The head of MasterCard Worldwide’s chip centre of excellence talks to Michelle Price about how the company is attempting to combat global online card fraud through its two-factor authentication model.

In the financial markets, there seems to be a repeating pattern of related crises and business collapses every decade or so. Could it be because lessons are not being learned from past mistakes? By Chris Skinner.

The amount of data that financial institutions need to store is constantly increasing, with knock-on effects on data centre capacity, energy use and running costs. Michelle Price reports.

In many parts of the world, the global economy is being driven as much by trade in information, ideas and services,as by trade in physical goods. Organisations that were able to achieve success and predominance through sheer productivity and massive scale are now fewer and far between. Increasingly, it is the ability to think laterally, to operate on an agile basis, to react to global trends quickly and, above all, to innovate that will determine the sustainability of an organisation in future.

Brian Stevenson, head of global transaction services at RBS, tells Charlie Corbett how the bank’s global footprint has received a huge boost from its acquisition of ABN AMRO’s transaction banking business.

Transaction banking has taken on a new vitality as banks starved of traditional sources of revenue by the credit crunch hunt for a steady income stream in a volatile market. Charlie Corbett reports.

The rapid growth of Pakistan’s United Bank Limited has created a complex IT infrastructure. Michelle Price talks to head of core banking Adnan Masood about UBL’s innovative refit of its technology systems.

Some banks are making efforts to engage with people through virtual worlds and social networks on the internet but their knowledge of this area is still limited – and being excluded by corporate firewalls does not help, writes Chris Skinner.

Online banking is struggling to keep pace with web trends and losing the lucrative social networking market as a result. Some players, however, are on the verge of a breakthrough. Michelle Price reports.

Identification methods that were once science fiction are now being used by banks, and some of the most innovative schemes are not in the obvious technology hot-spots. Wendy Atkins reports.