Bank Technology News articles from May 2009

Bank Technology News archives from May 2009

M&A: All the Core Action's With The Vendors; Fidelity will buy Metavante, but banks don't have the bandwidth or resources for new cores now.(Leading Off)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner The core banking market was shaken up dramatically last month when Fidelity National Information Services announced plans to buy Metavante, increasing the likelihood of further vendor consolidation at a time when...

ENTERPRISE: FICO Ups Its Sustainability Score; The data analytics firm's wide-ranging green initiatives save millions of dollars in energy and paper use.(Going Green)
May 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams Fair, Isaac Corp has caught sustaina bility fever in a big way, and in doing so is producing a blueprint for self-funding energy and paper use reduction that's already catching the eye of the financial institutions that...

MARKET OPPORTUNITY: Corporate Treasury Market is Ripe; Is now the time for banks to leapfrog vendors by offering their own Web-based products?(By The Numbers)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner It makes total sense for a corporate banking customer to buy treasury workstation functionality from its bank - who would be better at helping determine end-of-day cash positions and other cash management questions?...

MORTGAGE: Slow Down and Smell the Accountability; Back to basics loan processing means thorough income, employment and ID verification are now a part of almost all loan approvals. Web-based data aggregation tools can help out, but slower closings are inevitable.(Business Innovation)
May 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams There's no better sign of how the mortgage market's atmosphere has changed than what potential borrowers are hearing from Ameritrust. "We let them know up front that we are trying to close loans less quickly so all...

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: New Branch Tech "Surfaces"; Analysts warn that branch profitability is waning, but new technologies that promise to increase customer trust and interaction, and reduce wait time, may help.(Customer Tactics)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Michael Sisk It looks like something out of a sci-fi film, consumers and bank salespeople conducting business by swiping their hands across a table-top screen. In reality, the Surface technology is Microsoft's latest foray into...

Facebook and Banks: Not Really "Friends"; Banks have a lot to learn about doing business on Facebook. The most important lesson is that most business may not be possible.(Cover Story/Social Media)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Michael Sisk Facebook's 200 million user community is a tantalizing customer pool, and many banks have been quick to jump into the social networking community by setting up their own Facebook pages. But despite its vast size and...

CASE STUDY: The Learning Curve; Carolina Collegiate credit union has thousands of student members. Will they learn to love the CU on Facebook?(Cover Story/Social Media)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Michael Sisk Carolina Collegiate Federal Credit Union based in Columbia, SC may have the best possible customer base for a financial institution hoping to reach customers via Facebook. The University of South Carolina is the credit...

Some Say Twitter's for the Birds... But the latest social networking craze may have a solid long-term marketing or customer service case for banks that use it well.(Cover Story/Social Media)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Twitter is one of those all-or-nothing kinds of subjects. People love it or don't get it at all. Either way, there's no escaping the deluge of media attention the social networking platform has attracted of late,...

CASE STUDY: BofA: Best Bank On Twitter; It may not scale, but BofA is making great use of Twitter for customer service.(Cover Story/Social Media)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner The best bank on Twitter these days has to be Bank of America, which has parked its Twitter strategy not in the realm of Web 2.0 or social networking strategy but with Holly Hastings, the national customer...

CRM: Keep 'Em Coming Back; Consumer onboarding's never been more important, or automated.(Customer Tactics)
May 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams First Tennessee's bridge to the second decade of the 21st century is an automated connection between account opening and email platforms that enable onboarding tactics with results that blow traditional retention rates...

The Strongest Link; An emerging force for talent recruitment and networking, sites like LinkedIn haven't left headhunters and traditional Websites in the dust yet, but stay tuned.(Cover Story/Social Media)
May 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams Being active is better than being passive 99.9 percent of the time, and that makes LinkedIn a natural fit for talent scouting. Because of the nature of participating bank alumni organizations, special interest groups and...

PEER REVIEW: What the Cool Kids Are Investing In; Zeroing in on Mint and Geezeo's turf, ING's deployed a Web portal that allows consumers to see how similar people are managing their investments.(Direct Access)
May 1, 2009... Byline: John Adams It works for fashion and the fragile ecosystem that guides teenage social structure, but ING's about to find out if peer pressure also enables informed, contextualized personal finance decisions. "Peer comparison can...

DISASTER RECOVERY: Dress Rehearsals Reveal Holes; Full-scale disaster simulations aren't required, but this down-and-dirty approach to continuity testing is the best way to find unanticipated holes paper-perfect plans.(Shifting Gears)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Robin Arnfield When Farmington Savings Bank (FSB) staged a mock disaster affecting a branch, back office operations, as well as accounting and lending, the post-mortem on its disaster recovery plan revealed weaknesses the plans'...

PAYMENTS: Grappling With ACH Fraud; The percentage of fraudulent ACH transactions is low, but volumes are exploding-and that's cause for worry.(Direct Access)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Michael Sisk The number of paper checks being converted to ACH transactions is growing exponentially, making the channel more enticing to thieves and increasing instances of fraud. It's a problem that's starting to get the...

MOBILE PAYMENTS: Which Comes First, Stickers or The Phones? Frustrated that mobile handset makers aren't keeping pace, card companies are slapping NFC stickers on phones to jump-start mobile payments.(Leading Off)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Steve Bills Card companies are betting that if they stimulate consumer demand for mobile payments, it will spur the phone networks and manufacturers to move faster on improving the technology. First Data Corp. plans to begin...

NEWS MAKERS.(Leading Off)
May 1, 2009... FSTC Gets into Biometrics The Financial Services Technology Consortium has launched an initiative aimed at helping the financial industry understand how biometrics can be used to combat fraud. Specifically, biometrics' role in...

THE ECONOMY: The Financial IT World "After" the Crisis; Everything's going to be outsourced. Until it's not.(Plugged In)
May 1, 2009... Byline: Rebecca Sausner The idea that financial services will be completely different "after" - the recession, the crisis, the fall of banking as we know it - is oft repeated. "Already the industry has changed fundamentally, and forever,"...

TECHIES.(Plugged In)
May 1, 2009... UBS hired Ulrich Korner to lead a major restructuring drive that will include the consolidation of group-wide IT functions at the bank. Korner spent a decade at Credit Suisse, where was CFO and COO. Fidelity National's purchase of Metavante...