To identify the fintech startups deserving of special recognition this year, a team of American Banker editors, BAI staff and consultant Jeanne Capachin debated the merits of self-nominees and companies we know. These are the ten that matter for 2015.

A Brooklyn, N.Y., startup wants to eliminate fees long hated by ATM customers and replace the lost income with revenue from ads that play on teller-machine screens. Yet questions have been raised about whether that is easier said than done.

Nacha CEO Janet Estep discusses how her organization polices bad actors on the automated clearing house network, why it doesn't single out specific merchant categories as risky, and how nudging the industry toward "push" payments will help.

Regulators are expecting financial institutions to provide detailed modeling of deposits and ever-greater documentation in the next round of stress tests, bankers and consultants say.

A proposal to improve the way online banking information is shared with data aggregators has sparked a debate over a decades-old practice.

Soltra Edge promises to let financial institutions react to cyberthreats in milliseconds — without human intervention — by translating bankers' warnings from plain English into a format that security software can read.

As banks struggle to make sense of their wealth of customer information, the burgeoning industry of online marketplace lending is finding novel ways to glean insights from unconventional data points.

While "double-dipping" fraud is reportedly rare, vendors want to stay ahead of a problem and help bankers feel comfortable raising deposit limits and expanding the user base for mobile deposit.

The bank's first chief data officer, A. Charles Thomas, is training his analytical eye on cross-selling opportunities, delivering instantaneous client data to employees and hiring techniques.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center is calling attention to the security risks and potential fixes to a common practice: consumers handing over online banking credentials to financial advice sites.

Apple's high-profile app could give mobile wallets the jump start they needed.

As banks move analytics closer to the front office, bankers need to change the way they think about the customer.

The transformation of brick-and-mortar offices into high-tech sales centers has become an urgent matter as consumers increasingly transact through digital alternatives, yet branches still generate more sales than any other channel.

Banks will leveraging the built-in camera, geolocation and identity features of phones and tablets in new and profitable ways.

Banks' security investments are rising dramatically as breaches grow more frequent and damaging.

Banks are purging paper to speed up processing like their business depends on it. The payoffs from these workflow improvements include faster processing, stronger loyalty, lower costs and higher revenue.

The bank's partnership with a hot payments startup comes as regulators nudge the industry to speed transactions and as some who initially resisted such calls start to embrace quicker settlement.

While banks almost universally offer mobile services, such as smartphone apps or mobile-friendly websites, their customers have been slow to use them, according to an American Banker/SourceMedia Research white paper.

Because of the conflicting messages from providers of mobile payments, consumers are not yet sold on the possibility that they can use apps to replace their plastic cards.

Total System Services is close to beginning tests of new products and merchant services, and is already seeing a benefit from last week's launch of Apple Pay. But in prepaid, a significant business for the processor, TSYS is still awaiting new rules from the government.