Opinions

I myself am a HMDA wonk, but one with a rather love-hate relationship to the numbers. I love what they reveal, but hate the headaches that come from wrestling with data.

Before the Target breach, many merchants were apparently willing to delay or ignore the card networks' deadline for adopting EMV and ready to face the consequences. Now, even merchants who remain unsold on EMV as cost-effective security may view incorporating the technology as unavoidable.

Retail giant Target Corp.'s headache-inducing data breach brings to mind the 1982 Tylenol poisoning crisis—an event that drug maker Johnson & Johnson handled with such aplomb that it restored public confidence in its medicine, altered the way retailers handle product safety and established itself as the gold standard for crisis management.

The head of a small Atlanta credit union used a negative situation, the Target data breach's impact on her customers, to score PR points. More big banks should think and act this creatively in crises.

There are plenty of reasons why small banks may be reluctant to amp up their social media presence. But this week's bad weather illustrates how these platforms can provide a real value-add.

Google has made an attempt to bolster its mobile wallet by opening it to more consumers and incentivizing them to use it, but it is unlikely that these changes will help the in-store payment component.

International banks and other global private firms need to ensure that they do more than pay lip service to the privacy laws of sovereign states. In fact, the penalties for failure to comply with privacy laws in many countries can be very serious indeed.

Every couple weeks a new group of mainstream merchants and payments providers begins accepting Bitcoin, the popular and often controversial digital currency.

New technology from Apple and others can help banks create appointments, share offers, crowdsource customer service and identify their best customers, all in real time.

For most of the banking industry, the ability to generate real-time views and assessments of risk across a company – right down to the transaction level – remains dangerously elusive.