Most-read tech stories of 2022

January 2, 2023 10:00 AM

Chase's declaration of an end to screen scraping of its customers' data, banks' efforts to offer bitcoin trading and the hacking of Crypto.com's multifactor authentication were among the most popular topics for American Banker readers in 2022.

Read on for the full list of the 10 technology stories that drew the most attention last year:

10: How Kahina Van Dyke is digitizing 160-year-old Standard Chartered Bank

In this interview, Kahina Van Dyke, global head of digital channels and data analytics at London-based Standard Chartered Bank, shared her plan to harmonize the bank's 30 different tech stacks in 50 countries and let large, multinational corporate clients see and manage all their money from one dashboard.

"I have this audacious, crazy ambition," Van Dyke said. "Standard Chartered is a 160-year-old colonial bank. We just had our official, 1000-page biography published in September. It was founded by the British colonists who were colonizing Asia and Africa. So the footprint of Standard Chartered is really unique in that we operate on the ground in 50 countries. We don't have a home market. So it's a completely dispersed model. It's also fragmented and expensive to operate. The vision that I see Standard Chartered serving is to transform it from a 160-year-old colonial bank to the largest fintech in emerging markets."

9: U.S. Bank to move most applications to cloud over next three years

In February, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank committed to moving most of its software applications to Microsoft's Azure cloud over the next few years, starting with customer-facing applications in consumer banking, small business banking and wealth management.

"This is a major investment," said Dilip Venkatachari, U.S. Bank's global chief information and technology officer. "We are a financially disciplined organization. So we have structured every step of that to be as thoughtful and as efficient as possible. And we do plot as part of this cloud migration to further simplify and consolidate our data center footprint, and that will lead to efficiency gains."

Accenture published research earlier this year that found that 82% of bank executives intend to move 50% or more of their mainframe software to the cloud.

8: Steven Schnall, CEO of Quontic Bank, dies in an accident

Steven Schnall, the CEO and founder of Quontic Bank in New York City, passed away this year in a motorcycle accident.

Schnall was a visionary who led many firsts at the community development financial institution: first bank to offer a bitcoin rewards product, first to offer a payments ring, among a small number to develop a home-grown data analytics platform and provide mortgages mostly to immigrants and gig workers.

"We're extremely saddened to share that Steven Schnall, Quontic's CEO and founder, has passed away in a tragic accident," George Lazaridis, a Quontic co-founder and the interim CEO of the $872 million-asset bank, said in a statement. "For decades, and especially since founding Quontic in 2009, Steve was a charismatic leader who inspired progress, got results, and managed to have fun along the way. He will be greatly missed."

7: How Wells Fargo is Google-izing customer interactions

The San Francisco bank announced that it would use Google Cloud's Dialogflow technology in its virtual assistant, giving consumers an experience akin to Google Assistant. The bank has been beta-testing Fargo with employees and hopes to roll it out to customers in the second quarter of 2023.

"Google helps us with the language processing, in terms of understanding what is the ask and trying to get that converted and back to customers in a way that's simple, fast and easy," said Michelle Moore, executive vice president and head of digital at Wells Fargo. Her team is working with a group of engineers at Google headed by Yolande Piazza, vice president of financial services. They are embedded throughout the bank for this and other projects.

In the future, new offerings from the bank, like early access to paychecks, will be incorporated into Fargo, Moore said.

6: Crypto.com hack exposes shortcomings of multifactor authentication

In January, the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com said it had mistakenly approved roughly $35 million in fraudulent transactions, affecting 483 of its users and costing the company an unspecified amount in reimbursements.

This incident hit home for people in the financial industry because hackers got around the company's two-factor authentication system that provides one-time passwords, the same kind of system most banks rely on.

An expert said the incident, which affected one of the largest crypto trading platforms in the market, shows the importance of using multiple layers of security and highlights other measures financial institutions can take to fend off a hack.

5: USAA completes first overhaul of mobile app in 10 years

The San Antonio bank and insurance company finished a rare upgrade of its banking app.

USAA company modernized its app using native mobile user interface languages. A new search tool uses natural language processing so customers can type or speak their search terms using casual phrasing and be understood.

One upgrade is the personalization platform. This feeds insights that show up as on-screen alerts as well as conversational interactions with the enterprise virtual assistant.

"Personalization is key in terms of continuing to tailor to an audience of one," said Ameesh Vakharia, chief strategy and brand officer at USAA. "The faster we can get to predicting what they need ahead of time is a big area of focus."

4: Bankers design a new blockchain that works like bitcoin — but it's regulated

A team of technology experts within banks and technology companies designed a distributed ledger that borrows many of the concepts behind bitcoin, but instead of existing outside of the government and the current banking system, the way bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies do, this version would be used by central banks, traditional banks and some fintechs — and fully regulated.

"The impetus for this was that the debate about the future of the digital dollar seemed to be resolving into a kind of Ping-Pong battle between central bank digital currencies and stablecoins," said Tony McLaughlin, managing director, emerging payments and business development at Citi Treasury & Trade Solutions. "As if the choice is really between centralizing things with the central bank or having unregulated wildcat stablecoins. And that seemed to be a false choice."

McLaughlin and several counterparts at other banks, including TD, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, collaborated on the shared ledger scheme in which digital dollars issued by governments could coexist alongside digital dollars issued by banks and private companies like PayPal and Square. The group has published a white paper describing the system, which they dub the Regulated Liability Network.

3: Warning signs emerge for neobanks: 'Doomed to not survive'

Critics began warning last year that many of the 400 neobanks in the world are struggling and less than 5% are breaking even.

Three hundred of the 400 will not exist in five years, Christoph Stegmeier, senior partner at Simon Kucher, predicted.

"They're doomed to not survive just by the type of business model and market segment that they're going into," he said. "There's too many me-too banks that are not doing anything specific, just a good user experience and no real product innovation. That's not going to work out. For many of them, the business model is wrong."

2: Small banks set to go live with bitcoin trading

In early 2022, a more optimistic time for cryptocurrency plans, a group of community banks said they were ready to start letting customers buy and sell bitcoin on their mobile banking apps.

An estimated 300 banks said they planned to go live in 2023 with this service with the help of the fintech NYDIG. The banks, the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America invested in the company as part of the effort.

"We have seen significant activity in cryptocurrency transactions from our customer accounts, and a few investments have been rather large, so that is obviously getting our attention," said Harold Reynolds, CEO of the $1.3 billion-asset BankSouth in Greensboro, Georgia, which is among the banks aiming to roll out bitcoin trading in its mobile app by midyear.

1: JPMorgan Chase says it has fully eliminated screen scraping

In October, the New York bank announced it had reached a milestone five years in the making: It's now routing all inquiries from third-party apps and services to access customer data through its secure application programming interface instead of allowing these services to collect data through screen scraping.

"It's a big win for our customers because they get greater control over their data and more visibility around which applications will use the data and which accounts they will be sharing with those applications," said Paul LaRusso, head of data aggregation at Chase.

Customers using a third-party app that needs access to Chase will log in and authenticate themselves directly with the bank. The customer can choose which accounts and data to share with the third party, as well as turn off access via the Security Center dashboard on Chase's website or app.