Banking

Companies climbing the FinTech Forward ladder lead on issues banks care about most — including mobile, omnichannel and big data.

Our FinTech Forward Companies to Watch are helping banks step up their game by offering virtual assistance, better money management tools and other solutions.

Funding of startups will cool overall, but venture capitalists anticipate growth in new areas of financial services that are ripe for innovation, including wealth management, insurance and back-office operations.

There were bound to be growing pains in the friendship between banks and fintech. Bankers plugged into the world of innovation give their advice on overcoming the challenges.

Banks are expected to spend more on technology in the coming year, with the cash earmarked for things like upgrading mobile apps and adding self-service tech in branches.

For regulators to develop a unified framework for fintech companies to operate in, they first have to come to a consensus.

The once-icy relationship between banks and fintechs thawed quite a bit in the last year. The next step might be for banks to start buying startups.

To see an interactive version of Top 100 Companies in FinTech, click here.

Fintech not only solves problems for banks and their customers, it also helped break a curse.

To identify the fintech startups deserving of special recognition this year as part of the FinTech Forward program, we asked our judges to consider several factors: Is this organization solving relevant problems for the banking industry? Is the organization creating change? Is the solution timely? Does it speak to the challenges the industry faces now? The following 20 companies are the standouts.

U.S. Bank’s Voyager Network enables fleet managers to track and control commercial fuel purchases, and now the platform also provides key fuel and vehicle usage data from fill-ups at private, unattended fueling sites.

A new app aims to modernize the automobile financing process by allowing car shoppers to get credit approval on their phones.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's final rule on prepaid cards will improve fraud protection and provide greater transparency of costs for such products, but is already drawing fire from both consumer advocates and bankers over how it treats overdraft fees.

First Foundation in Irvine, Calif., has agreed to buy a pair of branches from Pacific Western Bank in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The Federal Trade Commission took a victory lap Tuesday in its fight with race car driver Scott Tucker and his payday lending operation.

Wells Fargo Chief Executive John Stumpf may get a third grilling by lawmakers over the fake-accounts scandal that continues to embroil the San Francisco bank.

More than $100 billion in securitized commercial mortgages come due soon, many of them still underwater.

Wells Fargo, the lender grappling with a scandal involving unauthorized customer accounts, had its outlook lowered to negative from stable by Fitch Ratings.

The bank's fake account scandal is further reason to make the results of Wells' 2012 Community Reinvestment Act exam public.

The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that 19 private-sector proposals are now under review by nearly 500 members of two separate task forces, one of which was established to chart a path toward a faster payment system, and the other focused on payment system security.