The Financial Services Technology Consortium has posted some of the presentations from its recent Annual Conference to its website.

Glenbrook's Jim Salters files this report: Even if you've been following the authentication space and the industry dash to comply with the FFIEC Authentication Guidance, it's likely that you've never heard of Arcot. But that may soon change. According to the company, a major bank in the US will soon announce their plans to deploy ArcotID technology to its millions of retail banking customers. And while this might sound like just another customer win for an authentication solution provider, this appears to represent a dramatically different authentication strategy than we've seen so far from a large US bank, with interesting implications.

Mentioned earlier here on Payments News, the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) has formally announced that it has launched a major project aimed at authenticating financial institutions to their customers.

The Financial Services Technology Consortium has announced the "Authenticating the FI to Consumers" project, a follow-on to the recently concluded Better Mutual Authentication Project. The project intends to develop use cases dealing with authenticating the FI to consumers, along with applicable threat analyses, processes, evaluation metrics and the testing of combinations of various important emerging technology solutions against Financial Services community use cases and requirements. A project prospectus is available from Dan Schutzer or Chris Nautiyal at the FSTC.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has posted a summary of its 2005 Payments Conference titled "Forces Shaping the Payments Environment" (pdf).

The case of PayPal demonstrates that if existing payment products are unable to satisfy the requirements of the marketplace, new providers may emerge to provide superior payment solutions. Interestingly, such products may be provided by nontraditional payment providers. However, it appears that build upon the existing payment infrastructure. Thus, partnerships with existing payment providers and networks may be critical for greater market adoption.

Off-premise ATM supplier Triton has announced that it is opening up its ATM interface specifications through the release of its Triton Standard.

The Object Management Group has announced that its Electronic Payments Interoperability Working Group (EPI-WG) has issued a Request for Information to the finance industry and other users and processors of electronic payments seeking to shape a standard electronic payments framework that lets institutions everywhere interoperate without replacing existing systems. The RFI is available online. READ MORE

Glenbrook's Russ Jones has just posted a new opinion piece on RFID in financial services.

If implemented properly, with a careful eye on the special requirements of the financial services industry, RFID holds great promise. But if deployed prematurely or before all the privacy ramifications are understood, it might also provide some nasty and unfortunate surprises.

Eweek's take on XML in Financial Services.