April, 2018

• 2 April

  Security Notes: A Remedy for Wasted Drug Dollars

  

  The health-care industry is predominantly a simple, repetitive daily act carried out by millions of Americans: popping a pill. Seven out of 10 Americans are on prescription drugs. About 4 billion prescriptions are written annually, an average of 13 prescriptions per person. Taking our daily pills is our most common …
• 2 April

  Why Amazon Is Checking Into ‘Checking’

  

  Amazon.com Inc.’s interest in launching a checking-account-like product, reported last month by The Wall Street Journal, could have deep roots in its strategy both for payments in general and for Amazon Pay, the payment wallet it operates for non-Amazon sites, expert observers say. Talks between the Seattle-based retailing colossus and …

February, 2018

• 28 February

  Payments 3.0: How Payments Will Change

  

  A typical household makes from four to a dozen recurring payments month­ly. In addition, households pay for groceries and clothing and other things at points of sale and online. In the future, we may all commute using app-based ride services. But these overwhelmingly draw the passenger’s payment from a credit …
• 28 February

  Security Notes: The Real Cure for Payment Friction

  

  Remember the good old days, when you tossed a quarter into the peddler’s jar and picked up the daily paper in the train station? Now that was frictionless. You did not know the peddler. He had no clue who you were. You did not receive any paperwork: no invoice, no …
• 28 February

  Zelle Looks to Break Venmo’s Hammerlock on Millennials

  

  Payments observers who think Venmo and Square Cash have locked up the Millennial crowd for peer-to-peer payments may have to reconsider. With the new advertising blitz it announced in late January, the bank-owned Zelle service is making it plain it plans to steal its share of this huge consumer market. …
• 1 February

  The Hazy Horizon for Cannabis Payments

  

  After a short-lived scare, investors in the budding cannabis sector last month didn’t seem to be rattled by the hard line being taken by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions against their industry. But the legal marijuana industry is certainly no closer to getting payment card merchant accounts and other mainstream …
• 1 February

  Security Notes: Brave New Payments World

  

  Artificial intelligence (AI) is so unsettling that we look the other way as it encroaches on the fundamentals of what it is to be human. Why do I say this? As AI is envisioned today, each of us humans will have his or her smart self, or “sself.” This sself …
• 1 February

  Payments 3.0: Beyond Technological Innovation

  When payment volumes and values are displayed as a single graphic, some interesting patterns emerge about how we use current payment methods. Are there implications for new and future payment methods? – Debit card has the highest number of transactions but the lowest total value of those transactions. It has …

January, 2018

• 2 January

  Payments 3.0: Faster Payments: Coming Soon

  

  Faster payments in the United States took a major step forward in November with the sending of what many consider the first U.S. faster-payment transaction. A payment was made, in seconds, between U.S. Bank and BNY Mellon using The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments system, a system that meets evaluation …
• 2 January

  Security Notes: The Database Battleground

  Cyber fraud has matured into a solid industry, where economies and efficiencies count. So the lion’s share of hacking efforts is directed at large databases, where a breach is a gift that keeps on giving (as long as it is well-managed). Financial institutions and online merchants, in particular, use databases …