On The FinanSer, Chris Skinner blogs about today's world of what he calls 'disconnected banking' - noting that bankers have 'managed to get customers out of branches and transform them into data entry clerks, who serve themselves through ATMs and the Internet.' Who's he watching instead? The social finance sites like Zopa, Prosper and more - typically dismissed by bankers as 'folly, unpractical, unregulated and untenable.'

Yesterday, we mentioned we were building a new page on Payments News with RSS feeds from payments and banking-related blogs. We had a number of responses from bloggers today and have updated the page to reflect those responses.

Are there any more blogs we should add - please let us know!

Tell us about it! We're building a one page listing of updated content from other payments and banking-related blogs that we find worth a regular daily read. If you've got a payments or banking-related blog and think your blog should be listed, please send us your information via the link included on that page!

At mid-day today at the Digital Money Forum in London, five of us bank/payments bloggers took the stage for a lively discussion about blogs in financial services. The participants were Dave Birch from the Digital Money Forum blog (and the superb producer/director of this whole Forum!), Chris Skinner of TheFinanser.com, Colin Henderson of The BankWatch, Aneace Haddad of Aneace's Blog, and me, Scott Loftesness, of Payments News. The panel was introduced and deftly moderated by Steve Bowbrick.   » Continue Reading

In a post titled "Wells Fargo: Hitching its Reins to Mobile Banking", Brandon McGee writes for the Mobile Money & Banking blog about Wells Fargo's rollout of mobile banking services. McGee writes: "what captured my attention is that Wells Fargo seems to have strategically positioned themselves as the leader in mobile banking."

Jim Bruene (of the Online Banking Report) and I had a discussion yesterday about the evolution of mobile banking in the US market. He writes about it here on his Mobile Money & Banking blog. Back in February, Jim published is first forecast of how this market would evolve. In his blog post, he reflects on the dynamics of the market since that time and makes some adjustments to his thinking. He's looking for comments from industry participants - and providing a bit of a bounty to entice you to share your thoughts.

Javelin Strategy & Research has announced a new report titled "Financial Institution Blogs: How to Manage Your Brand, Engage Customers and Why You Can’t Afford to Wait" - saying it "shows why financial institutions must engage in blogging now, and provides specific steps for assessing this powerful new brand-building and customer-connection capability into 2008-10 strategic plans."   » Continue Reading

Jim Bruene posts on NetBanker about the Banking Camp that's getting organized for next weekend (July 21/22) - called BarCampBankSeattle.

Our thanks to Jim Bruene (of NetBanker and the Online Banking Report) for listing Payments News among his top five banking industry blogs! We also enjoy all of the other banking (and related) blogs he's listed and highly recommend them as well.

Jim Bruene's out with a new edition of the Online Banking Report - this time covering the area of "Social Personal Finance". More info about this new report is available on Jim's Netbanker blog.

Online Financial Innovations has announced the launch of NetBanker, a new free website featuring daily insights from the authors of the Online Banking Report. Congratulations to Jim Bruene of OBR on the launch of this great new service!