Branch banking

Refurbishing ATMs to accommodate mobile payments is less expensive than buying new ones, and is a solid green strategy, according to Mark D. Smith, director of business development for MVP Financial Equipment.

Peach State Federal Credit Union acquired a former branch of DOCO Credit Union after the latter made the decision to leave the Toccoa, Ga., market.

ATMs require dual-factor authentication in the form of a physical card and a PIN, and this same concept should be extended to phone transactions, writes Patrick Cox, CEO of TRUSTID.

Bank of America is investing heavily in videoconferencing at unstaffed branches, Citigroup is experimenting with gamification and Union Bank’s PurePoint Financial is going entirely paperless.

Longtime payments industry executive Kim Crawford Goodman has been named president of card services at Fiserv, where she will oversee the payments and ATM services, including credit and debit processing.

Resourceful crooks will relentlessly probe systems, processes and people until they find a weakness or an opportunity. That weakness is the magnetic strip that still exists on all EMV cards, according to Nathan Horn-Mitchem, senior vice president and chief information security officer at Provident Bank.

Community banks are slowly warming up to the pricey technology to reduce their reliance on branches, speed up transactions and provide convenience for customers.

Research and consumer surveys aren’t the only tools to help banks understand what they need to do. Friends of executives can provide honest feedback as regular customers.

The financial services industry and community reinvestment advocates both praised the Treasury Department’s recommendations for reforming Community Reinvestment Act enforcement.

Slowly and silently, 10,000 free-to-use ATMs are set to disappear from Britain’s high streets over the next four years — despite recent findings that at least 3 million people across the U.K. rely on cash for almost all of their day-to-day payments.