Penny Crosman

The addition of a personal finance app rounds out the loan and deposit-account offerings at the online lender Marcus.

Bank of America is investing heavily in videoconferencing at unstaffed branches, Citigroup is experimenting with gamification and Union Bank’s PurePoint Financial is going entirely paperless.

Dominic Venturo, chief innovation officer at U.S. Bank, shares his vision for digital banking ten years from now. It includes ambient computing – interconnected devices, machines and sensors that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people.

Applications can now be made on the bank's app or website, but closings will still be in person. With this move, BofA joins Quicken Loans, Lenda, SoFi and others offering a mostly digital mortgage. The trend is sure to continue.

AI in a car can be fatal. What could go wrong with AI in a bank? A new council established by BofA and Harvard hopes to minimize unintended consequences that could jeopardize consumers' financial well-being or discriminate against them.

The self-regulatory body says working with data aggregators increases risk of cyber fraud, unauthorized transactions and identity theft. But aggregators say other links in the information chain are more vulnerable.

Some speculate that the banks who do business with credit reporting agencies may be looking for alternatives after mounting concerns about their ability to keep information private. But breaking up is hard to do.

The software firm MonetaGo and three Indian factoring exchanges have launched a blockchain that can identify invoices that have already been financed.

Some fear that the removal of such data from individual credit reports could lead lenders to believe a consumer is a better bet than they really are.

Becoming a member of Hyperledger fits Ripple’s ideal of allowing different blockchains or distributed ledgers to communicate with each other.