Wall Street Is Trying to Beat Silicon Valley at Its Own Game

By Susan Deckerand Elizabeth Dexheimer, Bloomberg Businessweek

Banks and Silicon Valley are on a collision course, the future of finance may be at stake, and one side is brandishing its most dreaded weapon: the PowerPoint presentation.

In January dozens of government patent examiners gathered in a suburban Washington lecture hall to listen to Bank of America employees go through a slideshow. Hundreds more tuned in for a webcast. The presentation detailed 25 ways banks digitally authenticate such things as a customer depositing checks. It may sound agonizingly technical, but for banks, documenting every detail of what they do ...