MasterCard’s chief information officer tells Dan Barnes of his healthy state of paranoia, which compels him to keep up to date with developments in the market place.

By providing a standard approach across multiple vendors and technologies, service-orientated architecture will become simpler to manage. Heather McKenzie highlights the latest initiatives.

By adopting service-oriented architecture, financial enterprises will be better able to integrate processes, thereby creating more options to consolidate and excel in their core businesses. By Samir Seth.

Providers of financial services must move towards web services and service-oriented environments in order that they can be more responsive to changing industry shifts and stay competitive in a turbulent market. By Samir Seth.

The world’s largest banks are seeking growth in their own markets, seemingly with good reason, given that two-thirds of the world’s largest 300 banks are in the EU, North America and Japan and their assets account for some 80% of the total of the global top 300 banks.

Trying to maintain systems built using old programming languages can be costly for banks and rewarding for programming specialists. But what happens when the specialists retire? By Chris Skinner.

With fraudsters mounting increasingly sophisticated and co-ordinated online attacks, banks must be constantly prepared for the latest threats. Dan Barnes explains.

Wachovia’s corporate chief information officer views outsourcing as a partial solution to the slowdown in banking innovation resulting from industry consolidation. Dan Barnes reports.

Across consumer banks, the cost-to-income ratio is still high. Branch banking, consumer lending, bank cards, and call centre operations have been mired in structural costs attached to legacy technologies, fragmented systems and manual processes.

Inefficient banks used to operating in protected domestic environments are likely to suffer the heaviest casualties once the single European financial market becomes a reality in 2010.By Chris Skinner.