Google Inc. isn't asking for a share of the payments revenue generated with its new mobile wallet. Nevertheless, partnering with the search engine juggernaut could be a trade-off for banks.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has fined a former trader at Morgan Stanley $150,000 and barred him from the securities industry for two years after he fooled its risk management system with bogus equity swap deals.

Could another dotcom bubble be on the horizon? Less than a month after social networking site LinkedIn blew up in its blockbuster initial public offering, online coupon seller Groupon filed its S-1 form with the SEC.

linkedFA, a social networking web site designed specifically for financial professionals, announced a strategic relationship with Thomson Reuters, the New York-based business information service, to provide financial data to advisors using the social network.

The technology division of NYSE Euronext said its Capital Markets Community Platform will provide direct, on-demand access to high-performance, low-latency services from NYSE Technologies, including its Superfeed of market data, its Risk Management Gateway, its Managed Services Hub, and its global Liquidity Center Network.

Despite the fact that social media is critical for marketing and growth of financial advisory practices, a significant number of advisors are still concerned about using social media for compliance reasons, according to a Peak Advisor Alliance survey released on Wednesday.

ING Direct's customers now have one more hoop to jump through to use a personal financial management site. ING isn't apologizing for the inconvenience, and perhaps counterintuitively, PFM providers see no reason ING should.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney made the inevitable official by allowing a test group of 600 wealth management advisors to use Twitter in a limited capacity to connect and interact with clients and prospective new clients.

Hubspot’s latest study shows that the number of companies that blog has grown from 48% in 2009 to 65% this year. Indeed, it appears that non-bloggers are fast becoming the minority, and it’s not hard to see why: companies that blog have 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages, compared to those that do not.

Investors clearly are buying into the social media hype, sending LinkedIn shares through the roof in their first trading day.

Corporate cultures will ultimately define how far social media tools go in helping banks and financial services firms deliver services to customers.

Bank of America has hired Morgan Stanley's chief information officer of enterprise infrastructure, David Reilly, away to be CTO of B of A's Global Wealth and Investment Management team.

Dividing up computing capacity inside an organization is not only cutting a company's ties to fixed-in place servers -- it's cutting the cords of managers to the hardware that they are supervising.

The two-day collapse of Amazon Web Services last month is the kind of incident that underscores the concern that continues to keep critical applications, such as Wall Street's trading programs, out of remote, hosted online services and data centers, said Geoff Tudor, chief cloud strategist at Hewlett-Packard Company.

New research by Novantas LLC, Forrester Research and others adds weight to an idea being kicked around in the industry: that mobile may have its limits as a way to entice tech-savvy customers, reduce branch use and cut costs.

Advisors Asset Management is reaching out to the 37,000-plus registered reps and independent advisors in its network to help them begin or perhaps expand on their social media endeavors to help improve communication with their clients and attract new advisors to their firms.

Tradar said its portfolio and order management software will become available as a hosted service for fund managers, through Eze Castle Integration.

Markit and Deutsche Bank said they are providing financial research through a single application for iPad users.

But so far, it is not drawing in new demographics.

Most broker-dealers and compliance departments are terrified of social media, but advisors cannot afford to be, Matthew Halloran a practice management coach at Peak Advisor Alliance said during the company’s Excell Meeting.