Authentication

Banks will likely take a wait-and-see approach before connecting their apps to Siri, Apple's talking digital assistant. Such conservatism poses risks as consumers increasingly demand the latest digital features.

Many financial criminals are switching to a more sophisticated kind of identity theft in which they open accounts based on stolen identities, or on composites of information stolen from different people.

The Electronic Payments Coalition's arguments supporting Visa in its legal battle with Walmart are not based in fact.

Some days the ride-sharing app receives more than a million phishing emails — a stat to which large banks can relate. But after deploying common protocols and open-source software, Uber now rejects most bad emails.

The drumbeat of news about hackers stealing millions of dollars by gaming the Swift interbank messaging system should have been a wake-up call for banking executives, but it's unclear how many of them answered it. Is it too late for them to shore up their defenses?

By allowing commercial clients to authenticate via an eye scan, Wells Fargo is making a burdensome task simple. Secil Watson, head of wholesale Internet solutions, is pushing the bank to make digital banking easier for commercial clients.

In the ongoing melee between the two major players, strong authentication has been put on the backburner in favor of the respective economies of implementing chip card technology.

The San Francisco bank isn't interested in making splashy investments in technology. At an investor day event Tuesday, Wells executives said they would focus on taking incremental steps to reduce costs and improve customer experiences.

Everyone agrees that electronic transactions should be as safe as possible, but a PIN mandate will not prevent online or mobile fraud.

The distributed ledger technology has an answer for updating every core function of the antiquated financial system.