Bank technology

DDoS attacks, ACH fraud, and account information theft are problems, but is it hyperbolic to talk about war — cyber war?

It's no secret that most people would prefer not to have their personal information displayed openly online for all the world to see (with the exception of prolific Facebook users). A recent Pew Research Center survey shows most consumers know that they leave large digital footprints and they go to considerable trouble to avoid being observed on the web. For the project, 1,002 consumers were interviewed by phone.

Cybercrimes targeting small business online-banking customers don't make the news too often, but the damage they inflict is devastating for banks and clients.

Banks have been under siege for about a year. An in-depth look at the main types of attacks, the "bad actors" and their motivations, and what banks are doing about it.

Four vendors own the U.S. core banking market. But others, mostly international vendors, are starting to creep in.

The financial services data company Markit has launched a messaging network, and eight large banks are among its first clients.

City National Bank customers in select cities will soon be able to withdraw cash from ATMs while leaving their debit cards at home, thanks to a pilot program by City National (CYN) and bank technology provider FIS.

As consumers increasingly transact over mobile phones and social networks, banks, payment networks and policy experts are rethinking the nature of consumers' digital identities.

Adobe Systems Inc., the biggest maker of graphic-design software, said hackers broke into its networks and stole personal data on 2.9 million customers and source code for popular products including Acrobat and ColdFusion.

Citigroup Inc. was fined $30 million by Massachusetts after an analyst at the bank's global markets unit gave institutional clients confidential information on an Apple Inc. supplier ahead of other investors.

Talk about living your subject matter. Heather Schlegel wants to make a documentary about the where the payment system is headed, and she's using a crow-funding website to raise funds for it.

WSFS Financial in Wilmington, Del., holds the picture contest to engage customers and employees while highlighting improvements to its mobile banking.

For the first time in the history of a survey conducted by the American Bankers Association, mobile banking outranked telephones and snail mail in popularity.

Signaling yet another example of how banks are using cloud services, National Australia Bank (NAB) has converted its website to Amazon Web Services' public cloud.

Verizon's forthcoming Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage will offer guaranteed performance levels and variable pricing.

Social Money announced Thursday an API that lets PFM and prepaid partners introduce savings accounts and goal tools to their digital customers. Already, Social Money partners with The Bancorp to resell its technology to other businesses.

Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc. and American Express Co., the biggest U.S. payment networks, proposed using "digital tokens" instead of account numbers for processing purchases made online and with mobile devices.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has hired the head of a nonprofit that promotes business in developing countries to lead its charitable programs.

The operator of the "Silk Road Hidden Website" was charged with running a "sprawling black-market bazaar" where anonymous users paid Bitcoin digital currency for illegal drugs and phony identification documents.

U.S. regulators and law enforcement officials expect risk-based anti-laundering and sanctions programs — no small feat for digital-currency firms, which generally do not know their customers' counterparties.