John Adams

Of all the community banks that are executing core upgrades, few will undergo quite as vast a transformation as East Carolina Bank, where hardware assets that in some cases date to the Reagan Era are going into the cocoon and coming out as cutting-edge automation.

At T Bank, the big new IT project is more than a new deployment — it's a cross-enterprise method of using virtualization and outsourcing to enable a bunch of smaller IT projects.

Although consumers state a preference for receiving bank information through mobile text alerts, banks are still using older methods such as mass mail for much of their outbound communications with customers.

Interoperability among mobile-payments stakeholders is still a work in progress, says the Mobey Forum, which includes B of A, Nokia and others. True cooperation will be easier said than done.

Looking to lengthen branch hours and increase transaction speed while containing staff costs, the Pittsburgh area bank is deploying new ATMs from NCR and uGenius that allow customers to speak to a live teller on screen.

The bank says lots of merchants won't take cards for very small purchases. So it's using chip and PIN, and aggregated stored value POS technology, to increase use of contactless mobile and card payments.

New banking tablet apps at Citigroup and Intuit are taking advantage of the wider screen and more layered relationships people have with the actual devices, and finding out along the way that a venue for games and novels is a great location for visually pleasing, research heavy financial services.

The credit union cooperative will greatly expand its ability to offer online and mobile bill payment technology to its thousands of members.

In a pair of new ventures, Citigroup and Mint.com are tailoring personal financial management content to demographic segments — a relatively unused but emerging use of PFM.

As the financial services company's largely remote customer base begins to embrace smartphones as their primary, if not only, point of contact, the company is planning to alter its marketing and functional strategy for mobile in the year ahead.

While small banks already face a mobile banking adoption deficit to their larger competitors, some community institutions are still questioning the channel's safety.

Heavy on consumer members but light on business accounts, Desert Schools FCU is using a partner's high-tech portal as part of a way to boost share in the business market against larger banks.

The bank's iPad app is picking up lots of users and the bank is rapidly updating capabilities. Tracey Weber, the bank's head of internet and mobile banking for North America consumer banking, discusses how people use tablets differently than smartphones, and how that impacts what the bank puts in each venue.

A new product being pitched to financial institutions from startup SpringCoin uses account aggregation and personal financial management tools combined with credit counseling tips to offer people real-time advice on how to improve their financial performance.

Wells Fargo is ramping up its treasury management technology in an attempt to give worried international corporates a better handle on financial positions and concentrations of assets in local banks.

A bank's reputation is partly built on the company it keeps. At UBS, that's leading to a business intelligence-driven effort to ensure the ethical, environmental and legal integrity of its partners and clients.

Fresh off new funding from Morningstar and TD Fund, personal financial management startup HelloWallet is targeting corporations and plan sponsors with PFM tools that can be used by employees, an emerging use case that demonstrates the maturation of the PFM model.

First National Bank and Absa are claiming that a personal financial management startup called 22seven is unsafe and legally risky for consumers.

The bank's new IT testing includes a system called progressive automation, in which projects are tested much earlier in the development cycle-a move that should improve speed to market and error diagnosis.

For a smaller banks such as the $409 million-asset The Bank of Georgia, figuring out how to use social media safely and legally isn't easy.