2013: That was the year that was

As Finextra pulls the shutters down on 2013, we take a look back at our most popular news stories, videos, features and blogs over the course of the past year. The site will re-open for business on 2 January 2014.

Top news stories of 2012

January

Barclays banks on cloud and Linux to slash development costs

Barclays Bank plans to slash software development costs by 90% by building a private cloud infrastructure and moving more applications to machines running the Linux open source operating system.

February

Hacker plays Angry Birds on ATM

Russian security researchers appear to have hacked a cash machine and used it to play a game of Angry Birds.

March

Bookie offers 9/4 on bitcoin value hitting $500 by year end

Bookmaker Paddy Power is seeking to cash in on the bitcoin publicity wave, offering odds of just 9/4 on the virtual currency being worth more than $500 a pop by the end of the year.

April

Chase and la Caixa top mobile banking study; HSBC bottom of the pile

Chase has topped Forrester Research's mobile banking rankings, with Spain's la Caixa proving Europe's top dog and HSBC trailing badly at the bottom of the table.

May

Live: EBAday 2013, day one

June

Big data to drive banks' mobile wallet strategies - Finextra research

Research from Finextra finds that banks around the world are looking to discounted offers and big data analytics to beat off the competition from telcos and tech start-ups as they battle for control of the consumer mobile wallet.

July

Bank economists warn of disruptive threat from mobile and crowdfunding

Banks that fail to invest in mobile technology and crowdfunding platforms risk being swept away by a wave of disruptive innovation warn economists at US bank BBVA Compass.

August

Payments in 2022: Cash out, mobile in

Gazing into its crystal ball, the UK's Payments Council predicts that Brits will turn their backs on cash over the next 10 years as plastic cards continue their ascent and mobile money becomes a mainstream player.

September

HSBC tops UK bank social media customer service table

HSBC is Britain's most engaged bank on social media, using the likes of Twitter and Facebook to provide prompt customer service, according to research from IMGroup.

October

Money2020 stirs up cashless society debate

While much of the chatter at the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas centred on schemes to eliminate hard cash, former Citibanker Jay Bhattacharya took a contrarian approach, brandishing a newspaper clipping from 1972 that confidently forecast the arrival of a cashless society by the end of the 1970s.

November

Google bypasses the Secure Element to circumvent carrier restrictions on mobile wallet

Google has found a way to circumvent carrier restrictions on its mobile wallet by introducing support for Host Card Emulation in the latest version of its Android operating system, effectively removing the need for access to the telco-controlled Secure Element.

December

UK consumers not interested in mobile payments at the checkout - YouGov

A YouGov poll of UK consumers has shown a strong resistance to mobile payments technology for paying for purchases at the point-of-sale.

Videos

Bullish on bitcoin

Mobile payments: Sibos's Holy Grail?

Swift's Nordic conference set for Stockholm

Mobile banking - what the West can learn from the East

Finding peace in payments

Features

Appetite for integration - How can banks merge risk and finance? - Webcast

Think local, act global - Webcast