Core systems

Bank of the Ozarks' taste for M&A means its information-technology staff has to juggle integration projects and experiments with new software, mobile and other technologies.

Royal Bank of Canada's chief executive, Dave McKay, says the company could roll out a loyalty system kept on a blockchain next year as it experiments with distributed ledgers and looks to enhance its mobile wallet.

Legacy core systems make banks vulnerable to new competitors and risks. Modernization is underway, but many institutions are not moving fast enough. The risk of waiting too long is that it will take too long to catch up.

Financial services technology company Fiserv and bank-owned risk management provider Early Warning are partnering to add scale for deposit accounts and bill payment services.

So many banks are running systems that were implemented before 1984, the year Mark Zuckerberg was born. They’re going to be dead meat in the age of real-time connectivity in the near-free world of today’s mobile Internet.

The chiefs of Fiserv, FIS and TCS Financial Solutions explain how they continue meeting customers' current needs while preparing for the inevitable day when those needs radically change.

The central bank originally established a 10-year time horizon for completing upgrades to the nation's aging electronic payment system. But a task force convened by the Fed thinks that's not ambitious enough.

Cloud Lending Solutions, a technology provider to marketplace lenders and other finance companies, announced that it has raised $8 million in venture funding.

Can true innovation happen when so much of the industry is still working on systems built in the 20th century?

Software problems have recently plagued Bank of New York Mellon, HSBC and the New York Stock Exchange. Thorough testing and new quality standards can help financial institutions weed out weaknesses in their code that could (literally) break the bank.