Bank Technology News articles from November 2008

Bank Technology News archives from November 2008

Crisis Woes Mean Less Focus on Innovation. Bad Timing.(Firing Line)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Holly Sraeel, Editor-in-Chief A major player in the industry recently remarked to me that his greatest concern was that the credit crisis would diminish innovation, something that would only worsen an already difficult market...

BILL PAY: Bill-Pay adoption Remains Elusive; Fidelity NIS, Jack Henry step up feature sets on bill-pay services, but research shows that consumers turn to billers when they want to make a payment fast.(Business Innovation)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest In the uphill struggle to gain both customers and revenue for banks' online bill-pay features, vendors continue to tweak their offerings with enhanced services. The latest example: Fidelity National Information Services...

MOBILE SECURITY: Reality or Just hype? Some warn that escalating mobile-phone malware threatens security, but others are more sanguine, saying it's not translating into actionable threats - at least not yet.(Business Innovation)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Maria Trombly The increasing functionality and numbers of mobile banking platforms, the growing sophistication of criminals, and the popularity of smart cell phones create the potential for mobile banking security issues, but...

WEB MARKETING: Getting Sightseers to Stick Around; Banks, in their drive for new deposits and revenue, are turning on chat and other interactive tools to convert Web-site passersby into customers.(Customer Tactics)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest Banks have heavily invested over the years in Web tools-chat, wizards, re-search comparisons, etc.-that help cross-sell new products and services to online customers. They also own interactive marketing budgets that...

Life After The Fall: The Keepers Of The Vision Carry On, And So Does Progress In The Industry.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Holly Sraeel You can sense it in the market: blame the technology for the failings in the financial industry, the billions and billions in writedowns and the collapse of confidence among the investing public. It should be so easy....

(1) KURT WOETZEL; Bank of New York Mellon, CIO.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Sisk From his perch as the CIO of The Bank of New York Mellon, an institution with $1.1 trillion in assets under management and $11.3 billion in revenues, Kurt Woetzel has run a gauntlet, orchestrating a complicated...

(2) FISERV; Jeff Yabuki, CEO.(7th Annual The Innovators)(Company overview)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Sisk Fiserv has been on an innovation tear over the last year through the acquisition of CheckFree and organic product development - and the company hasn't been afraid to pony up to do so. Fiserv paid $4.4 billion for...

(3) AVID MODJTABAI; Wells Fargo & Company, EVP and CIO.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Dumiak With a $2 billion budget at a huge institution in the technological heartland of America, one might think innovation comes easy to Avid Modjtabai: with those resources, it's there for taking. But merely throwing...

(4) BANK OF AMERICA.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Sisk Jeff Carter, the Bank of America executive heading the bank's Center for Future Banking - a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab - sounds every bit the evangelist when asked about his project. To visit the center, he...

(5) DREW SIEVERS.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest "Am I ahead of Tripp?" The game clock never expires for 2008 Innovator newcomer Drew Sievers. Even when the subject is a BTN ranking about his work and life, the chatty mFoundry CEO remembers to make a dig at Tripp...

(6) BARCLAYS; Sean Gilchrist, Director of Digital Banking.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner It's a beautiful thing when a plan comes together. For Sean Gilchrist, director of digital banking at Barclays, the UK bank's aggressive, industry-leading and highly visible investment in securing the online banking...

M&A: Consolidation Threatens IT Spending; With four of the nations' largest retail banks becoming two, expect a dose or two of bloodletting. Just when that happens is anybody's guess.(Leading Off)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest In Wells Fargo, Wachovia, JPMorgan Chase and Washington Mutual, the financial tech industry had four of its biggest customers, adding up to about 20 percent of North American retail bank IT spending a year, according to...

(7) GOLDMAN SACHS.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Anthony Malakian Much has changed at Goldman Sachs. In September, the 139-year-old investment bank became a Fed-regulated entity, and, just like that, Goldman is now the fourth-largest bank holding company in the nation. One...

(8) KEN CASEY; ATB Financial, EVP, Major Initiatives.(7th Annual The Innovators)(Company overview)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Dumiak The former CIO of this mid-size western Canadian bank knows he's got to live up to his title-major initiatives-because heaven knows he's got one on his hands. Casey's in charge of swapping out ATB Financial's core...

(9) MICHAEL LINDSEY; BancorpSouth, EVP, Head of Retail Banking.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest One might presume the events of the past few months would've taken the wind out of Michael Lindsey's sails. Lindsey, the industry's unlikely mobile evangelist as the head of retail banking at BancorpSouth, has...

(10) TIM DILLOW; BB&T, SVP.(7th Annual The Innovators)(Company overview)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Sisk Regional banks the size of BB&T, at $137 billion, are not usually a font of innovation. They tend to be followers, watching what the larger banks vet and then adopting those technologies themselves. But SVP Tim Dillow...

(11) BIT9; Parity 4.0, Whitelisting Software.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Maria Trombly Is it time to get out of the anti-virus arms race? If new security vendor Bit9, Inc. gets its way, banks may soon be able to eliminate virus scans altogether. Instead of trying to track every new virus and piece of...

(12) ARCHER TECHNOLOGIES; John Darbyshire, CEO.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Anthony Malakian There are numerous reasons why risk management is perplexing. But not least of which is that while everybody thinks it's a good idea to share information, nobody seems to want to step to the head of the line and...

(13) ANISH BHIMANI; JPMorgan Chase & Co., Managing Director, Risk & Security Management.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner There's a shift underway in the field of information security, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Anish Bhimani is at the heart of it. Fading fast is paradigm of a lifelong security practitioner who sees the issue of...

(14) M-COM.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest Arriving from its home base Down Under, M-Com is a potential up-ender with its 2008 launch into the U.S. The New Zealand-based mobile banking and payments platform vendor crashed the North American m-banking market...

(15) DIGITAL CHECK CORP. CheckXpress CX30, RDC.(7th Annual The Innovators)(Company overview)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Anthony Malakian The world of small business remote deposit capture has been a boon for those who have jumped on the wave. According to Celent, there are nearly 15 million small businesses in the market for an RDC solution, and...

(16) FRANK D'ANGELO; Metavante, Senior EVP.(7th Annual The Innovators)(Company overview)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Anthony Malakian Prior to Frank D'Angelo joining Metavante in 1997, the Milwaukee-based company made its name as a core-processor provider. It's been D'Angelo, the company's senior evp and president of payment solutions, who has...

NEWS MAKERS.(Leading Off)
November 1, 2008... Ebay Cashes in Now on Bill Me Later eBay, conceding its struggle to build out the Pay Later online credit service, forked over $945 million in cash and options to buy Bill Me Later and incorporate the service into its PayPal unit. Bill Me...

(17) JOAN KELLY; MasterCard, Group Executive.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Mark Brown Making mobile phone transactions easier, reaching the un-banked and eliminating the use of cash and checks are the major challenges for capturing credit card market share, says Joan Kelly. Having a payments...

(18) CITI'S SECURE AUTHORIZATION SERVICES; Gary Greenwald, Global Head, Capabilities, and Information Products, Global Transaction Services.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Sisk A powerful brake on industry's push to automate workflow and reap the significant savings possible through business process automation and elimination of paper, is the inability to verify the identify of the people...

(19) VIEWPOINTE.(7th Annual The Innovators)(Company overview)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Dumiak Consolidation and execution: those are the two stepping stones to technology dominance - at least until the next disruptive thing comes along. While Viewpointe can't be considered dominant, it's looking pretty strong...

(20) MEMENTO; Security 4.0.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Dumiak It was old-school bank thievery brought down by new-school technology in Gainesville as the tawdry headlines splashed across the local paper: WACHOVIA EMPLOYEE CHARGED WITH STEALING. A 29-year-old vault manager at...

(21) MIKE DUKE; Wachovia, VP, IT innovation.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner Nothing like selling cable TV door-to-door up and down the East Coast to teach you a little bit about people, and overcome any possible fear of putting yourself and your ideas on the line. Mike Duke, vp IT...

(22) CANOPY FINANCIAL; Vik Kashyap, CEO.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Mark Brown Canopy Financial is on a roll. Two years after introducing its Web-based financial processing service HealthDirect, 12 of the 25 top banks and healthcare plans in the U.S. use it to administer more than a million health...

(23) GDS LINK; Dataview 360, Risk Management.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Maria Trombly These are times that try bank balance sheets - and test their credit scoring abilities. But adapting to new economic realities can be difficult if the scoring formulas are hard-wired into a legacy database system. ...

(24) SOUNDBITE COMMUNICATIONS; Intelligent Communications Platform, Multi-Channel Communication.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner The average wireless subscriber sent 357 text messages per month in the second quarter of this year, and only made 204 cell phone calls, says Nielsen Mobile research. As text becomes the preferred method of contact...

(25) WOLTERS KLUWER; AML Virtuoso, AML Training Tool.(7th Annual The Innovators)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Michael Sisk Colonel Mustard. In the library. With the candlestick. As Raffi Festekjian, chief executive officer of the compliance analytics business at Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, watched his children play the game of...

ATM AND DEBIT FRAUD: New Methods to Bust Transaction-Level Fraud; Innovation in ATM- and debit-fraud detection could save millions.(Direct Access)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner A 40 percent increase in the amount of ATM and debit fraud detected could probably pay for the technology investment behind it pretty quickly, given that debit fraud in the U.S. is a $1 billion - and growing -...

MOBILE BANKING: Fiserv Teams With M-Com; Whither Firethorn? Firethorn was an early darling of the mobile banking space, but a strategy shift has the market looking for the triple play.(Leading Off)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest M-Com, an established New Zealand mobile banking and payments player, is quickly becoming a force in the U.S. The company, which had earlier this year migrated sales and marketing execs to Atlanta and landed its first...

MORTGAGES: Workout Analytics Taken to Loan Level; Banks, servicers and mortgage insurers have new choices in predictive assessment technologies to help salvage value from their distressed lending portfolios.(Shifting Gears)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Glen Fest Loss mitigation doesn't quite seem the right term for mortgage loan portfolio problems these days. How about "women and children first"? According to RealtyTrac, foreclosures went up 12 percent in September, and were...

RISK MANAGEMENT: Learning to Track Counterparty Risk; After Bear Stearns, counterparty risk practically became a household term. UMB Financial found a quick and efficient solution to the problem by adding on to an existing system.(Shifting Gears)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Maria Trombly The dramatic fashion in which Bear Stearns and others have gone down in flames brings to the fore issues like counterparty risk management that had previously been undercounted, or not scored at all. The current...

Capitalizing on Consumer Commerce.(Perspective)(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2008... Byline: James S. Greene My daughter just turned 10. Like many kids her age, she has been bitten by the "High School Musical" bug. So, I recently logged onto a popular virtual store to pick up the movie's DVD for her birthday. As I was...

IT Jobs Not in Jeopardy - for This Quarter.(Perspective)
November 1, 2008... Byline: David Foote With capital markets in tatters and investment banks disappearing, rampant consumer pessimism, and the national unemployment rate already at a five-year high, you might think that the financial sector's IT departments...

PROJECT PLANNING: Accounting Change to International Standard Looms Large for IT; Tension grows between senior IT execs who want a wait-and-see approach, and IT teams that have hundreds of systems to change.(Leading Off)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner The hottest topic in accounting this month is surely fair-value accounting, and whether all those toxic assets written down in the last few quarters might be shined up. But the bigger picture in accounting is the...

ONLINE INNOVATION: Getting Smarter, Getting More Social; The trends in online innovation once again threaten to disintermediate banks and their customers-unless bankers buy the competition first.(Plugged In)(Conference notes)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Rebecca Sausner You'd never have guessed that the market fell 700 points that day, that an eight percent drop in the Dow would be viewed as same-old, same-old by the more than 400 attendees at the second annual Finovate conference...

TECHIES.(Plugged In)(CheckFree Investment Services to appoint Steve Steinberg )(Duncan Johnston-Watt to leave Enigmatec Corp.)(Compushare to appoint Dwij Sharma )(Brief article)
November 1, 2008... Monitise Americas, a joint venture of UK-based Monitise and Metavante, named Soren Bested as COO, reporting to CEO Lisa Stanton. He will lead the team focused on product development and delivery. Fiserv's CheckFree Investment Services...

Message Board.(Plugged In)
November 1, 2008... "Sometimes you're a dog, then you're a hero. But you can't be a hero and a hero." Diane Offereins, evp and CTO, Discover, on how, when it comes to credit practices, you can't beat the competition in both down and up markets. "That's...

APPLICATION SECURITY: Sites Still Vulnerable; The latest statistics compiled by WhiteHat Security show that many financial institutions face severe application security vulnerabilities on their Web sites.(By The Numbers)
November 1, 2008... Byline: Anthony Malakian The good news is that three quarters of nearly 300 financial institutions haven't experienced an urgent security issue related to their Web sites in more than two years; the flip side is that close to 75 FIs have,...