Bank technology

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators are not moving fast enough on fintech, prompting Rep. Patrick McHenry to introduce a bill designed to give them a push.

JPMorgan Chase is shifting its IT organization to private and public cloud computing. The motivation is not just saving money — on the contrary, CIO Dana Deasy vows the IT budget will not shrink. Rather, the main goals are saving developers' time, redirecting resources away from basic infrastructure and toward innovation and working with fintech startups.

JPMorgan Chase has made an equity investment of an undisclosed size in InvestCloud, a startup that provides cloud-based software to the securities industry.

Banks continue to gather ID documents manually from would-be customers, even ones who sought to open accounts online. Bringing the manual process into the digital age is the goal of several startups.

Paper-based marketing — not digital communication — remains a more promising way to reach customers 50 and older, who also tend to be a bank's wealthiest client segment.

Swift is taking another step to protect the payment system following a multimillion-dollar cybertheft early in the year.

WASHINGTON — A Republican lawmaker is urging the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to consider issues related to virtual currency companies as the agency develops a fintech regulatory framework.

Fraud analytics, e-signatures, consent tools, artificial intelligence and notifications are all being floated as possible defenses against employees falsifying account openings and product sales.

Virtual currency advocates are hoping a recent surge of support in Congress can help them accomplish a long-sought goal of creating a safe harbor for companies that do not directly hold customers' funds.

Bankers may have a reputation for being old-school, but their rapidly growing digital-ad budgets are in step with the rest of the business world. Banks can both gather valuable demographic data from who clicks on their ads and better measure returns on their investments.

Banks can be more effective in connecting with customers by offering them personalized communications, rather than bombarding them with general sales pitches.

The surprise vote by the U.K. in June to leave the European Union may encourage fintech firms in London to expand across the pond. That was the case with Duco, a financial data management company, which recently added senior managers in New York. "Hiring talent in London was already hard on the tech side, and we think it's going to get even harder" says CEO Christian Nentwich. Duco was selected last year to participate in Accenture's Fintech Innovation Lab in London.

There's no tech solution in the world that can prevent cybersecurity attacks. To mitigate risks, however, banks can apply four controls after they first determine their risk tolerances.

Digital has been seen as the death knell of branches, but banks like JPMorgan, B of A and UMB are among those making the case that branches can still set banks apart from rivals provided they get leaner and offer customers a blend of tech support and financial expertise.

Online lenders have to make diversity efforts before they can be viewed as champions of economic justice, said Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., during a Friday panel on fintech held during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual legislative conference.

A federal regulatory plan detailing how to unwind a failing uninsured national bank provides some tantalizing clues for how the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency may craft a charter for fintech companies.

Mixed messaging on fin tech doesn't just emanate from the halls of Congress. It can also be found at the regulatory level as well.

Ripple, a provider of distributed ledger settlement technology, announced Thursday it has raised $55 million in Series B funding from several of the world's largest banks.

Regulations proposed by New York State regulators provide stricter and more specific guidance than banks have received from the federal agencies, especially in areas like data encryption and multifactor authentication.

Increasingly, our conversations about digital banking are only about technology. We must expand our dialogue to include ways to make digital banking empathetic.