Wave-and-pay cellphones coming

Canadian shoppers will soon be able to reach for their cellphones instead of their wallets at the checkout counter, said The Canadian Press.

Royal Bank will team up with Visa Canada to test technology that allows cellphones to act as mobile wallets, letting people literally pay by phone.

Anne Koski, head of payment innovations at Royal Bank`s cards division, said the pilot project will see mobile phones embedded with special microchips. There will be no cost to the cellphone user and, initially, the system will be limited to transactions of $25 or less.

Senior managers in UK banks have a good opinion of their staff and strategy - but a less rosy view of how they handle information and IT, says silicon.com.

This is according to a benchmarking survey, conducted for the Chartered Institute of Banks in Scotland, and consultancy Charteris, which polled 40 senior business managers in 12 UK banks about the quality of their internal structures.

The managers were asked how they would benchmark themselves on a number of commercial aspects, including information, people, processes, strategy and technology. The banks rated themselves well on the calibre of the people they employ and the strategies they formulate - but badly on their management of information and even worse on the technology in place.

Bank of the West has taken the hosted route and passed its voice automation needs on to Intervoice, with a contract valued at approximately $1.1 million over 36 months, says TMCnet.

With Intervoice, the bank`s voice automation system moves to a hosted environment - no longer requiring the bank to maintain the voice automation infrastructure.

As per the agreement, Bank of the West has said it will transfer all the authority of its monitoring and hosting voice automation technology to Intervoice at two locations: Fargo, North Dakota and Omaha, Nebraska.