Cloud computing

The cloud computing company Salesforce has introduced Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, a series of applications written for financial services firms. The first application in the series is designed to facilitate the relationships between financial advisers and their clients.

Google is pitching its lightweight laptops to enterprises such as banks. But bankers say the devices are not yet a match for financial institutions' intense computing needs.

Envestnet's planned acquisition of Yodlee is shedding light on how real-time data about customers' financial data can shape the future of the wealth management and financial advisory business. Jud Bergman, CEO of Envestnet, says the deal will create "an unprecedented level of engagement."

Tangerine Bank, the former Canadian operation of ING Direct, is creating and testing applications on IBM's Bluemix cloud software environment at a facility in Toronto.

They're not ready to go all-in by putting core processing in the cloud, but community banks are experimenting with hybrid and quasi-cloud arrangements that offer low costs and rapid deployment.

A deal between two major fintech players to provide core processing hosted in the cloud raises the question of when U.S. banks will feel comfortable putting their most important data on publicly shared computers.

San Diego-based Mitek, a firm that specializes in capturing mobile data for customer acquisition, has acquired Dutch identity verification company IDchecker.

Encryption still vastly outpaces tokenization as a means of defending data in the cloud, according to a new report from a cloud data cybersecurity firm, CipherCloud.

Recent studies show financial services companies increasingly use cloud services. But behind the numbers, there are a range of attitudes toward cloud computing, from warm embrace to full-on paranoia.

A consumer lender with nearly 300 far-flung offices struggled to keep up with multiple compliance projects using email and Microsoft Project. Then it turned to collaboration software, and demanded some customized changes, that helped tie its many loose threads together.

IBM will assist Citi's Mobile Challenge competition, the two announced Tuesday.

Implementation has been slow going for the Banking Industry Architecture Network. But PNC says the framework is already helping the bank achieve some important IT goals, and could help the industry adapt to the cloud computing era.

Purveyors of certain cloud services, such as cloud-based lending, face continual rejection from bankers worried about security. But some say a data storage specialist could be every bit as secure as a financial institution — if not more so.

Let this be the year that the financial industry stops using the phrase "big data" and remembers that the goal of technology is to make people's lives simpler.