Bank Technology News articles from March 2009

Bank Technology News archives from March 2009

BIG BREACH: Heartland's Lonely Quest For Reform; Some agree with its call for industrywide prevention, but there's silence from major players.(Leading Off)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Heartland Payment Systems CEO Robert Carr has likened his company's massive data breach to the Tylenol moment when product contamination led to an overhaul in packaging safety. It's likely Carr has had a few Tylenol...

SUSTAINABILITY RISK: Spotting Bad Environmental Bets; The IDB's turning to automation to mitigate many of the same sustainability risks facing commercial banks. The takeaway is environmental risk and economic risk go hand in hand.(Going Green)
March 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams The Inter-American Development Bank may not swim in the exact same pool as commercial banks, but this should still sound familiar: "It's incredible how much time you can waste not having access to information,...

Green Initiatives.(Going Green)
March 1, 2009... The Largest Desktop Virtualization Ever Brazil will convert 35,680 PCs into 356,800 school computers in a desktop virtualization project being billed as the world's largest ever virtual desktop deployment and the largest ever Linux...

SmartyPig Goes Global; The Web 2.0 banking application gives consumers the ability to save money for a specific goal - just in time.(Interview)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Jon Gaskell and Mike Ferrari worked for 16 months to develop SmartyPig as an application enabling consumers to save for a particular goal and let others contribute to the account. It's partnered with Iowa-based West...

MORTGAGE: Pumping More Value Into e-Valuations; AVMs are gearing up for the new mortgage reality by adding macro economic data to comparable surrounding sales as part of the predictive mix. That might result in some financially healthy borrowers getting shut out of the market.(Business Innovation)
March 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams The mortgage tech industry's been working feverishly to freshen the data cocktails used by automated property valuation models (AVMs) to meet industry demands for greater predictive acumen in an uncertain market. But...

Top Community Bank IT Initiatives.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Saving time and money were primary drivers of community bank IT spending last year, as many of the country's smallest banks got squeezed; not typically from securitization woes, but from the housing market freefall...

BANK OF AMERICAN FORK, American Fork, UT; CiO: Richard Beard, Project: Automated Training.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams An institutional focus on saving money and shaving overhead's no excuse for not following the law, and that's brought innovation into the compliance teaching shop at Bank of American Fork. The bank's deployed an...

BANK OF TENNESSEE, Kingsport, TN; CiO: Phillip Haumiller, Project: Outsourced Print and e-Statement Delivery.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Despite the fact that it handled its own printing, the Bank of Tennessee's statements had not materially changed since the bank was founded in 1974. And through its services division, BT Services, the bank handles...

NORTH SALEM STATE BANK, North Salem, IN; CTO: Chad Remsburg, Project: Managed Network Infrastructure.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner What started out as a cost-saving venture - the implementation of a VoIP telephony system - was the last straw on an expensive network infrastructure quagmire that North Salem State Bank found only an outsourced...

T BANK, Dallas, TX; CTO: Thad Hutcheson, Project: Centralized Communications Portal.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams Whether you're an auditor in the midst of an exam, a loan officer perusing lending documents, a board member reviewing meeting notes or new employee studying bank policies, at T Bank you're going to the exact same...

THE BUSINESS BANK, Appleton, WI; CTO: Peter Horvath, Project: Server Virtualization and Disaster Recovery.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Dealing with server sprawl is one thing; relying on servers that had been underwater in a flooded building, dried out and put back to use, raises a bank's IT risk to a whole 'nother category. When Peter Horvath was...

CARDS: Users Are Now In Control; MasterCard's inControl ups the stakes in the user-driven card preferences race.(Customer Tactics)
March 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams Consumer-driven usage controls are a card firm's version of Bo Jackson - a multi-sport player that can battle fraud, boost loyalty and enable sound personal debt management. In this game, Orbiscom is MasterCard's...

WEB 2.0: A Simple Concept, A Complex Solution; With BofA and Wells on board, more banks may consider blogs, a form with as many approaches as benefits. But watch out for the bots.(Direct Access)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Chris Costanzo Blogging seems easy - a 14-year-old with Internet access can do it. But the vastly different approaches taken by financial services pioneers suggest a path to successful public interactivity that's complex, diverse...

It's not all happy....(Direct Access)
March 1, 2009... Sample Wells Fargo blog comments in response to news about an employee reward trip to Vegas, and its subsequent cancellation. Posted by: Juli February 4, 2009 10:06 AM What the heck Anne Marie? I was just going to congratulate...

CORPORATE PAYMENTS: Unlocking The Lockbox Business; More institutions are turning to lockbox solutions to increase efficiencies and post cash faster. Metavante and Wausau hope to take advantage.
March 1, 2009... Byline: Michael Sisk Despite growing adoption of electronic billpay by consumers, most businesses still pay the old-fashioned way: paper - and it's likely to stay that way for some time. But what makes B2B checks so unwieldy isn't just the...

It's Time For Check Fraud Detection 2.0.(Perspective)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Mike Fenton Despite a steady decline in the annual number of checks written over the past few years, check fraud continues to be a major concern for banks, financial institutions, and retailers, regardless of size or location. It...

ONLINE BANKING: Gen Y's Tastes in Internet Delivery; Online banking has high utilization rates among the millennial generation, but Web 2.0 functionality isn't a priority just yet.(By The Numbers)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner No surprise to hear that the "millenial" generation - some 80 million Americans currently ages 18-30 - are hooked on their technology tools, with nearly 90 percent of 1,600 surveyed globally by Javelin Strategy &...

PAYMENTS: A New Force Down Under; NAB's partnership with provider Distra will enable a global sales push.
March 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams National Australia Bank's plotting a global effort to offer payments products to other institutions during a particularly rough time to pry new capital from IT shops that already have a lot of payments firms to choose...

A Call for Leadership: CEOs and CIOs Must Step Up on Payments and Risk.(Firing Line)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner, Editor-in-Chief IF ever Banking needed strong leaders, it's now. The industry has been forced to face the undeniable truth that its own innovative ways to extend more credit and make more money - and consumers' and...

RISK MANAGEMENT: The Language Of Risk; IBM wants global standards for op risk reporting via XBRL, which could make it safer to go back in the CDS waters.(Leading Off)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner There's little question the financial industry needs a way to accurately gauge, predict and price operational, market, credit and even systemic risk, for regulatory and institutional use and for the accurate pricing...

News Makers.(Leading Off)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Government Housing for Ex FNMA Worker? A Fannie Mae contractor who was fired last fall for writing erroneous code has been charged with planting a virus designed to destroy all of the data on the GSE's servers, a plot that could have cost...

MARKET SNAPSHOT: GRC Vendors Merge, Bank Demands Surge; The space is hot but fraught with a fast pace of mergers and acquisitions. Banks should be wary of vendors that are "For Sale.".(Plugged In)
March 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner There are lots of business truisms bandied about these days in the Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) technology market: eat or be eaten; get big, get niche or get out; and GRC is dead. Archer Technologies,...

Techies.(Guaranty Bank N.A. to appoint John Petry as its new CIO)(NCB Corp. to promote Frankin D. Fasano as CIO)(NewOak Capital has appointed Patrick Mooney as new COO)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Austin-based Guaranty Bank has named John Petry as its new CIO. Petry was formerly evp and CIO for TD Banknorth. ClairMail named Pete Daffern as its new CEO. Daffern has more than 20 years experience in the financial technology space,...

Message Board.(Plugged In)
March 1, 2009... "I think it will be a catalyst for change, all the ingredients are lined up. But it will be slow change." Avivah Litan, Gartner vp and analyst on the role the Heartland Payment Systems data breach will play in increasing security in the...