited a spirited debate over its impact on the U.S. job market. While offshore staffing models have become standard operating procedure for...

From Unique to Universal: Speech Technology Goes Mainstream.
June 1, 2004... Before the Web, the interface for convenient, at-home customer service was the phone. It was the main, and sometimes only, lifeline to a customer's banker or broker. So it seemed a novelty in the early 1980s when he could get his bank balances...

Check 21 and ARC: Convergence or Divergence in Payments?
June 1, 2004... With pending changes to current payments strategies as Check 21 Act goes into effect on October 28, many organizations are left with the large question: Will Check 21 replace accounts-receivables conversion in the payment stream? This question...