Dodd/Frank. CFPB. Corporate governance. The very terms are apt to make bankers wince. Nevertheless, they’ve become integral to the industry and its management. Whatever one thinks of the specific merits—or demerits—of the increasing role of government oversight, they’re a fact of life. And, in a sense, they’re also an opportunity, both for banks and the vendors that are feverishly fashioning technological solutions to changing compliance realities.

Several recent corporate product announcements, coupled with a slew of new research, indicate a rapid maturing of the cloud and how it can be used by bankers and businesses in general.

It was and continues to be big news, starting a couple weeks ago: Global Payments Inc. reported unauthorized access to its processing system affecting credit card payments. On March 30, the company said less than 1.5 million card numbers may have been exported.

Recent studies and developments offer insights and some cautions

As observed before, the one thing holding back an explosion of new payments options has been the consumer’s legitimate concern about security. That said, however, nothing has stopped a lot of smart people and companies from thinking about what may be possible once the security issue is resolved.

You’d think enough has been said already about security and mobile banking, but here’s the Federal Reserve commenting just last week in its survey on mobile financial services:

Technology and process management is increasingly on the board’s radar

Lowly POS terminal now a key link

The stars are aligning and pointing to a fairly clear conclusion: Mobile payments will only surge and it’s up to banks to either dominate this field or lose to hungrier nonbank competitors.

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.