Bank technology

New York may grant transitional licenses to small virtual-currency firms and startups to let them grow before facing the full burden of new regulation, the state's top financial watchdog said.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center is calling attention to the security risks and potential fixes to a common practice: consumers handing over online banking credentials to financial advice sites.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

Mobile money products are taking off in countries including Bangladesh, Kenya and Somaliland — and banks have a historic opportunity to get involved in this rapidly advancing market.

Green Dot announced Thursday that its revenue and net income rose in the third quarter as the firm found ways to earn more money from its base of 4.6 million active prepaid cards.

Apple's high-profile app could give mobile wallets the jump start they needed.

As banks move analytics closer to the front office, bankers need to change the way they think about the customer.

The transformation of brick-and-mortar offices into high-tech sales centers has become an urgent matter as consumers increasingly transact through digital alternatives, yet branches still generate more sales than any other channel.

Banks will leveraging the built-in camera, geolocation and identity features of phones and tablets in new and profitable ways.

Banks' security investments are rising dramatically as breaches grow more frequent and damaging.

Banks are purging paper to speed up processing like their business depends on it. The payoffs from these workflow improvements include faster processing, stronger loyalty, lower costs and higher revenue.

The bank's partnership with a hot payments startup comes as regulators nudge the industry to speed transactions and as some who initially resisted such calls start to embrace quicker settlement.

Jan Estep, president and CEO of Nacha, discusses the organization's revised proposal to speed transactions on the automated clearing house network and how it improves on the plan that member banks voted down two years ago.

Apple Pay scooped up one million payment cards in its first 72 hours, 60% of which were Visa cards, but MasterCard's chief executive still expressed optimism for the payment network's chances in the rapidly shifting mobile landscape.

CurrentC, the retailer-backed mobile-payment system touted as an alternative to Apple Inc.'s platform, was hacked during a test of the technology, resulting in some e-mail addresses being stolen over the past 36 hours.

About 60% of the first cards loaded onto Apple Pay are Visa cards, and the card network plans to build on this beginning in an aggressive mobile commerce strategy, according to CEO Charles Scharf.

While banks almost universally offer mobile services, such as smartphone apps or mobile-friendly websites, their customers have been slow to use them, according to an American Banker/SourceMedia Research white paper.

Because of the conflicting messages from providers of mobile payments, consumers are not yet sold on the possibility that they can use apps to replace their plastic cards.

Total System Services is close to beginning tests of new products and merchant services, and is already seeing a benefit from last week's launch of Apple Pay. But in prepaid, a significant business for the processor, TSYS is still awaiting new rules from the government.

Rather than wait until after a data breach to increase information-security investments, banks should put into place practices that help prevent cyberattacks in the first place.