Bank technology

Banks spend far less than other industries on innovative technologies — a grave mistake that must be fixed.

Union Bank has hired long-time Zions tech exec John Itokazu to be its new chief information and operations officer. He most recently held the same job at Zions, where he worked in various positions for more than 30 years.

India has its first app designed specifically for small mobile devices and it offers more than the traditional banking features.

Kevin Lynch, the senior vice president of ecommerce at 1st Mariner Bank in Baltimore, answers 5 questions about the bank's social media presence.

Key players in payments are discussing how technology in IBM's supercomputer Watson might revolutionize fraud monitoring or credit evaluation, and even sit in for human operators.

Banks must balance the urge to make investments for a smartphone world against the needs of today's customers — and a majority of them use standard cell phones.

The online and mobile payment startup says it has been building a payment network called Grid that will be more secure than the Visa and MasterCard card networks.

States' efforts to rein in fly-by-night companies are starting to have an effect on some payments startups' operations.

In its first major play to connect its mobile-payments service with social media, Starbucks Coffee Co. now lets its mobile payment users send gift cards to friends on Facebook.

Its reader for tablets, announced Wednesday but not available until next year, is meant to serve a different market than its reader for smartphones.

Fiserv Inc.'s deal to buy the software vendor CashEdge Inc. narrows the field of contenders vying for dominance in the growing person-to-person payments space.

Dynamics Inc. made a splash last year with the launch of a Citi-issued multipurse card that has a built-in screen and keypad, but all of those features are duplicated by the mobile wallet systems that have been announced since then — including Google Wallet, which also has Citi's support.

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Technology vendor Fiserv Inc. is making a bold move to bolster its digital payments arsenal by shelling out $465 million to buy the smaller technology company CashEdge Inc.

American Express Co. has added a cardholder perk designed to make spending on its cards worthwhile for a broad swath of small business owners: advertising credits on Facebook.

Yet another mobile-commerce venture is being formed, and this one could have some staying power.

Many banks must go back to the drawing board in deciding which security systems to use to protect online banking users.

A security vendor recently had to issue a correction to its own sales pitch after it falsely insisted it was "certified" with a payments industry security standard, StorefrontBacktalk reported June 23.

The man behind an attack on AT&T Inc. that exposed personal information for users of Apple Inc.'s iPad pleaded guilty last week in federal court in Newark, N.J., The Washington Post reported June 23.

"Hacktivists" who disagree with MasterCard Inc.'s policies claimed to have taken its website down Tuesday morning.