Mobile banking

Activehours, a direct-to-consumer startup that lets hourly wage earners name their paydays, announced it has raised $22 million of funding.

Regulators here made strides to encourage innovation in 2016, while Brexit cast doubt on the London fintech boom. Yet the cross-Atlantic payments battle is just beginning.

2016 was very good to these financial services executives, who succeeded where others failed, sold their businesses for large sums, felt the love of regulators or could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Banks are grappling with new challenges in trying to work with voice assistants like Alexa in Amazon's Echo to allow customers to check balances and perform other tasks. But with voice banking on the horizon, banks cannot afford to stall their efforts.

Royal Bank of Canada has introduced a video chat service for its small-business banking customers whose hectic lives may not allow for frequent branch visits.

The bank's new CEO, Onur Genc, fresh from Turkey, will have to find a way to leverage the considerable tech and innovation investments the bank has made and strengthen the brand's U.S. presence.

Even in a digital era, human connections still matter. That is one big disadvantage for fintech startups and increasingly for banks as customers stop making regular branch visits. So it is instructive to hear SoFi's thinking on how to overcome this challenge. It is trying some unorthodox tactics to better understand the people behind the data and to create meaningful connections with them.

Banks have used biometrics for about a decade, but there are a number of hurdles that banks, device makers and customers need to overcome before passwords are history.

The new year will bring risk in marketplace lending, but progress will be made in micropayments platforms and regulators embracing innovators.

Since technology is so ingrained in every aspect of banking, some say the idea of looking at tech spending as a stand-alone budget item is antiquated.