Bank technology

Black Knight has acquired HeavyWater, a developer of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology for the mortgage industry, and plans to incorporate the startup's borrower data verification and other automation capabilities into its existing product suite.

Promontory MortgagePath fills management roles for bank relations, technology and outsourced services opportunities.

Leader Bank says it can land property managers as commercial clients by helping them handle tenant deposits — and possibly create opportunities to boost CRE lending.

The bank says its partnership with Lender Price will help streamline and simplify its home loan process.

Applications can now be made on the bank's app or website, but closings will still be in person. With this move, BofA joins Quicken Loans, Lenda, SoFi and others offering a mostly digital mortgage. The trend is sure to continue.

Some speculate that the banks who do business with credit reporting agencies may be looking for alternatives after mounting concerns about their ability to keep information private. But breaking up is hard to do.

Some fear that the removal of such data from individual credit reports could lead lenders to believe a consumer is a better bet than they really are.

Lenda, launched in 2014, currently makes mortgages start to finish in two weeks. But it's aiming to make it a process that can be finished on a borrower's lunch break.

To attract new customers, banks are getting rid of the paper-based payments process between builders and subcontractors.

The bank will spend an additional $1.4 billion on technology in 2018 to gain share and boost efficiency, executives said Tuesday. But they were peppered with questions about whether the big investment will yield a big financial return down the road.

The digital-only Ally Bank has taken several steps to deepen customer relationships through electronic channels, including use of personalized emails and websites that have yielded strong click-through and loyalty rates.

Some Wells Fargo customers on social media Thursday afternoon expressed frustration with not being able to log in to accounts digitally. The San Francisco bank responded in a tweet acknowledging the problem.

Banco Santander joined existing investors JPMorgan and USAA as well as others in raising $25 million in secondary-round financing for Roostify, which seeks to build a paperless mortgage process.

For many newcomers to the U.S., establishing credit is a big challenge. A handful of entrepreneurs are developing tools to help verify their financial histories.

Startups that have developed the technology for real estate finance are starting to conduct a broader array of transactions, including property sales.

Calls for less reliance on credit bureaus and Social Security numbers for verification are leading many to envision a future of identity on a distributed ledger.

Tim Welsh has spent his first two months on the job thinking about how to make U.S. Bank as central to consumers’ lives as Amazon, develop new personal financial management services, and expand into new cities.

One lawsuit has already been filed against Equifax in the wake of its massive security failure. But that’s the just beginning of the consequences for the credit bureau and the banks that use it.

Intruders accessed names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers in what could be one of the largest data intrusions.

It’s highly debatable whether the artificial intelligence engines that online lenders typically use, and that banks are just starting to deploy, are capable of making credit decisions without inadvertent prejudices.