Jim Bruene writes about how banks could do a better job of marketing their remote deposit capture services. Like Jim, we've also been anxious to sign-up for such a service - and have yet to be able to do so at our bank.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's latest quarterly Supervisory Insights newsletter features an article titled "Incident Response Programs: Don't Get Caught Without One". From the abstract: "A security incident can damage corporate reputations, cause financial losses, and foster identity theft, and banks are increasingly becoming targets for attack because they hold valuable data that, when compromised, allow criminals to steal an individual's identity and drain financial accounts. To mitigate the effects of security breaches, organizations are finding it necessary to develop formal incident response programs (IRPs). This article highlights the importance of IRPs to a bank's information security program and provides information on required content and best practices banks may consider when developing effective response programs."

The UK's banking regulators (FSA, HM Treasury and the Bank of England) have published a report titled "2006 Financial Sector Market Wide Exercise" (PDF) summarizing a six week test conducted last fall intended to test the UK financial sector's resilience to pandemic influenza. "The distinguishing feature of a pandemic is that its main impact is upon the availability of personnel rather than on physical assets. ... Across the financial sector as a whole, not surprisingly, the heaviest impact of the pandemic was upon the more labour-intensive parts, notably the provision of customer-facing retail financial services."

Strategy+Business from Wharton has an article titled "Innovating Customer Service: Retail Banking’s New Frontier" (PDF). From the abstract: "Banking lags far behind most other consumer retail industries in developing leading-edge products and services, but the industry's rush of consolidation is ratcheting up the competitive ferocity. By federal law, no bank may hold more than 10 percent of the total U.S. deposits, and many of the top 20 banks are closing in on that limit, which means that growth by acquiring new customers will no longer be feasible. Instead, banks will have to grow by strengthening relationships with their current customers, and to do that banks will have to innovate their offerings." I particularly enjoyed this quote from the article: "People put up with lousy service because the switching costs are high.”

Over on Tom Brown's Bankstocks.com web site this morning, David Martin writes about his recent "wow" experiences with JetBlue - saying "I’m trying hard to remember the last time I interacted with a company and immediately felt compelled to tell my friends, “I can’t believe how good these guys are. You’ve got to check them out!” Someone once said "retail is detail" - that's what retail bankers have to live every day.

• Former Key Bank Executive Joins Prepaid Industry Leader Springbok Services, Inc.