By now you would think that mobile banking would be as ubiquitous as ATMs, branches, and online web sites, judging by all the ink and electrons that have been expended writing about it, but it seems that there are still some holdouts out there.

It's rare when banking regulators express a desire to position their agencies on the leading edge of technology in financial services. The trend so far has been to depend on the industry to push the limits afforded by new and developing capabilities that offer the possibility of doing things better, faster, and more efficiently, while serving customers and providing returns on investment.

Did you hear about the family of five in Florida? Unfortunately, this is not a joke. It turns out they were involved in an identity fraud ring for more than three years. The family, with ages ranging from 24 to 37, had filed at least 130 fraudulent applications, using more than eight Social Security numbers and 11 dates of birth during a three-year time period.

You probably have nomophobia and don't even know it. It's the latest created word that describes that gut-wrenching, sweat-inducing, panic-attacking realization that you've lost your mobile phone.

Love it, hate it, it doesn't matter. Management at the least has to learn to tolerate the consumerization of devices in the work place, and, at the best, create and enforce policies acceptable to all parties-IT managers, security managers, business managers, and employees themselves.

It seems like only yesterday that personal financial management was a fertile field for financial institutions seeking new sources of revenue, especially because new online systems promised to make PFM provision affordable.

This being National Cyber Security Awareness Month, it's appropriate to start off with some of the eye-popping statistics that various industry players put out recently:

The gee whiz phase of mobile banking is over, or soon will be. Customer expectations increasingly are making it as much as an expected commodity as online banking is now.

A year ago every time "big data" was mentioned, one had to define the term, along with its tag-along partner, analytics.

Entropay, a European concern that runs a virtual credit card website that allows anyone to open and fund a virtual prepaid Visa card, was repeatedly attacked recently by highly sophisticated online hackers.