Mobile banking

U.S. Bank's new "Your Community" app aims to give consumers the scoop on local happenings, including news and merchant offers. It's the kind of idea that may finally give consumers a reason to share their location information with a bank.

Capital One Financial has purchased another digital design studio as it works to deepen its reach in Silicon Valley.

The new Amex Express Checkout service bears a passing resemblance to rival products like Visa Checkout, MasterPass and PayPal. But that similarity is only skin deep.

First National Bank of South Africa says the offering for its direct-deposit customers should give them one more disincentive to leave, beyond the usual hassles of switching financial institutions.

Community banks that try to serve too broad an array of customers will wind up losing out to larger competitors. They would do better to focus on one or two customer segments and familiarize themselves with those groups' specific habits and needs.

ING recently launched its InsideBusiness platform, which aims to allow corporate clients to do things like manage their global liquidity from anywhere in the world. The product, which will be expanded slowly, is part of the company's push to compete for commercial clients in the U.S.

PayPal has agreed to acquire Xoom for $890 million, as the consumer payments company looks to expand into the international remittances business.

Always-connected workers report feelings of guilt as well as privacy concerns around the use of mobile devices for personal matters at work, and vice versa. Bank CIOs are facing this challenge with software tools and mobile device management policies.

As manufacturers increasingly equip automobiles with Internet access, bankers and technologists are envisioning a day when cars could be used to make payments, inform risk underwriting and deliver targeted offers.

You'll find many disruptors in banking, but startups like Moven aren't among them. In essence, virtual banks simply dress up web storefronts to look like banks but offer one-tenth the services.

Apple realizes that retailers are uniquely well-positioned to encourage mobile payments adoption. That's why the company's decision to start accepting retailer loyalty cards on Apple Pay before launching a loyalty program of its own makes good sense.

Silicon Valley firms like Apple and Lending Club are happy to partner with banks — so long as they get to be the face of customer interactions. But banks may not easily give up that ground.

It's hard to get consumers and merchants to change their behaviors. But eventually the convenience and well-crafted incentives of mobile payments will prompt people to give up the plastic habit.

The 28-year-old Young Americans Bank was founded to teach kids to save, but now the bank is focused on showing its customers how to spend wisely. CEO Richard Martinez says tots still prefer paper statements, while tweens are getting their allowance via bill pay.

While other banks build fancy modern skyscrapers or look to shrink the size of their branches, Dollar Bank in Pittsburgh has poured its resources into restoring a 144-year-old building downtown. The bank says the building's fame gives it a marketing edge.

San Diego-based Mitek, a firm that specializes in capturing mobile data for customer acquisition, has acquired Dutch identity verification company IDchecker.

Each time Elavon, a payments-processing unit of U.S. Bancorp, launches a new product, its R&D lab steals a page from rock 'n' roll history to mark the occasion.

Global financial inclusion efforts have made big strides, but documentation requirements continue to hinder access to financial services, and women and the poor remain disproportionately underserved, according to the World Bank's annual study.

Todd Barnhart, head of retail banking at PNC Financial Services Group, discusses the conversion of branches to emphasize digital banking and why it's good to teach consumers to better manage their own accounts, even at the expense of fee revenue in the short term.

Banks' customer-satisfaction ratings are at a 10-year high, according to a new study by J.D. Power. The research firm identified the top-rated banks in each region, and found that the postmillennial generation has a thing for the megabanks.