Bank Technology News articles from November 2005

Bank Technology News archives from November 2005

Workforce Management: Union Planters Gets Productive And Saves $1M: It found a big chance to improve in the back office.
November 1, 2005... Tom Burge says everything looked fine. Three years ago, the senior vp of day one operations at Union Planters in Memphis (prior to its July 2004 acquisition by Regions) was certain his proofing operations were as streamlined as possible. ...

Mortgage Fraud: A Stealth Problem: Incidents, and their severity, are on the rise.
November 1, 2005... While Cyber security breaches grab the headlines, mortgage fraud continues to increase outside the spotlight. And it's doing so in a decidedly non-glitzy way-usually by someone blatantly lying on an application. The FBI said in a recent...

Dealing with Higher Loan Volumes: Lenders Find Ways To Lower the Boom: Union Bank of CA, Saxon, deal with big growth.
November 1, 2005... Technological change isn't necessarily feared in the mortgage industry, but new innovation is often not embraced until other financial products have reached almost full adoption. But the sheer pace of volume that's resulted from the real estate...

Edit Index.(Illustration)
November 1, 2005... A, B ABN Amro 16 Baker Hill 10 Bank of America 44 Bill Matrix 10 C CardSystems 20 Cardtronics ...

Follow VCs' Money...All the Way To India And China.(Venture capitalists )
November 1, 2005... The road to innovation used to be a straight shot to Silicon Valley, and it was paved with the investment dollars of venture capitalists. That's beginning to change in the VC community, with growing emphasis being placed on where...

M&As: IT Firms Expand to Woo, Wow Banking Clients: Recent deals enable vendors to add capabilities in an attempt to be a one-stop shop. Institutions are losing some choice, but simplifying relationships in return.
November 1, 2005... Looking to greatly expand their capabilities in financial services, many technology companies have been on a buying spree. This is good news for financial institutions looking to manage fewer vendor relationships, instead choosing to focus...

News Makers.
November 1, 2005... Pay By Touch Bids for cardsystems Two days after CardSystems buyout offer from CyberSource Corp. fell through, biometrics firm Pay By Touch announced its intention to buy the beleaguered processor and its 120,000 merchant accounts....

Top Tech Deals.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Number One Visa International and Oracle have entered into a partnership designed to streamline the expense management and reporting process by integrating Visa Commercial payment data with the Oracle E-Business Suite. The parties say the...

Safety and Customer Retention: Electronic Reminders Get New Life as a Stop Loss Measure: Banks such as Wells Fargo are finding ways to use the previously stagnant technology for security and retention purposes.
November 1, 2005... Electronic alerts, once viewed as a potential drag on account fees, are enjoying a renaissance of popularity with banks who are enthusiastically expanding use as a way to involve customers in account security, boost retention and drive them to...

The Aging of Hard Cash: Put Another Credit Card In the Nickelodeon: Plus: Visa survey reveals corporate cash managers are losing faith in their traditional job methods.
November 1, 2005... It wasn't that long ago when putting a quarter in the jukebox was as much a part of pop culture as putting an Elvis or Bill Hailey 45 on the turntable. The manufacturers of today's jukeboxes hope they have just as must appeal with recording...

Techies.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Wachovia Corp. hired Karen Curtin as director of network management for financial centers and ATMs. The Financial Services Technology Consortium appointed Jeffrey Pinckard of US Bank as co-chair of its business continuity standing...

Message Board.
November 1, 2005... "You have to be in the know in terms of hacking strategies." Jason James, vp of technology at Happy State Bank, on the need to know the capabilities of criminals who play in the electronic space. "There's not as much of a business case...

Branch Growth: How Intelligent Has the Building Boom Been?: Celent says the question of whether the building spike is a boon of innovative thought or folly depends on why the institutions are putting their stakes in the ground.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Check writing is declining, Web bank enrollment is surging- and banks are pouring money feverishly into new branches. Regardless of market saturation, flat-lining average deposits and mediocre ROI, research firm Celent reports financial...

Keeping Happy and Safe In the Texas Panhandle.(Jason James)(Interview)
November 1, 2005... Jason James VP of Technology Happy State Bank Jason James, Happy State Bank's vp of technology, says that his Northern Texas bank's grown from $100 million in assets to about $400 million in five years. That growth has brought new...

HSAs: Banks May need Plastic, Not paper: Providers dipping their toes into flexible spending and health savings accounts favor using cards instead of paper-intensive reimbursement methods.(Health Savings Accounts)
November 1, 2005... In a new report on issuer opportunities in the upcoming HSA "revolution," TowerGroup research says a growing number of medical providers and plan administrators are turning to card-based methods to replace unpopular and paperwork-intensive...

Safety for Startups: Great Florida's Great Big Leap into Compliance: The bank is growing fast, and that brings lots of regulatory, security and consumer and employee safety headaches.(Company Profile)
November 1, 2005... Great Florida Bank is a young bank in a big hurry. The Miami Lakes-based institution opened its lone branch in June 2004 with startup capital of $60 million. This October, the bank had grown to $700 million in assets and nine branches. COO...

Cards: Taking the Challenge Out of Cash-Back Programs: AmSouth's CheckCard Rewards debit-card reward program is winning early converts by keeping things simple for the customer.
November 1, 2005... When it comes to card reward programs, AmSouth Bank believes less is more. That's the attitude behind the Birmingham, AL-based bank's new consumer and business debit-card program, CheckCard Rewards. The product asks little of its users-and is...

Wholesale Banking: Tough Times Call for Convergence: Cutthroat competition to offer commoditized services is squeezing revenues, requiring new approaches that move far beyond the stock strategic realignments of the past.
November 1, 2005... Disjointed wholesale bank offerings are a problem at most banks, and one they've known about for years; it's been the object of numerous bank reorganizations, and it's still bedeviling them. As Dave Hunkele, vp of wholesale banking at S1 puts...

Payments: Looking forward, with a Nod to the Old: Banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Wachovia are all for electronic payments. But sources agree there's peril in forcing automation on customers. Finding the balance is key.
November 1, 2005... Numbers almost always tell the truth, and in the case of consumer payments, all the chatter is of the long-standing trend toward electronic transactions that's sure to continue for years to come. But there's also a danger in dragging consumers...

ATMs: Commerce Lobbies D.C. by Outsourcing: The New Jersey bank has hired Cardtronics to deploy and maintain cash machines-a way to make a quick score in a new market without the expense of branches.(Automated teller machines)
November 1, 2005... Commerce Bank has tried lots of different ways to woo customers when it's entered new markets-in New York it purchased TV time to tell people the time and temperature during station breaks. When it moved into D.C. this summer, it decided to...

Profitability: East Boston Deploys An Account Gauge.
November 1, 2005... By John Adams -- Banks are under lots of pressure to maximize profits from both customers and products, so East Boston Bank has rolled out a new system that allows it to produce statements that tell how profitable each account has been each...

The Innovators Issue.
November 1, 2005... Listening to what customers want and examining the most pressing issues are key drivers of innovation in financial services. Taken together, these inform the perspective of industry players whose vision determines not only what is possible, but...

World-Class Core Banking With TEMENOS.
November 1, 2005... The banking environment is experiencing tremendous change in the Caribbean. Mergers and acquisitions along with more sophisticated clients and their needs means that core banking systems are required to process greater volumes and produce more...

Caribbean Banks Welcome a Sea of New Systems: Regional integration and compliance are helping compel the region's banks to invest in new technologies.
November 1, 2005... Financial institutions in the Caribbean are typically small, lack deep pockets for major technology overhauls and are fragmented across the region's more than 7,000 islands and 25 territories. Yet, with tough Central Bank mandates, the desire...

Compliance and Business Continuity.
November 1, 2005... Technology to stem fraud and money laundering is gaining steam in the Caribbean, partly because many of the regions' banks have remote clients so must closely track customer behavior. "The Caribbean is a major hub for offshore banking so banks...

Fiserv: Leading Caribbean Financial Institutions in the 21st Century.
November 1, 2005... Fiserv CBS Worldwide is the largest provider of technology services to the Caribbean financial service industry, delivering long-term satisfaction to customers throughout the region. With years of rich experience in the Caribbean, Fiserv...

Money Management: PFM Lite's Starts To Get Heavier: Converging with bill pay and other personal cash-management capabilities, this new option seems like a slam dunk, but traction has been slow. That may be about to change.(Personal finance software)
November 1, 2005... Most users of Intuit Qui- cken or Microsoft Money never take the software out of first gear. According to Celent senior research analyst Dan Schatt, 70 percent of personal financial-management software consumers ignore the retirement,...

Security: Information Risk is Moving Up the Chain of Command: The need for chief information security officers is certain, though the role is still evolving by rebecca sausner.
November 1, 2005... The role of the chief information security officer (CISO) in financial services is evolving as the issue of security gains traction in the C-suite-and well it should, given that security breaches can have a noticeable impact on the business...

Opening Accounts: Nat City's Put a New School Twist On An Old Practice: In the manual world, banks have used single sign ups to facilitate multiple accounts for years. Now the Cleveland-based bank is bringing the idea on-line.
November 1, 2005... One of the Web's great promises has always been that it can shave time and effort from practices that used to take a long time to accomplish manually by electronically eliminating redundancy. National City hopes that promise can pay off in...

Network Storage: A Larger, Cheaper SAN for Small FIs: Over the past two years, smaller financial institutions have turned to a new network storage system working over IP protocols. Welcome to the world of iSCSI.
November 1, 2005... When kicking tires on network storage solutions two years ago, Orange County's Credit Union was like the longing child eyeballing the biggest, noisiest toy in the toy store display. Laura Thompson, vp of technical services and other...

Bad Data: Filling In the Blanks: Bank spending for improved quality is expected to grow up to 30 percent annually in the next two years.
November 1, 2005... When it comes to operational risk, bank executives do a lot of tossing and turning over customer data. A June 2004 survey from Cary, NC-based business analytics firm SAS stated financial institutions felt "collating sufficient volume of...

Automated Provisioning: Giving Workers a Digital Identity: Combining electronic employee ID and access, firms like Courion, Microsoft and IBM are hoping to trim both time and costs.
November 1, 2005... The basic principle behind banking-that customers seek a trustworthy place to keep their money-seems obvious. But according to Chris Sullivan, vp of customer solutions at Framingham, MA-based enterprise provisioning firm Courion Corp., many...

Automation Can Help Manage Mortgage Docs.
November 1, 2005... In any paper-intensive process, filing and record keeping are tedious tasks that often get postponed. The mortgage industry is no exception. The strict regulatory environment and importance of documents in the mortgage lending process makes...

Outsourcing Can Boost Data Management.
November 1, 2005... Big changes in the banking and financial services industry have followed deregulation, including acquisitions and consolidations, integration across state lines and a decline in the market share of small banks. As a result, banking systems...

Securing Web Apps Protects Data Behind Them.
November 1, 2005... The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, commonly known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, includes regulations that protect non-public personal information from disclosure by financial institutions. An interpretation of section 501(b) of GLB,...

To Catch Phish, Banks Need Better Bait.
November 1, 2005... As larger banking institutions have taken steps to protect against phishing schemes, fraudsters have begun to test the waters at smaller institutions. Phishing, like other forms of fraud, continues to evolve. What started in the early...

Learning to Live With the Reality Of Breach Risk.
November 1, 2005... Security breaches have become a fact of life. While it's obviously prudent for financial institutions to invest in even stronger security measures, achieving 100 percent total security is wishful thinking at best. This is due in part to the...