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.

In the perpetual race to keep advisors well equipped, efficient and loyal, Cetera Financial Group has just launched a technology platform for its investment adviser representatives.

The chip-equipment giant makes the largest acquisition in company history to get its foot in the door of a highly specialized and fast-growing segment of the chip industry.

Advisers want technology that will give them a comprehensive view of a household’s assets so that they can rebalance and deliver goals-based guidance more effectively. On Thursday, Fiserv, Inc., of Brookfield, Wis., announced a plan to deliver such a solution.

For many advisors, your personal or company website is the core of your web marketing efforts. It's no surprise, then, that advisors are starting to think about how to better utilize their website to both serve their existing clients and develop new business.

Even the most useful banking apps won't get as much play as Angry Birds. But bankers can learn from popular games and use similar technology as part of their customer interactions.

BB&T became the latest bank to roll out a new mobile banking application, giving business and consumer customers the ability to check balances and pay bills from their Android-powered smartphones and tablet PCs.

Over the next few weeks B of A plans to roll out revised versions of smartphone apps, with more of a focus on under-the-hood improvements than on flashy new features.

After years of incredible growth in sales, earnings and market cap, Google's first-quarter earnings miss and spike in operating expenses has unnerved some analysts and investors.

The Web-based analytical tool allows advisors to compare more than 10,000 mutual funds and ETFs in 60 different categories and formats to help them pick and choose the products that will best meet their clients' individual investment needs.

When it comes to social media most advisors will tell you “my clients don’t do that”. On the surface, this seems reasonable. However, if you have clients who work in corporate America, all bets are off.