Bank technology

The search giant responded Wednesday to critics of its recently established ban on payday loan ads.

Community banks and credit unions have banded together to use their combined bargaining power to wrest better terms from what they regard as an oligopoly of core processing vendors.

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.

Instead of fighting to own customer data, banks need to embrace a new model: becoming personal data banks that help customers do more than manage money.

If banks don't weigh in on an appropriate privacy standard, they risk letting outside events spark onerous new regulations.

A growing number of marketplace lenders and other fintech companies say they no longer use FICO scores or are using them in a limited way. The open question is whether their alternative methods will be more effective.

Cybercriminals understand psychology just as much as they do technology. Here are steps your bank employees must take to mitigate the risk of phishing and other attacks.

WASHINGTON — Ripple Labs obtained a virtual currency license from the New York State Department of Financial Services on Monday, making it the fourth company with a BitLicense.

Visa's Digital Commerce App is allowing banks to develop their own mobile wallets. Many of its clients are larger community banks that may not otherwise have the resources to develop such a product internally.

Nonbanks now set the digital banking experience bar, but in less than a decade large banks will have swallowed them up and will have become digital financial superstores.

A vendor-created messaging network has attracted hundreds of community banks, many of which have decided it is easier to stop financial crime as a group.

Fintech companies are asking a federal regulator to create a specialized charter that would allow them to comply with federal rules instead of facing a state-by-state licensing framework.

Umpqua Holdings in Portland, Ore., has found a bank partner to join in its bid to bring new banking technologies to market.

The Bank of England is among the central banks exploring possible uses of blockchain technology. In a recent speech, a BOE official noted how it would open access to central banks beyond commercial banks. "Everyone – including individuals – would be able to hold such balances," he said.

American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and our social media platforms.

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.

Regulators need to start paying attention to "denial-of-system" attacks as one of the triggers that could bring down a systemically important institution.

Throw Cathy Bessant of Bank of America a question about a hot tech topic, and she's got answers. Blockchain? She loves it but is still waiting for its use case. Patents? The law is making us be aggressive. Swift? A call to action. And that's just the start.

Fintech firms and banks should collaborate on using alternative data sources to qualify more borrowers for small-dollar loans.

Without the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau setting specific debt collection guidelines — including what technology agencies can use — the industry will continue a practice that harms consumers: lawsuits.