Bank technology

Discover's Pulse network is the latest offer person-to-person payment capabilities from Obopay. But widespread consumer demand seems to be lacking, as does a clear business case for financial institutions.

Strong fourth-quarter earnings for French terminal maker Ingenico signal good news for the payments industry, and likely for Europe's economy overall.

Yet another emerging payment scheme sees an opportunity to claw at the soft underbelly of legacy point-of-sale payment systems, this time putting carriers — not banks — in control of the payment accounts.

Looking to lengthen branch hours and increase transaction speed while containing staff costs, the Pittsburgh area bank is deploying new ATMs from NCR and uGenius that allow customers to speak to a live teller on screen.

Software lets small business set up mobile storefronts and process mobile payments.

IronKey announced its new Enterprise Service, an addition to its Trusted Access security suite.

The bank says lots of merchants won't take cards for very small purchases. So it's using chip and PIN, and aggregated stored value POS technology, to increase use of contactless mobile and card payments.

It's awards season and consulting firm Corporate Insight recently rolled out the proverbial red carpet for its tenth annual Bank Monitor Awards, which honor banks with gold, silver or bronze medals for their online banking features. The banks are compared to a baseline developed by the firm, not with each other, so more than one bank can qualify for each medal in each category. Bank of America led the pack with four gold medals.

Smartphones and social media are still relatively new frontiers for consumer banking, and they pose new risks.

Offering payment technology that supports game developers who want to write one app and run it on many platforms.

Provides device identity authentication as well as user authentication.

New banking tablet apps at Citigroup and Intuit are taking advantage of the wider screen and more layered relationships people have with the actual devices, and finding out along the way that a venue for games and novels is a great location for visually pleasing, research heavy financial services.

Facebook is becoming a payments contender a lot faster than it has led observers to believe. It has money transmitter licenses in at least 15 states, according to an American Banker analysis.

To calm consumer fears about having card account numbers stolen wirelessly, University of Pittsburgh has developed a way to switch contactless cards off automatically when they are not in use.

NCR announced Tuesday that Dollar Bank has chosen to install its APTRA Interactive Teller machines.

Misys Plc, the financial-software maker that agreed to merge with Swiss competitor Temenos Group AG, rose as much as 12 percent in London trading after drawing a rival bid from Vista Equity Partners.

IMGCAP(1)]

The shutdown of BitCoin's TradeHill, which exchanged digital currency for dollars and euros, underscores the regulatory and legal obstacles facing would-be disruptors in the payments business. Facebook is proceeding cautiously.

The credit union cooperative will greatly expand its ability to offer online and mobile bill payment technology to its thousands of members.

American Express is dangling another lure to hook its small-business cardholders on social media as a promotional channel: $100 worth of Twitter advertising.