Banks and internet banks

The second largest commercial bank in Kuwait is offering Mobile Plus service to improve banking convenience for its customers.

The new offering Mobile Plus which represents an upgraded version of the existing Push service in fact is a menu-driven application. With the application the bank customers may use banking functions via their mobile phone.

On Monday Alabama National BanCorporation's (ANB) merchant payments business was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Moneris Solutions, one of North America's largest payment processors. The acquisition includes the servicing of 103 banking centers in the Southeast as well as the existing merchant processing portfolio. From now on all existing and future credit card processing sales and servicing functions related to ANB will be under the supervision of Moneris.

The Islamic banking services launched by Ahlibank Qatar (ABQ) proved popular with customers and brought huge revenues. Thereby ABQ is determined to promote its services on a much larger scale.

“The demand for Islamic financing services is growing due to the fact most clients feel more confident because it operates in compliance with Shariah principles,” said Bassel Gama Aly, ABQ CEO.

Beginning from today all customers of Crédit Agricole in France will be able to view their bank accounts (except securities accounts) on their iPhones.

The initiative agrees with Crédit Agricole’s policy to march in step with the technological progress thus offering its customers convenient instruments to facilitate their banking relationships.

Final approval was granted to Citigroup's banking unit in China to issue local debit cards, a step toward expanding its services to Chinese retail customers.

The first bank to get authorization to conduct local debit card business in China was the Bank of East Asia which obtained permisson earlier this year. Two more financial institutions applied for approval: HSBC and Standard Chartered.

A deal worth US$442 million was arranged by Online discount brokerage E*Trade with Scotiabank. Under the terms of the deal E*Trade is to sell its Canadian operations to Scotiabank.

Earlier in January a massive fourth quarter net loss of $1.7 billion was posted by the company while the net income the year before amounted $176.9 million which is explained by getting badly burned by the US mortgage crisis last year.

In UAE an electronic image based check clearing system was introduced by the Central Bank. The Image Check Clearing System (ICCS), the newly launched product, represents the modern way of processing traditional paper based payments instruments.

With ICCS fully electronic clearing of check regardless of where they are presented becomes possible. At the beginning the system will clear checks within a maximum of 36 hours which is to be reduced at a later stage.

1 million customers of Barclays Bank were noticed to use online banking services without a single case of fraud.

Security success of Barclays Bank, the world's fourth largest financial services firm is ascribed to its customer's use of smart card readers from Gemalto.

234 Emirates Bank ATM machines, 60 Emirates Islamic Bank ATM machines and 180 National Bank of Dubai ATM machines will be integrated into one network as reported by Emirates NBD. Now customers of the three banks will be able to use any of the machines belonging to the enlarged ATM network to perform various banking and payment transactions which will be available in unison across this channel.