Bank technology

Rogers Communications Inc., Canada's biggest wireless phone company, plans to start a bank, primarily focused on credit, payment and charge-card services, a filing with the Canadian government said.

American Express, which has been developing prepaid and digital payment options to expand its audience, has added yet another product: an online-only gift card.

As ATM operators consider upgrades, security is a priority, but not the top priority. Operators are most welcoming of any function that reduces cash replenishment and deposit collection costs. Security improvements are the next highest priority.

Mobile payments have attracted tons of buzz over the past year, but even with all the hype, the tough rules of business apply, particularly for those companies that can't find the right niche or powerful cheerleaders, or run afoul of stringent regulations.

Core banking purchases have stayed level, vendors systems are getting better and overall things are not as bad as they might seem.

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Eighty-five percent of U.K. consumers say they would recommend the technology, but 37% lack of retailer acceptance prevents them from using it more often.

Selco Credit Union will go from an outsourced relationship with VSoft to licensing and to in-house development to defray deployment costs, yet maintain control as the credit union expands ancillary services tied to check processing.

Catherine Palmieri, a veteran of Citigroup Inc. and CashEdge Inc., has been hired as chairman and chief executive officer of a unit of TIAA-CREF.

Zions, in its attempt to spot fraud, was gathering much more data than its technology could handle. While searching for a needle in a haystack, it was just piling on more hay.

BofI Holding Inc. in San Diego is planning to raise $10 million in a stock sale and intends to use the proceeds to support growth and to boost regulatory capital at its bank subsidiary, Bank of Internet USA.

Banks of all sizes are tackling changes in regulations such as RESPA. Bank of Billings is using loan documentation compliance software to meet the challenge.

Computer Services Inc. said Thursday that it completed its acquisition of Heit. It did not disclose the price of the deal, which it announced Aug. 10.

It's not just IBM — Oracle, SAS and SAP are among the large vendors making major investments in bank risk technology. Their reasons for doing so are sound.

Banks are using technology developed by search engines to cheaply sort through vast amounts of consumer data to identify potential fraud.

Capital Access Network puts the electronic payments system to work in a way that allows lenders to small- and medium-size businesses to access the daily cash flows of borrowers, and collect daily remittances from them. The platform gives lenders a window into their customers, and relies on payment processors to split the settlement of card transactions between the small business and its bank.

This acquisition expands IBM's business analytics capabilities in the financial services industry.

New web and mobile research says most banks are planning to develop downloadable mobile banking apps. But they aren't vigorously marketing the channel.

When it became clear that manually looking for potential money laundering wasn't working, Northwest Federal Credit Union turned to AML software.

Unsure of the efficacy of the various LEED ratings, Arvest is using its own branches as test bases, intentionally using lower certification levels as a baseline.