January, 2018

• 2 January

  As Its Rivals Write off Signatures, Visa Stands Alone

  

  Three of the four U.S. general-purpose card networks—American Express Co., Discover Financial Services, and Mastercard Inc.—now plan to cease requiring signatures for point-of-sale transactions made with their cards beginning in April. That leaves Visa Inc. as the sole signature supporter. AmEx on Dec. 11 joined Mastercard, which started the no-signature …

December, 2017

• 1 December

  Payments 3.0: Thoughts Over Morning Coffee

  

  Recently, I found in my hometown, general-circulation newspaper stories about new technologies and economic trends that banks will to have to deal with or that raise issues—and possibilities—bankers and payments organizations should probably be thinking about. Dell is creating a new $1 billion division that will focus on the Internet …
• 1 December

  Security Notes: Complexity: The Enemy Within

  

  The price paid for the dazzling convenience of swipe-and-pay and thumb-and-buy is the monstrosity of backroom complexity. The convenience of Venmo, PayPal, and Square hides the growing dependence on layers on layers of protocols, equipment, and technologies. Indeed, the flipside of clicking out your banking needs on your phone is …
• 1 December

  Real-Time Payments: New Possibilities, Competitive Issues

  

  Unless there is a potential fraud issue or customer dispute, very few of the trillions of transactions that cross U.S. electronic payment networks annually attract any attention. But the first transaction last month on The Clearing House’s new real-time payments system was so different that BNY Mellon, the bank originator, …

October, 2017

• 31 October

  Payments 3.0: Which Inventions Will Succeed?

  

  It has been a wild ride for the payments community the past several years. But is it going anywhere? How do we sort the valuable innovations from the passing fads? I’m pretty sure one winner will be blockchain, also called distributed-ledger technology (DLT). DLT has a solid, provable business case …
• 31 October

  Security Notes: Be Careful What You Wish For

  

  Barrels of ink have been poured and hours of shows have been aired on the hot topic of payment anonymity. Much of it plays on consumers’ uneasiness about the fact that Visa and Mastercard have a perfect view into who you are, how you spend your time, and your circumstances. …
• 31 October

  Apple Pay: Can’t Get Along With It, Can’t Get Along Without It

  

  The first big wave of Apple Pay contracts began expiring last month, and a big question for both Apple Inc. and the financial institutions that committed to support the computing giant’s mobile-payments app is whether to renew, and under what terms, in the face of less-than-spectacular results for mobile payments …
• 1 October

  Money in an AI World

  

  General artificial intelligence is not yet here, but some say it is around the corner. We in the payment realm must prepare for the mind-boggling possibility that non-human entities will behave human-like: make money, own money, lose money, become rich, pay taxes, and build an AI social dynamic much like …
• 1 October

  The Big Equifax Breach Comes Amid a Carnival of Fraud

  

  Last month’s disclosure that hackers accessed up to 143 million credit records at Equifax Inc. has stirred fears of a tsunami of fraud in coming months. But it turns out physical and online merchants are already struggling not only with a huge threat of fraud, but with a stunning fraud …
• 1 October

  DLT: Big Enough Now to Matter

  

  Distributed-ledger technology (DLT) may radically telescope the time for a new payments technology to reach significant commercial use. Forty years passed between the chip card’s invention and its widespread use, and 25 years went by from when a patent was issued for check-imaging technology until Check 21 fully exploited image-item …