Today’s antifraud, anti-money laundering, and general anti-online bad guy measures are pretty good compared with a few years ago—but so what? Today’s digital thieves and malcontents already can run rings around such measures and are gearing up for mischief that is orders of magnitude more sophisticated.

Here’s a question that is kicking around just now: Would it help marketing and customer retention if a bank’s internet address domain was much more specific? Namely, instead of ending in dot com (.com), it ended in dot-bank (.bank)? How about taking it further by having the address end in dot-yourbank (.yourbank)?

MasterCard last week joined Visa in issuing a plan—it’s termed a “roadmap”—for the widespread introduction here of the Europay-MasterCard-Visa standard for electronic payments. That is, using cards embedded with computer chips instead of relying on the magnetic stripe.

UX is the internet wonk word for “user experience,” or the measurement of how easy or how hard it is to use a given website for its stated purpose. The object, of course, is to provide a good UX.

It used to be simple. You wanted something, you plunked down enough cash and coins to cover it, or paid by “plastic.”

It may be getting tedious hearing about how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets are the big new thing for business, including retail banking, but the facts are the facts: business social media is a big thing, and it’s no longer new.

With all the predictions of what’s coming for 2012 floating around, one really should stand out: Increased mobile security.

Multifactor biometrics that allow hands-free ATM transactions. Ultrapersonalized marketing material indistinguishable from a personally written letter. Mind reading headsets connected to computer cursors.