Bank technology

Jeff Stiefler, the former president of American Express Co., has been named the chairman of inQ Inc., an Agoura Hills, Calif., provider of online management software.

The table lists daily composite stock prices at 4 PM (unless otherwise noted) as measured by market capitalization.

Large banks are establishing direct payment connections with trading partners to provide faster and cheaper settlement for automated clearing house transactions, and the move could raise costs for smaller institutions.

About half of large businesses are planning to reduce their use of checks in favor of commercial payment cards, according to a study released Thursday by Visa Inc.

MasterCard Inc. is using fraud detection software from Nice Systems Ltd.'s Actimize unit to evaluate debit and automated teller machine transactions.

Diebold Inc. raised its full-year profit outlook late Tuesday and said it has caught up on its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A new frontier in asset custody may be holding the cash of fantasy sports leagues.

Synovus Financial Corp. is using check scanners as a loss leader in some of its local markets to retain the depositary business of its commercial clients, executives said.

After a delay of more than a year, Intuit Inc. has unveiled an online banking and aggregation system that it says will dramatically improve the way people manage finances online and increase its share among consumers and small businesses, for which its financial applications were once one of the only options available.

The table lists daily composite stock prices at 4 PM (unless otherwise noted) as measured by market capitalization.

CashEdge Inc. says it would not have been comfortable offering its new service that lets individuals send each other payments through online banking sites if it had not made parallel advances in fraud detection.

Shares of Total System Services Inc. fell Friday after a stock downgrade prompted by the Columbus Ga., company's exposure to the Washington Mutual Inc. failure.

The Lubbock, Tex., community banking company City Bank was reported Thursday to be planning to offer mobile banking services using software from ClairMail Inc.

The St. John's, Antigua, payments technology company M2 Global Ltd. said Thursday that it had bought the prepaid debit card marketer First Pay Ltd.

Hewlett-Packard Co. in Palo Alto, Calif., has agreed to market payments software from Fidelity National Information Services Inc. to its banking clients.

Diebold Inc. has been granted seven patents for software that it says banks can use to deliver marketing messages through automated teller machines.