Bank technology

It's a fact of life for bank vendors that drumming up business is a constant imperative, because sometimes - particularly after an intense merger-and-acquisition period, such as the one over the last year - customers will be lost to consolidation.

Corporate customers of Bank of America Corp.'s Global Treasury Services unit can now accept payments online or over the phone with a single system.

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For years, with increasingly regularity, banks have been relying on the Federal Reserve to whisk away their excess cash, weed out the worn bills, return the money to them when they need it - and, oh yes, pay them interest on it.

TCF National Bank has become the 20th financial institution member of Nacha, the electronic payments association.

PALISADES, N.Y. - As banks attempt to remove the walls between their businesses, International Business Machines Corp. is moving to retrain its employees to offer a greater breadth of expertise.

Fiserv Inc. has signed up three more banks to settle check transactions processed through the fledgling Fiserv Clearing Network, whose reach will expand to 19 states, mostly in the Midwest, the Southwest, and the West Coast.

It's been four years since the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act was signed into law, and to date few e-signature applications have moved much beyond the pilot stage.

Headlines:

ING Group NV of Amsterdam said Thursday that its Internet-based consumer banking operations in eight countries grew dramatically in the second quarter and were profitable in six of those countries.

InteliData Technologies Corp., a vendor of electronic bill payment and presentment technology and services, continued to have difficulty making sales in the second quarter and took a much larger hit to earnings.

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CheckFree Corp. said its second consecutive quarter of profitability according to generally accepted accounting principles validated its vision of electronic bill presentment driving online bill payment adoption.

eFunds Corp.’s revenue rose only modestly in the second quarter, but its profit almost doubled, because of cost-cutting and good results in three of its divisions.

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Some banks are using the flexibility of Internet technology to address a longtime quandary: Freebies and special offers attract new customers, but not necessarily profitable ones.