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Author
Christine Hintze

Profile of Christine Hintze

Blog Posts: 87
Articles by Christine Hintze

How to Make Your Website a Magnet for Deposits

8/11/2010
By Terry Moore and Madhavi Mantha, Accenture More than one-half of financial services product searches in the United States begin online, according to Accenture research, and that figure is likely to increase. Indeed, customers rank the online channel as the single most important way of interacting with their banks.

Keeping the Love Alive: How Banks Can Strengthen Client Relationships

7/26/2010
By Jeff Ficke, Senior Vice President and Treasury Management Sales Director, Fifth Third Bank While clients have always looked to their banks as trusted advisers, the depth to which that trust is needed and the desire for strong strategic counsel has never been greater. The financial challenges of the last 18 to 24 months have altered the way bank-client relationships are perceived. Clients today have higher standards and expectations for their banks than ever before, and as a result,

Credit Scores Aren't Broken, But Are Being Enhanced With New Analytics

7/22/2010
Dr. Andrew Jennings, Chief Research Officer, FICO The recent economic crisis has led some to wonder whether analytics that measure consumer credit risk are fundamentally broken. I can reliablystate that they're not broken - the robust measures, such as the FICO score, still rank-order consumers by credit risk.

Banks Need to Turn Black Boxes into Glass Boxes

7/13/2010
By David Sherriff, Microgen Traditionally, many financial services companies have treated their internal operations like the black box on an aircraft: only when the plane goes down do outsiders get a glimpse into what happened leading up to the crash.

How Banks Can Become Too Smart to Fail

6/23/2010
By David Sherriff, Microgen Global legislative and regulatory pressure continues to grow to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. One of the potential outcomes is that banks may be forced to split retail banking (safe, low-margin business) from investment banking (high-risk, high-profit business) to create two (at least) legal entities.

Banks Beef Up Data Security in Spite of Tight Budgets

5/20/2010
By Matt Mancuso, Ernst & Young With external and internal data security threats on the rise - both malicious and inadvertent in nature - financial services organizations are taking a more holistic view of risk and security and focusing on the overall health of their information security management programs.

How Banks Can Help Clients Meet Healthcare Reform Requirements

5/10/2010
By Stuart Hanson, Fifth Third Bank Discussions around healthcare reform continue to dominate office small talk, as dramatic changes are in the offing. While the impact of these reforms cannot be accurately predicted, there are several mandated changes that are already affecting the way healthcare providers must deal with payments. The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the more recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which includes the Health

Get A Grip on Legal Holds

5/6/2010
By Jorge Rey The financial industry has been experiencing a dramatic up-tick in litigation due to the economic recession. With record high defaults, foreclosures and the extreme devaluation of property and assets people have turned to lawsuits as one option to mitigate their financial losses. In anticipation of these issues, lenders should take a proactive approach and develop legal hold policies and procedures. You may be tempted to push the creation of a legal hold p

Six Ways to Better Manage Commercial Real Estate Loans

3/24/2010
By Jodi Alperstein, managing director, Moody's Analytics Recently, a congressional watchdog panel warned that mounting commercial real estate losses could endanger the banking system and thwart economic recovery. The panel discovered that a total of $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will require refinancing within the next four years. Today, more than half of those loans are underwater, because they were underwritten for properties whose value has dropped significantly. In

Prepaid Show Dispatch: 3 Promising Prepaid Providers

3/3/2010
By Steve Kietz, Managing Partner, Woodbury Advisors At the Prepaid Show last week, I got a chance to meet with three promising new prepaid card companies: PreCash, Edo Interactive and Blackhawk Network. Each brings something unique to the prepaid table.

Prepaid Show Dispatch: Visa, MasterCard Updates

3/2/2010
By Steve Kietz, managing partner, Woodbury Advisors LLC At the Prepaid Show last week, I had a chance to catch up with Brian Triplett, head of Prepaid products at Visa, and Elisa Corridore, global payroll card executive at Mastercard.

The Innovation Factor: Going Lean and Green

2/24/2010
By Patrick J. Moore, Senior Vice President, Director, Treasury Product Management, Fifth Third Bank Just a few years ago, one of the hottest business trends in the nation was the move toward sustainable practices. If you weren't going "green," you were behind the curve. Then the economic crisis arrived and the prevailing focus shifted to survival.

New Landscape Accelerates Core Banking Changes

2/18/2010
By Steven Reiter and Fiaz Sindhu, Accenture Post-crisis, banks are awaking to a new world order marked by a regulatory wave requiring greater transparency, more self-sufficient customers with rising expectations, and greater competition from traditional and non-traditional players Yet most banks' ability to respond to these forces is highly constrained. The processes, procedures and information technology that form the foundational layer of their operations are expensive to maintain and lack

Fraud and ID Theft: Are One-Time Password Bank Cards the Answer?

2/17/2010
By Dennis Brestovansky, president and CEO of Aveso Displays Over the past few years, fraud and theft of corporate and consumer information have escalated dramatically, reaching devastating proportions worldwide. It's becoming a far too frequent fact of financial life.

Banks' Struggle to Achieve Document Security

2/2/2010
By Adi Ruppin, Confidela Keeping electronic documents secure is a challenge in any industry, but banks have extra considerations. Checks, loan applications and monthly statements need to be accessible online. The same applies to sensitive internal bank documents that need to be shared among employees, branches, auditors and others. And industry regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley require banks to maintain an audit trail of all these documents. There are three conditions in many banks th

Three Ways to Deter Cyber Crime

1/25/2010
By Joe Spatarella, Online Banking Solutions Ironically, as businesses move from risky paper check payments to a safer means of electronic B2B payments, the online banking systems through which payments are originated have become an attractive fraud target. Although businesses are using payment fraud control devices such as ACH Positive Pay and ACH Debit Filter, they only mitigate fraud after it occurs. There are at least five fresh reasons to step up the security investment.

Time for A Holistic Fraud Prevention Effort

1/22/2010
By Mike Ressel, vice president of business development, Fiserv Despite continuing effort and investment by banks to mitigate financial crime risk, fraud is evidently still a growing problem. So what's going wrong?

Three Approaches to Combatting Enterprise Fraud

1/22/2010
By David Nussenbaum, vice president, ACI Worldwide Fraud is on the rise and it's expected to accelerate in the wake of the global financial crisis, with not just cards but other bank products and channels being targets for criminals. Urban gangs like the Crips and the Bloods have been known to collect more than 10,000 credit card numbers a night. Right now, a gang member is likely approaching a waiter as he starts his shift. The crook simply offers the waiter a card skimmer, which is s

It's Time to Unite Money Laundering and Fraud Prevention Efforts

1/21/2010
By Karen Van Ness, Oracle Financial Services Software In the last year, the financial services industry received a rousing reminder of the profound damage that increasingly complex financial schemes and fraud can inflict on their reputation and bottom line. Analysts estimate that financial crime costs industry organizations approximately $20 billion in losses, annually. At the same time, banks are grappling with expanding anti-money laundering (AML), fraud prevention and risk managemen

How to Protect Online Business Banking

1/20/2010
By Craig Priess, Guardian Analytics Online business banking is under attack. While much ink has been spilled detailing consumer banking fraud and its victims, business accounts are no less susceptible to cybercrime - and in many ways are more at risk. Small business banking is particularly vulnerable, especially in the current economic climate. Why? One reason is that Regulation E of the Federal Electronic Funds Tra

Mobile Banking and Payments Feed Customer Experience Lab

1/14/2010
By Bill Bradway, Bradway Research LLC The recurring headlines touting mobile banking and more recently, mobile payments, reinforce my opinion that technology-based innovation in financial services is often ahead of the business-based needs the technology solutions address. Mobile banking over the past 10 years has been a poster child for this phenomenon. No doubt the interest in mobile banking today by bankers is rising and

The Innovation Factor: Are Banks Ready to Innovate?

1/13/2010
By Patrick J. Moore As promising signs of economic recovery emerge and businesses shed their bunker mentality, it is time to look ahead. A key question for the banking industry is, how will it prepare for the future? Are we ready to embrace innovation, take risks, and reach beyond our comfort zone? Or will we continue business as usual and run the risk of going the way of the dinosaur?

Finding New Acquisition Opportunities Among Current Customers

12/10/2009
By Margot Vaughan, MasterCard Advisors As consumers struggle with debt, issuers have-quite appropriately-refocused their acquisition efforts. U.S. issuers reduced their direct mail credit card offers 27 percent in 2008, some by as much as 61 percent. But going too far in that direction can lead to lost market share and portfolios with high inactive rates and losses. Instead, card acquisition efforts now should largely focus on finding opportunity among the bank's existing customer bas

Consumers Are Ready to Protect Their Accounts, But Will Bankers Let Them?

12/9/2009
By James Van Dyke, Javelin Strategy & Research A popular misconception about consumers' willingness to be involved in fraud protection is holding back retail bankers' profitability. New Javelin factual research debunks the mistaken belief that consumers won't sacrifice convenience in order to increase security. By analyzing rigorous data comparing latest behaviors and preferences toward banking security, Javelin identifies steps bankers can take to not only lower their fraud mitigation costs

Bank Tech Innovation and the Great Recession - 2010 Outlook

12/2/2009
By Bill Bradway, Bradway Research The opportunities for bank tech innovation have been expanding over the past 40 years. When I started my banking career in 1973, the automated cash dispenser/ATM was the emerging innovation. Over the past 36 years I have followed wave after wave of promising "innovations." As the banking industry begins its recovery from the Great Recession, eyes and minds are shifting their focus back to identifying the most promising bank tech innovations for the nex

Fostering and Promoting Diversity in Workplace IT Departments

12/1/2009
By Kristina Draper, Wells Fargo In today's business environment, there is an increasing focus on cultivating a diverse workforce. But achieving diversity can be a challenge for many organizations, particularly in IT fields. While there are several contributing factors, one key driver is simply that the numbers of certain racial and ethnic minorities in IT are not proportional to their numbers in the population. In addition, in the U.S., the percentage of female IT employees has steadil

Rebalancing IT Spend to Deliver More Business Value

11/30/2009
By Sultan J. Khan, Tata Consultancy Services, North America Optimizing the IT Operating Model, or as I often say, rebalancing IT to drive business value, is a critical initiative at any point in time. However, in the current economic environment, an increased focus on programs that identify substantial cost savings and ultimately lead to improved performance and greater business value have never been more important.

For Bank Marketing, Re-Focus the Pareto Principle on Customer Profitability

11/23/2009
By Hongjie Wang, Fulcrum The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80 percent of income in Italy went to 20 percent of the population. Interestingly enough, such phenomena occur in many disciplines and industries. Marketing is no exception, so much so that Pareto analysis has become one of the standard must-haves in customer analysis.

Challenging Economic Times Call for Innovative Branch Technologies

11/22/2009
By Stacey Zengel, Jack Henry & Associates Inc. Recent turmoil in the financial services industry may have changed some of the players, but it has not changed the basic mandate for financial institutions to satisfy the needs and desires of customers while generating shareholder returns. Indeed, the challenge to meet these goals has intensified. Bankers today are pressed to find ways to create efficiencies that drive a greater return on investment within the branch while still enhancing

From BI to Analytics: An Evolution In How Business Gets Done

11/17/2009
By Jay Morreale, Bank of America As the amount of data gathered and produced within an organization grows daily, users are challenged to make decisions based on this information in shorter and shorter time periods. While traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools provide valuable access to this data and offer standardized reports that translate this information into key snapshots on the state of business, they are typically narrow in their application. Business users who have questio

Moving From Stress Tests to Broader Scenario Analyses

11/16/2009
By Mike Stefanick, SAS The Federal Reserve, rating agencies and capital providers are requiring consistent views of banks that extend far beyond a simple snapshot of capital reserves. Today, banks must embrace a richer brand of Scenario Analysis, executing a variety of stress tests and scenarios across all of their portfolios. The payoff extends beyond mere regulatory compliance and institutional health. It also means an enhanced competitive posture.

For Banks, Application Development Can Be Faster and More Efficient

11/9/2009
By Maurice Martin, iRise "Fail early!" may seem like an odd rallying cry for banking CIOs tasked with developing new applications. But, with reduced budgets and ever-increasing demand from the business for efficiency and innovation, it's no wonder today's IT leaders feel the need for speed. New applications-initiated by application consolidation or by modernizing legacy systems-increasingly top the CIO's agenda as the banking industry faces an unprecedented level of mergers and acquisi

In Healthcare Payments, Lockbox Environment Key to Meaningful Revenue Cycle

11/2/2009
By John Reynolds, FIS Healthcare Payment Solutions Ideally, revenue cycle management (RCM) for healthcare providers is simple: Eliminate the paper chain from claims and payments handling and significantly reduce the time spent exchanging information about payment responsibility. The outcome should allow a provider to considerably speed its receivables by collecting from the patient at the point of care, accepting an electronic payment from the insurer, and easily linking it to the ori

A New Era of Banking: Meeting the New Era of Customer Demand

10/28/2009
By Jerry Driscoll, HP Exstream From the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to President Obama's call for a "New Era of Responsibility," the market shift among financial institutions extends beyond Capitol Hill's call for greater accountability and regulation to a new era of customer demand calling for integrity, transparency and better communication.

Careful Planning Goes a Long Way in Mitigating Software Upgrade Risk

10/26/2009
By Rob McWalter, ConverterTechnology Enterprise software upgrades pose a significant risk to banks. Software migrations rarely go smoothly, and most banks' IT staffs are ill-equipped to deal with the fall-out. File links break. Macros go haywire. Spreadsheet formulas stop working. And system downtime is a major business liability.

Alternative Payments Vendors That Embrace Triangle of Value are in the Driver's Seat

10/20/2009
By Bruce Cundiff, Javelin Strategy & Research Due to recent decline in credit card usage and consumers adopting real-time banking strategies, alternative payment solutions are becoming exceedingly mainstream and gaining market share. Alternative payments vendors are taking advantage of the "perfect storm" of economic and competitive factors affecting the payments landscape, and are continually gaining momentum within our existing payments system.

Convergent Payments and SOA Technology Can Generate Revenue, Reduce Costs

10/19/2009
By George Warfel, Fiserv Controlling and reducing payment processing costs and boosting payments revenue have become critical as financial institutions suffer from the loss of lending revenue due to the credit crisis. Managing payment channels in separate silos on disparate technology platforms causes redundant work and expense. By implementing a convergent payments system to handle all payment types, a financial institution can dramatically reduce payment processing costs and offer ne

Fast Action, Good Communication Key to Data Breach Prevention

10/12/2009
By Nick Buri, Deluxe Corp. A data breach can have a serious impact on your business, costing an organization $4.1 million on average (Javelin Strategy & Research). Investing in data breach preparation up front will determine how and if a financial institution recovers after one occurs.

Boosting Performance with Analytics in 2012

10/7/2009
By Omer Sohail, Accenture In the wake of the financial crisis, the banking industry will be significantly reshaped by technology. Indeed, by 2012, technology-driven innovations will be more important than ever to help banks regain the high performance they seek.

Using Debit and Online Banking Programs as Revenue/Loyalty Generators

10/4/2009
By Lynne Laube, Cardlytics Research shows that more than half of consumers view debit and online banking programs as the most important products and services their bank offers. However, most banks do not invest in them. This can be attributed to the fact that debit cards have thin margins primarily based on interchange, and bill pay and online banking are typically managed as cost centers, generating no profit at all.

Next Steps for Your Card Operations After an MPLS Migration

9/30/2009
By Edgar Aguilar, MasterCard Global Technology and Operations Today, as consumer technology has evolved, people face a dizzying array of choices. At the same time, some technology product options have narrowed, mostly to consumers' delight. For instance, many broadband providers now offer "bundled" television, Internet and phone services. So, rather than having to go to multiple providers for each service, consumers now have a single account/provider to manage.

Managing For The Internet - Online Banking Demands Web Performance Excellence

9/28/2009
By Stephen Pierzchala, Gomez Inc. The Internet is dramatically changing the way banks interact with customers. Its explosive growth and development has resulted in a substantial percentage of customer interactions being moved out of the branch, off the phone, and onto the computer screen and mobile device, accessible by anyone at anytime. Online banking is not simply a customer convenience, but also a critical component of managing costs, since online transactions can be significantly

Getting Ready for the International ACH Transaction Rule

9/14/2009
By Hugh Jones, Accuity On September 18, 2009, an International ACH Transaction (IAT) rule from NACHA - The Electronics Payments Association, will become effective. The new rule will mandate all U.S. financial institutions and other organizations sending and receiving IATs incorporate additional remittance data identifying both the sender and recipients. This mandate also includes financial institutions that conduct domestic transactions only or do not process ACH payments. The coming I

Is PCI DSS a Safe Investment?

9/10/2009
By Robert Vamosi, Javelin Strategy & Research Should merchants continue to invest in Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) in a down economy? Yes. The losses-not just in fines and litigation, but also reputational damage-associated with the consequences of a data breach are astronomical when compared with the annual burden of maintaining compliance. PCI is an excellent baseline for cardholder security, but should PCI be made law? On this, there is plenty of room for d

Creating Opportunities with Proactive Customer Interactions

8/31/2009
By Joseph Salesky, ClairMail Today's business and technology climate has disrupted customer relationships for banks, making it harder to retain assets, acquire new deposits, cross-sell products or obtain new customers. Customers are feeling the need to stay connected to their accounts, but that is driving up the cost to service them.

European ATM Deployments Serve as Lesson in Self-Service to U.S. Banks

8/24/2009
By Martin Macmillan, Level Four Americas The way Americans use ATMs and self-service technology is about to change. A look at how European financial institutions have developed ATM functionality that encourages consumers to use ATMs for activities beyond cash withdrawal will provide some insight as to how American financial institutions will follow suit.

Beyond "Check-the-Box" Mobile Banking and Payments

8/17/2009
By Calvin Grimes, Fiserv Bank and credit union executives recently cited "the competition is doing it" as one of the top two reasons why their institutions were investing in the mobile channel. This unscientific poll of attendees at two webinar events reveals a potentially troubling tendency toward "check-the-box" decision making when it comes to mobile banking.

Financial Institutions Can Learn to Be Lean

8/10/2009
By David Potterton, IDC Financial Insights Lean Processing has been trying to make its way into financial institutions for the past 10 years or more. While success has been limited, there is much financial institutions can learn from Lean. Lean, based on the principles of Toyota's Production System, is really about creating more value for customers by eliminating wasted activities and increasing efficiency. Many times it is paired with elements of Six Sigma (which is based on quality i

Using Covenants to Protect Trade Secrets and Other Intellectual Property

8/3/2009
By Jennifer J. Spencer, Esq., Spencer Crain Cubbage Healy & McNamara In the current financial market, almost no industry, including banking, is immune to employee layoffs, reductions in force or terminations. Employees who are laid off can possess, or be privy to, numerous types of confidential or trade secret information. They may have information about your bank's finances, mergers and acquisitions, future plans, technology and other sensitive data. What is to stop those employees fr

Taking Another Look at Implementing e-lending Technology

7/27/2009
By Andrew Krieger, Encomia When bank CIOs think about technology implementation, it is likely that they assume it involves a long and complicated process. They remember implementing a blended contact center or a mobile payment system-projects that took as long as 18 months for development and rollout.

Making the Case for Business Intelligence Investments in Tough Economic Times

7/20/2009
By Rajat Sharma, Onward Systems Many banks are in survival mode. Some will survive, some will merge or get bought, and some unfortunately will have to close business. What does a bank need in tough economic times? A bank needs cash flow, customer retention, to maintain profitability, and to find ways to increase revenue. How is all this possible in a survival mode? By investing in business intelligence is one promising way.

Banks, Tech Providers Can Help Corporates See Benefits of Revamped Wire System

7/15/2009
By Hank Farrar, The Clearing House, and Lauren Hargraves, Federal Reserve Bank of New York As the nation's major wire transfer systems gear up to offer significant new functionality, financial institutions and technology providers have a rare opportunity to deliver additional value to corporate clients-the power of information.

Sound Risk Management, Transparency Can Help Banks Master Financial Crisis

7/13/2009
By Falk Rieker, SAP America While the latest travails in the financial services industry were a decade or more in the making, the time is now to prevent plunging world markets into deeper despair. According to the Milken Institute, one common thread runs through all facets of the crisis from Main Street to Wall Street: excessive leverage. Homeowners and major financial firms alike had assumed too much debt, while, at the same time, taking on too much risk.

Business Strategies for Managing IT Risk During an M&A or Layoff

7/6/2009
By Mark McClain, SailPoint Technologies Today's economy is creating an environment where accelerated mergers and acquisitions, and subsequent layoffs, are becoming the norm rather than the exception. The resulting corporate churn creates significant IT risk, particularly regarding access to critical corporate information. There are, unfortunately, too many examples of disgruntled former employees stealing data. For instance, Fidelity National Information Services had 2.3 million custom

A Dose of Transparency Crucial to Rebuilding Bank Trust

6/29/2009
By Ashok Vemuri, Infosys Technologies Though you wouldn't know it from reading today's headlines, America's banking history is one littered with a number of principled and driven personalities who went to any length to maintain the public's faith in the financial system as a whole. In October of 1907, John Pierpont Morgan rounded up a consortium of his contemporaries to stem a potentially disastrous run on the Trust Company of America. Personal wealth was pledged, handshake agreements

Burden of Responsibility for New Era Reg Compliance Ultimately Will Fall on IT

6/18/2009
President Obama's proposals for the reform of financial services regulation are wide-ranging. Even if only partially enacted, they will have far-reaching impacts to the way financial services organizations of all types conduct business in the long term. As expected, they have been instantly attacked from the right and the left, and we have already seen declarations of war from industry organizations.

Taking an Integrated View of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), Processes and IT

6/15/2009
Information technology is a fundamental business enabler in today's financial services sector. Now more than ever, financial institutions are looking to IT solutions to help them address fundamental business challenges - from delivering more personalized customer service to managing risk to improving operational efficiency. The now inextricable link between IT and business operations has fueled a compelling need for FIs to implement comprehensive and holistic IT governance, risk and compliance (

ATM Sourcing Strategies: Get What You Pay For

6/8/2009
In today's retail banking landscape, the role of the ATM can vary from delivering basic "cash-and-dash" functionality to conducting a variety of sophisticated, value-added transactions.

Solid State Drives Offer Quantum Leaps in Performance for Banks

6/2/2009
By John Cagle, HP Solid state technology, such as flash-memory, is a type of storage with no moving parts. When used as a disk drive, it provides a more reliable and higher performing alternative to traditional hard disk drives. Solid state drives (SSDs) have been in use for several years in laptops and, until recently, were associated primarily with consumer products and USB storage devices. However, solid state storage is taking a more prominent role in the enterprise computing marke

Workforce Optimization: Using the Right Employees at the Right Time

6/1/2009
We've all had the experience. You dash into the branch for a quick transaction, but end up standing in a long line while one teller serves customers, another works away in her station not making eye contact, and several windows sit vacant. It's equally frustrating to contact the bank by phone, only to be placed on interminable hold.

Reducing Risk and Seizing Revenue Streams With Electronic Invoicing

5/27/2009
With near failures and mega-mergers around almost every corner, the banking industry is experiencing unprecedented change. With much of their focus on achieving cost efficiencies and effective resource utilization, banks may be losing sight of a key issue - finding ways to build and retain customers to remain profitable. One way to achieve this balance is to deliver new services that enable banks to simultaneously develop new revenue streams while deepening the relationship with the customer.

Using IT to Survive Mergers and Acquisitions in a Challenging Economy

5/18/2009
Few industries have been affected more by today's economic downturn than the financial industry. Many financial institutions have been forced into consolidations and mergers, requesting government assistance just to survive. They are pressured to show revenue increases and cost reductions almost immediately, and depend heavily on IT to meet these demands.

Addressing the Rising Cost of Check Fraud

5/4/2009
Despite of the steady decline in the general number of checks written annually, organizations still make 74 percent of their payments by check, according to some estimates. It is not news that check fraud is a prevailing form of fraud. Check fraud takes numerous forms, covering the gamut of illegal and/or deceptive practices from forgery to check kiting (drawing against balances credited to uncollected checks) to embezzlement. Signat

What do the Stress Tests Reveal About Health of the Industry?

4/28/2009
The release of the government's stress testing methodology last week was the latest effort to diagnose U.S. bank industry ailments and set a course for recovery. We will certainly learn more when the actual results are released in May. Meanwhile it is important to understand what these tests can and can't tell us about the health of the industry.

Web 2.0 Widget Banking Takes Online, Mobile Channels to the Next Level

4/20/2009
Retail financial services institutions are at crossroads. On the one hand, they need to generate business from new and existing customers and on the other, they need to cut costs. Failing at either of these goals could severely impact an institution's ability to survive. So what can financial institutions do? New Web 2.0 widgets just might provide a novel way to succeed at both.

It's 2009: Do You Know Who Your Customers Are?

4/13/2009
By Dr. Leonard Shaefer, Chief Scientist, IBM's Global Name Recognition unit, and Edward Lull Jr., VP, Virginia Commerce Bancorp For professionals in the international financial markets, these are indeed "interesting times", as the Chinese expression goes.

The Branch Expansion/Remote Deposit Capture Paradox

4/3/2009
There is an emerging paradox in retail banking between investments in branch renewal and remote deposit capture (RDC) technologies. Following heavy investment in branch renewal, the industry is also seeing rapid adoption of technologies like remote deposit capture and image-enabled ATMs, which keep customers away from branches. Early indications of consumer capture of check deposits will also contribute to reducing branch traffic. However, recent research conducted by Celent indicates no reducti

The Importance of Technology in Managing an FI's Liquidity

3/30/2009
Technology is becoming increasingly important to financial institutions to assist them with managing and maximizing their liquidity. Once a minor element of risk execution, liquidity management has evolved-especially as regulators, policymakers and lawmakers have dealt with the current financial crisis to concentrate on market, credit and operational risks.

Best Practices for Integrating Disparate ATM Networks Post Merger

3/20/2009
During Q3-Q4 2008, the financial services industry witnessed a level of M&A activity not seen in almost two decades. Within the last six months, four of the top five financial institutions have merged and predictions for 2009 indicate a continuation of this trend. As the FDIC watch list grows, many banks are looking to absorb smaller, weaker banks through acquisition. Once the move has been made and the ink on the contracts dries, bank executives are faced with the practical reality of coupling

Finding a Brighter Path to Banking's Future at Davos

3/13/2009
By Richard Muirhead, Tideway When I packed my bags for the World Economic Forum this year, I wasn't sure what to expect. Clearly the 2009 conference would be like no other, evident in the event's title: "Shaping the Post Crisis World." Attendees came to Davos this year not knowing what to expect for the future of the banking industry. An air of anxiety, if not doom and gloom, often hung over the conference center as nervous questions were constantly

Not All Alerts Are Created Equal

3/24/2008
By Joseph Salesky, ClairMail Inc. In theory, alerts can be an effective customer service tool for fraud prevention, account management, bill payment and other banking functions. When executed correctly, not only can alerts increase customer service and satisfaction, they can also significantly cut costs for banks, introduce new revenue opportunities and accelerate adoption of the mobile banking channel.

Efficiency Ratio: A Focal Point for Change In Lending

2/25/2008
By J. Brian King, Benchmark Consulting International One of the greatest challenges faced by financial institutions is sifting through and processing data in order to extract meaningful information on which to base their decisions, according to a whitepaper by BenchMark Consulting International (Atlanta). Understanding and properly leveraging internal data as well as appropriate external data can allow lenders to confirm where they are perform

Getting Personal with Customers Using Interactive Documents

1/7/2008
By Jerry Driscoll, Exstream Software Despite the large number of mergers and acquisitions within the industry over recent years, banking still remains highly competitive. Walk down any street in an average American city, and you're likely to pass three or four bank branches marketed to attract more customers and encourage them to do more business by opening more and different types of accounts. As always, however, the most effective way to do this is to build personal relations

GUEST COLUMN: A Greener Data Center Starts with a Better Handle on IT Assets

8/20/2007
By Richard Muirhead, CEO and Founder, Tideway Systems Going green is a red hot issue these days, particularly in the data center which is a big consumer of energy. Rising energy costs, combined with the increasing number of servers, cooling equipment and related infrastructure being deployed, are creating new pressures on corporate bottom lines in financial services organizations and in many other industry sectors.

Cookie-based Security Creates False Sense of Online Banking Security

8/13/2007
- By John De Santis CEO, TriCipher Throughout 2006, a series of high-profile incidents occurred that very painfully and very publicly highlighted how flimsy usernames and passwords are in protecting a person's online identity. Phishing and various other forms of online fraud sent the e-business community--particularly in financial services, which bore the brunt of these attacks--into a tailspin. In a bold move, one of the world's largest
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