BANKS SEND
EARLY USERS
TO THE
INNOVATION
LAB FOR
TESTING
What do banks want
from Howard Schmidt?
Page 9
SPEARED
Plug-ins defend would-be phishing victims
Page 11
FEBRUARY 2010
TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION. BUSINESS RESULTS.
VOL. 23 NO. 2
Daylight
Come and
They Need
Loans Paid
LOSS MITIGATION
Has ‘Tap and
Go’ Lost
Its Touch?
CONTACTLESS
Experian’s Tallyman is
part of a parade of new
collections products.
There’s lots of issuer activity, but marketing has
waned and consumer enthusiasm is tepid
MOST OF US WOULD LIKE TO
believe a new, brighter day
has dawned. Part of creating
that reality for banks requires
improving collections systems
to locate troubled loans that
can be prevented from hitting the default dustbin, then
helping overburdened staff
reach a resolution that gets
the borrower paying again.
There’s also a bit of amnesia
that has to be cured.
“The industry has forgotten
how to collect. The [boom]
economy had allowed it to
lose that skill,” says Dennis
Moroney, a research direc-
tor at TowerGroup. “Today
that’s a bad thing.”
To adjust, tech firms and
banks are viewing collections
as a CRM-type task, utiliz-
ing new credit decisioning
technology, data aggrega-
tion and predictive modeling
Customer Tactics, page 23
HUNGRY GIANTS GET AGGRESSIVE IBM, Oracle and Microsoft signal vertical moves. What will that mean for banks and their usual vendors? COVER STORY PAGE 18
ISSUERS ARE MAILING OUT CONTACTLESS CREDIT AND DEBIT CARDS BY
the millions, it’s not clear how often they are being used.
Several payments executives say consumer interest in the
technology is falling off, and they blame the banks’ and card
networks’ apathy. Even the format’s biggest backers concede
they have sacrificed broad-based marketing, preferring to promote contactless cards in the cities and industries where they
are most likely to be successful.
“Even if you do have a PayPass and/or a blink card, it’s very
unlikely that you know what it means,” says Nick Holland, a
senior analyst at Aite Group LLC. “They’ve just done a totally
crappy job of pitching this. … Merchants have told no one about
it. Card networks have told no one about it. The issuers haven’t
Leading Off, page 10
CU Pushes Twitter Banking
Vantage’s tweetMyMoney offers ;nancial services. It will see who follows.
DIRECT ACCESS
BY THE
NUMBERS
IT HASN’T TAKEN LONG FOR
Twitter to go from “What’s
that?” to big time sizzle
among consumers. When
it comes to using the social
media site to deliver finan-
cial services, Vantage Credit
Union’s about to find out
how much steak there is.
unique phishing reports were made
in August 2009,
5. 5 percent more than the
previous record in September 2007.
40,621
