Rebecca Sausner

Forgetting for now the political fallout, the WikiLeaks affair has evolved into one with major business implications for the financial services industry.

FinTech 100: There should not be any question as to whether Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) BaNCS core processing solution can scale.

FinTech 100: Nomura Research Institute's presence in the United States is limited, but it is the number one information technology outsourcing and consulting company in Japan.

FinTech 100: Almost no part of banking has changed as dramatically in the past year as the credit card industry, but TSYS — which derives 60% of its revenue from card processing — has persevered.

In a ruling likely to displease many in the financial industry, the viability of business process patents was upheld in Monday's long-awaited United States Supreme Court ruling in the Bilski v. Kappos case.

U.S. Bancorp executives provided details about their mobile banking strategy, including plans to roll out person-to-person transfer and remote check-capture services this year.

Banks in the U.K. are battling fraudsters who have found a way to compromise out-of-band authentication — widely considered one of the strongest security formats.

Banks in the United Kingdom are battling fraudsters who have found a way to compromise out-of-band authentication — widely considered one of the strongest security formats.

In a year of upheaval, these women stood out for their leadership, their coolness under pressure, and their continued drive to innovate.

Cybersecurity leapt back into the national consciousness last month when a DDOS attacks that may or may not have originated in North Korea targeted Federal government Websites along with those of the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and The Washington Post. Watching such highly-trafficked - and presumably adequately-funded - government and private industry sites fall to such a rudimentary attack by a laggard technology nation begged for some reassurance, or at least acknowledgement of the situation from President Obama's newly appointed cyber security czar.

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The saying goes, "If something's not working, try something else." And clearly, when it comes to the financial services and retail industries' response to phishing, something's not working. Unique phishing attacks reported to the Anti-Phishing Working Group hover around 25,000 per month, with spikes as high as 38,000 in the last year. Somewhere around 150 brands are targeted each month. And Gartner estimates that 3.3 percent of the 124 million consumers who received a phishing email last year lost money because of the attack. Why aren't industry efforts—from consumer education, to diligent takedown, to spam filtering—putting a dent in the problem? "Because we haven't addressed it at the Internet level; it's like Band Aids," says Gartner analyst Avivah Litan.