Bank technology

There is now a gold-rush mentality among developers looking to produce the next hit mobile-payment application. The latest example was a "Pitch That App!" that drew more than 100 participants.

Paying for fruits or vegetables with a wooden token might seem like a throwback to Colonial America, but in some cases it is proving more practical than modern electronic payments systems.

Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. closed some of their card customers' accounts this week, citing data breaches at unidentified retailers. It was not immediately clear if both banks' customers were affected by a security failure at the same merchant.

The more Needham Bank encourages employees to access systems remotely via mobile devices, the more it has to tighten security. The bank is building what it calls a private cloud to get the benefits of outsourcing without losing ownership of its data.

The screen-card maker Dynamics is improving its production capabilities through the purchase of a facility in Pittsburgh, Pa. Dynamics makes cards with digital screens and rewritable magnetic stripes

A number of companies that depend on consumers wanting to turn off paper statements may run into difficulty as banks report their paper-suppression efforts are moving backwards.

Secure Vault Payments, which lets consumers spend at online merchants without disclosing their bank account details, is expanding into more financial institutions through a deal with the vendor Jwaala.

The recent turmoil in the financial markets has not yet altered banks' immediate technology spending, Jack Henry & Associates says, but it "adds to concerns" for their long-term plans.

Web fields were turning into mine fields for Dollar Bank's customers, who were getting trapped by a simple navigation error that was cutting off their online banking sessions.

Technology vendor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. on Tuesday reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings that beat analysts' estimates and reiterated its confidence in banks' spending appetite despite recent upheaval in the financial markets.

The Onion's reference to the world's largest payment network as a "lender" probably smarts more than being (jokingly) called a "massive scam."

Those tech companies provide an allocative service with fewer employees, but they also don't have regulators and don't need retail branches. Perhaps Apple's the better benchmark.

FirstMerit has succeeded at getting its online banking users to immediately adopt a new mobile service from the vendor Fiserv, which said 11% of the bank's active online banking users enrolled in the first week.

As if the financial system needed more challenges, there is a huge one lurking that never goes away: keeping data secure. Because our current market and economic predicament has presented a barrage of other risks that are perceived as more immediate, securing customer and corporate data too often remains at the bottom of the triage list.

New guidelines advise using stronger authentication for business accounts, but more community banks use it for consumer accounts.

The bank is offering web data backup to U.K. businesses, regardless of whether the businesses are Barclays clients.

Kennesaw State University has entered into a partnership with mobile money start-up TreasureCom to develop and market banking applications for mobile phones.

Starbucks changed its mind about allowing a customer to share his prepaid card with the world.

S1 and ACI Worldwide are each trying to win over shareholders in their ongoing merger feud. The Vendors on Monday tried to influence how S1's shareholders will vote for its pending merger with Fundtech.

ISIS, the telecom consortium intent on offering a mobile payment scheme, is building out a wider range of mobile wallet capabilities to keep up with its aggressive rival, Google.