Bank technology

ClearXchange has access to a majority of the market's online banking accounts as it takes on Venmo, but there's one thing it may not have.

With flooding in a big portion of its market, Iberiabank executives detail how technology is helping it stay open for business in a way that could not have happened a decade ago.

R3 CEV, a consortium of several of the largest global banks focused on blockchain, filed its first patent on Tuesday: a distributed ledger platform designed to manage financial agreements between regulated financial institutions.

Screen scraping is an out-of-date way to share transaction data with mobile apps and services. It's high time for banks to invest in OAuth, a protocol that lets customers access their financial data in a portal of their choosing and is secure.

Artificial intelligence has gotten good enough to do some of the more mundane tasks people perform at banks every day. Whether the trend will kill certain job categories entirely or make a lot of dull work more interesting, or both, is an open debate.

New specifications for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's common mortgage application unveiled Tuesday add data points and remove obsolete questions, as well as include additional capabilities to promote digital mortgage workflows.

Companies like Prosper have revolutionized the front end of the consumer lending experience, but they have not proven able to handle even minor financial bumps without running off the road.

Sure, there is an inherent business tension between banks' digital offerings and personal financial management software. However, the ground rules for making account data available to consumers for use in external software products and apps are in place and the so-called rivalry is overblown.

High-profile hacks such as the attack on the Swift messaging system highlight how banks depend on each other to have top-notch cybersecurity. "Everyone's security is at risk, because everyone is communicating with each other," says Andre McGregor, director of security at Tanium.

The Federal Reserve Board launched a Facebook page last week — and it went about as well as you would think. Social media experts faulted its approach as high-handed and tone-deaf, raising questions about what the central bank was trying to accomplish and about its commitment to social media.