Alibaba plans on commercial bank

Banking regulators in east China's Zhejiang province have confirmed that Alibaba, the country's largest e-business operator, is planning to establish a commercial bank and has won the support from local government, according to recent reports from China National Radio, says People's Daily.

"Alibaba's plan to set up a new commercial bank is awaiting approval from the People's Bank of China and China Banking Regulatory Commission," says an official from Zhejiang Banking Regulatory Bureau.

Insiders from Alibaba Group disclosed that the central bank and the regulatory commission have approved the group's micro-loan business. Zhang Peng, chief editor of Business Value magazine, says the IT companies have been gaining influence on banking institutions. He predicts that the power of the Internet will play a bigger role if Alibaba finally establishes its own banking branch.

Record attendance is expected at the 12th annual Business Best Practices and Emerging Technologies Conference, which will be hosted on 30 September by the University of Wisconsin-Madison E-Business Consortium, writes WisBusiness.

Members of the media are invited to join attendees to hear a talk by a Google executive who is the youngest woman ever included on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list. Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search product and user experience at Google, will discuss creating an organisational culture of innovation and how such a culture developed at Google.

In addition to giving the conference keynote address, Mayer will receive the 2010 Distinguished Fellow Award from the UW-Madison E-Business Institute, the research-orientated counterpart to the industry-focused consortium. The award is presented annually in honour of significant achievements and advancements in information technology and e-business.

Law enforcement in Romania have announced the arrest of a man accused of trying to phish IDs and passwords for more than 3 000 eBay employees, reports eWeek.

Liviu Mihail Concioiu, arrested 22 September, is accused of having embarked on two phishing attacks against eBay in 2009 and stealing employee credentials with which he accessed an eBay database and stole company documents and files, among them an application used by eBay employees to query a database with information about customers and their transactions.

Separately, Concioiu is accused of working with others to fraudulently use ATM cards to withdraw 300 000 euros from banks in Italy. Prosecutors in Romania cooperated in the investigation with the US Secret Service officers in the US embassy in Bucharest as well as authorities in Italy.