Abstract
In this paper the business lines in Bank of Montreal show an increasingly profitable growth margin in recent times. The writer shows that by realizing the revenues and assets of the bank one can see the new mission to make acquisitions on the international market as well as in commerce in the United States. Further, the writer points out that by pursing new avenues of investment banking the Bank of Montreal is expanding to suit the new global markets. The writer also notes that without this approach the bank would be missing an opportunity to expand exponentially into new market.

From the Paper
"The aim of this financial study will help to understand the goals and objectives that the Bank of Montreal (BMO) possess in the near future. By realizing the investment potential through loan policy, profit margins, and the business division present within this bank, one can discern the growing capacity of generating capital through this banking institution. Also, one can evaluate the mission statement of the Bank of Montreal in regards to progressive monetary and financial goals for the bank's future."

Tags:montreal, bank, finance

From the Paper
"The Wells Fargo Bank was started in 1852 in part as a consequence of the Gold Rush in California. The company started as a banking and express company and has developed into a major banking institution in the western United States. The company survived the period of banking shakedown in the 1980s during the savings and loan scandal and the various bank failures brought about by bad loans and bad management. Wells Fargo has encountered some problems, but it has been reorganized under new leadership and seems to have weathered the storm that destroyed many other institutions either by scuttling them outright or by making it necessary for them to merge in order to survive.

The Gold Rush started in California in 1848 near Sutter's Mill outside Colema, California, and thousands of people seeking riches in gold streamed into California in the next few years."

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Abstract
The author of this project plan is an employee of a major credit card company. In this paper, the writer examines issues of consumer confidence, trust and convenience in credit card use. The paper seeks to identify what initiatives have been used by financial institutions in recent years to provide consumers with the confidence they need to safely use their credit cards while avoiding fraudulent transactions in both brick-and-mortar and on line settings. The stated aim of the paper is to suggest what steps can be made to improve consumer confidence in a bank's credit card administration services.

Outline:
Project Plan
Brief Description of the Context of the Study
Project Rationale:
Provisional Reading List
Information about Data and Artifacts
Time Line
References

From the Paper
"Data collection will be accomplished by consulting relevant resources in public and university libraries as well as reliable online research sources such as EBSCO and Questia. Organizational resources including those maintained by Citi Cards will also be consulted. The data to be collected will focus on the impact of initiatives designed to improve consumer confidence in credit card use in quantifiable ways. Keywords and phrases to be used for this purpose will include: "credit cards," "credit card fraud," "Citibank," "international credit," "credit card industry," "online credit," "online credit transactions," "online fraud," "identity theft," "banking security," and so forth. The research process will progress in a step-wise fashion, beginning at the top of an inverted pyramid in terms of generality concerning the areas of interest and proceeding more specifically to the issue of defeating credit card fraud at Citibank. Serendipitously identified resources were also incorporated where appropriate. Exclusion criteria to be included in identifying these resources will be those resources that are less than 10 and preferably less than 5 years old, and published in the English language. This approach is highly congruent with a number of social researchers who emphasize the need to review the existing literature as part of virtually any research project today. For example, Gratton and Jones (2003) note that a review of the relevant literature is an essential task in all research... "

Tags:consumers, accounts, virtual, identity, theft, financial, EBSCO, questia

Abstract
This paper covers the subject of bank mergers and acquisitions mainly focusing on European and American banks. The paper offers an in-depth look at both the financial and organizational sides of how a merger or acquisition effects the bottom line for both finances and employees. The paper covers a review of the literature in order to analyzes these topics.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Mergers and Acquisition: A Review of the Literature 1980-2005
Background to the Study
Data Analysis
Conclusion

From the Paper
"(3) Assessing employee opinion on the M&A and discussing issues of effective leadership and measuring of employee production and morale after the M&A are important to weighing the benefit of the M&A. For an organization facing an M&A, they can look at past M&As to assess strengths and weaknesses. This will allow that bank to adjust the strategy and aid in handling problems that will arise. This will be done through looking at surveys of employee and their reactions to M&As. Such statistics will include ratios looking at how their morale survived the M&A and also how many employees stayed or quit."

Tags:financial, acquisitions, M&A

Abstract
The paper explains the importance of customer service in the banking business and examines banks with unusual or extraordinary customer service policies. The paper looks at Sovereign Bank's "Red Carpet Service" policy, Citizens Bank's website with its on-line suggestion box, M&T Bank's payment assistance for loan customers, Commerce Bank's opening hours and Omega Bank's courtesy coverage for their customers. The paper then focuses on the role of bank employees in following the bank's customer service procedures and relates the outcome of two banks who were contacted with customer complaints. The paper concludes by proposing a customer service policy for all banks.

From the Paper
"Banks are a service-related business. There is only a certain number of ways banking services can be offered to customers. With that in mind, one of the most effective ways to get customers' attention is to focus on customer service. Customer service policies need to be developed and designed to keep current customers happy, as well as, attract new customers. Another thing to consider is the use of the internet. Most banks have on-line access. Customer service policies must be designed to include extreme security measures while maintaining ease of use for the customer."

Tags:employees, complaints, respect, feedback

Abstract
This paper discusses on-line banking--the ability to conduct banking transactions on the internet. The paper claims this is revolutionizing the way that consumers bank. The paper explains that behind this transformation is information technology. With its use, banks have been able to scale and secure transactions, provide the same and often more functionality than brick-and-mortar banks and evolve from mass marketing to one-to-one marketing. The paper examines issues of security and fraud in on-line banking.

Outline
Introduction
Consumer Readiness
Hardware Infrastructure
Security and Fraud
Software Functionality
Customer Relationship Management
Conclusion

From the Paper
"The popularity of online banking is soaring with more than fifty million adults banking online in the United States as of November, 2004, an increase of forty-seven percent during the past two years (Sullivan, 2005). It is the fastest-growing Internet activity. Home broadband connections are credited with driving consumer adoption. Those with broadband access are about twice as likely to have tried online banking as users with dial-up connections because broadband encourages users to do more activities online. Demographic characteristics of those more likely to have broadband access include consumers between the ages of twenty eight and thirty nine, and more affluent households, reflecting a group inclined to be early adopters of information technology."

Tags:web, internet, finances

Abstract
This paper examines three on-line banking websites--Washington Mutual, Chase and Wells Fargo--by using several criteria such as overloading, consistency of image, grammar and spelling, speed of loading, functioning links, ease of use and overall impression: The Wells Fargo website was judged to be the best. The author stresses that banks must consider the requirements for protection of rights and interests of depositors, establishment of stability and confidence in financial markets and requirements for economic development in both their brick-and mortar and online operations. The paper relates that e-Business has changed the way in which banks must operate in the areas of customer relations (CRM), the banking supply chain, customer-based marketing that provides many customers services and immediately becoming an international entity through their presence on the internet.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Evaluation of Web sites
Washington Mutual
Chase
Wells Fargo
How Web Sites Differ
Washington Mutual
Chase
Wells Fargo
Bank Supply Chain in a Brick-and-Mortar Setting
Web Site Supply Chain Modifications
Marketing Tools
Washington Mutual
Chase
Wells Fargo
Customer Service
Washington Mutual
Chase
Wells Fargo
Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues
Security, Confidentiality and International Issues
Washington Mutual
Chase
Wells Fargo
Conclusion

From the Paper
"To compete successfully in the highly competitive marketplace, banking Web sites must strive every day to deliver consistent levels of performance and experience as perceived by users. Site performance must be formatted to accommodate speed reliability factors, and display what type of company they portray themselves to be. There are ten areas that Web sites are measured against: Response time (over high speed, DSL, and dial up connections), response consistency, geographic uniformity, load handling, page design, network connectivity, site reliability, and outage hours."

Tags:crm, international, competition, evaluation, customer

Abstract
The paper presents a research proposal to test the hypothesis that that those factors that tend to contribute to the success of online banking in Hong Kong today can be identified through secondary research consisting of a critical review of the relevant peer-reviewed, scholarly and organizational literature together with primary research using a questionnaire instrument designed to elicit preferred electronic banking functions. The paper uses this approach to confirm or refute the hypothesis stated above and uses the following question as a guideline: "What are the most important factors that contribute to an online bank's success in Hong Kong today"? The paper then describes the questionnaire, the sampling approach, and the design and analysis to be used by the study. The paper includes a copy of the questionnaire.

Outline:
Introduction
Hypothesis and Research Questions
Questionnaire
Sampling
Design and Analysis

From the Paper
"Indeed, convenience to the banking consumer has emerged one of the primary advantages of Internet banks today (Raskinis and Bartkute 2007:121). Convenience and accessibility, though, are just part of the larger picture of which factors contribute to the success of electronic banking today. For instance, Calabrese and Remshard note that electronic banks require a viable functioning organizational structure and some ways of providing feedback to consumers in as efficient manner as possible. While all banks will have their own agenda concerning their respective goals when establishing a virtual extension of their brick-and-mortar outlets, there are some commonalities they all share."

Tags:convenience, questionnaire, influential, demographic, variables, in, depth, investigations

Abstract
This paper explains that internet crime includes eager young hackers, who infiltrated web sites to see if they can get away with it; professionals, who are looking for individual data and account numbers and computer frauds such as pyramid schemes and stolen credit cards used to defraud people by ordering high-end merchandise. The author points out that Citibank has three "lines of defense" against unlawful use or access to a customer's account information: (1) Firewalls and VeriSign digital IDs, which act as an electronic checkpoint, refusing access to any intruder; (2) a scrambled 128-bit strong encryption and (3) log-on authentication, which includes not only the T-PIN number but also an additional 6-digit alphanumeric code, containing both letters and numbers. The paper relates that internet security has become an industry in itself; many large financial institutions are building gateways to protect their information storage and retrieval systems from unlawful entry.

From the Paper
"Banks and other institutions that rely on electronic money transactions are now taking additional steps to assure security for their customers. Citibank is one prominent example. Their "privacy" message, accessible on the Internet, explains "In order to provide better service or to address security hazards, we will occasionally use a 'cookie'. A cookie is a small piece of information which a Web site stores on your Web browser on your PC and can later retrieve. The cookie cannot be read by a Web site other than the one that set the cookie. We use cookies for a number of administrative purposes, for example, to store your prefer3ences for certain kinds of information or to store a password so that you do not have to input it every time you visit our site."

Tags:gateways, firewalls, cookie, citibank, t-pin

Abstract
This paper states that technology is noted for increasing the overall efficiency of any business and banking is no exception. The paper focuses on more recent technological advances in banking-- digitization, on-line banking and systems integration for one-to-one marketing. The paper contends that these applications have dramatically altered the overall cost structure of banks and have completely transformed the way they now conduct business.

Outline
Introduction
Digitization
Online Banking
Customer Relationship Management
Conclusion

From the Paper
"Up until the late 1990s, institutions focused their technology strategies on the front end of the business. Data access in the back office continued to be mired in a myriad of costly manual business processes (Walker, 2005). Increasingly, digitization is being used to facilitate end-to-end process automation. Digitization formalizes, through technology, the business processes, content and associated metadata required for efficient business operations. It leverages a services-oriented architecture to create a more nimble business infrastructure that provides critical linkages, among the customer, the back office and emerging technologies. Gartner Dataquest forecasts double-digit licensing growth over the next four years for digitization tools such as content and document management and collaboration software because financial institutions are beginning to recognize the need to bring better cost control standardization, consistency and measurement to their business processes."

Tags:online, finances, digitization