Bank technology

Bank of the West has joined the early adopters of technology that lets customers pay bills by photographing them with their smartphones, making mobile bill payment easier and potentially reinforcing the customer-retention benefits of online bill pay.

Jack Hartings is a vocal proponent of reduced regulation for small banks. But the CEO of Peoples Bank in Ohio wants Washington to force other industries to share the burden of improving cybersecurity and cleaning up after breaches.

Mere days after disclosing that Google Inc. purchased Softcard's technology and intellectual property, the telcos' mobile wallet venture began publicly disclosing its plans to shut down.

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 from our social media platforms.

The Bank of England will research whether issuing a digital currency such as Bitcoin would help it achieve its monetary policy, financial stability and regulatory goals.

Prosper Marketplace, an online lender for consumer loans, has found a new source of referrals: community banks.

As you can guess from the title of his book, "BitCon: The Naked Truth About Bitcoin," author Jeffrey Robinson takes a caustic view of the Internet currency and payment system. He explains why he thinks Bitcoin's real-time, public ledger is insufficiently transparent for law enforcement in the first of three parts of a conversation with American Banker's Marc Hochstein.

Small banks don't have the budgets of large-bank competitors, but with nimbleness and creativity they are sometimes first out of the gate with innovative technology, from real-time payments to biometric authentication. We scoured the land for examples of tech-savvy community banks and chose the following 10 standouts.

Across the country, community banks are defying the stereotype of small institutions as technological laggards, sometimes introducing useful digital features well ahead of the better-resourced and purportedly savvier big banks.

Small banks don't have the budgets of large-bank competitors, but with nimbleness and creativity they are sometimes first out of the gate with innovative technology, from real-time payments to biometric authentication. We scoured the land for examples of tech-savvy community banks and chose the following 10 standouts.

On the acquisition trail, Minnesota's Frandsen Financial picked up nine legacy imaging systems. A new system and shared database unlocked many years' worth of archived checks and statements.

Getting employees used to using fingerprint scanners was the biggest challenge to Clear Lake Bank's biometrics project.

With a strong financial commitment and a goal of "building cool stuff," the Boston community bank hopes to continue to innovate.

A stable of in-house development talent helps Florida's C1 Financial create cutting-edge apps.

Using Splunk Cloud, Orrstown is trying to go beyond merely monitoring network traffic at a time when cyber threats keep mounting.

The Boston bank has become one of the few to let customers open accounts by snapping a photo of their driver's license.

An Illinois bank has pioneered the use of a mobile app that queues up ATM transactions.

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday formally signed off on the creation of a national intelligence center to share information about cyber threats.

The acquisitive Bank of North Carolina is using a new iPad and desktop app to help its frontline employees make product recommendations to customers.

The Connecticut lender overhauled its enterprise risk management system after becoming frustrated with inefficient spreadsheets.