May, 2017

• 1 May

  Slow on the Uptake for Faster Payments

  

  The subject of faster payments has been in the news almost continually for months now, but apparently awareness of the subject, and in some cases adoption, remains lower than expected among the financial institutions that will be depended on to implement speedier settlement. That’s if survey results released in April …
• 1 May

  The Top-Heavy Acquiring Industry

  

  Consulting firm The Strawhecker Group is out with its 2016 rankings of U.S. merchant acquirers, and they show that 240 acquirers and independent sales organizations processed more than $5 trillion in payment volume. The 10 biggest acquirers accounted for 80% of that volume. Topping the list is JPMorgan Chase & …

April, 2017

• 1 April

  Why ID Theft Must Be Defeated

  

  The identity crisis in cyberspace is not like the weather, which we all complain about and accept as a shared fate. It is not a force of nature. It is a product of our construction, and therefore within our power to solve. The first step is to define it properly. …
• 1 April

  Faster Payments: Are We There Yet?

  

  At latest count, there are 21 countries that have faster-payments systems in operation. Some, like Japan’s, have been in place for decades. Others, like Denmark’s, have been running for only a few years. And some nations, like the United Arab Emirates with its move to all-digital payments, are laying the …
• 1 April

  An Incentive for Wallet Providers To Offer Incentives

  

  Mobile-wallet providers just might have to buy some love if they want consumers to adopt their fledgling services. New findings from Auriemma Consulting Group based on research with 1,505 payment card holders eligible for mobile-payments programs show that transaction-based incentives are effective in building the frequency of mobile transactions and …

March, 2017

• 1 March

  Prepaid’s Day in the Sun

  

  In the United States, prepaid money is the most rapidly growing payment instrument. It is a lifesaver to the unbanked and the underbanked. It is the payment vehicle used in an increasing number of creative arrangements. But it is also the platform of choice for many fraudsters, and it amounts …
• 1 March

  Can We Predict Successful Innovation?

  

  By now, we have seen enough fintech payments disruptors that we should be able to draw conclusions about which ones will succeed and which won’t. Are there heuristics that indicate which innovations will succeed, and which will likely fail due to miscalculations of market demand and how best to meet …
• 1 March

  A Payments Divide Over Dumping Durbin

  

  Now that Republicans in the wake of the November 2016 elections control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, there is a distinct possibility that the Dodd-Frank Act, which Republicans have opposed since a then Democratic majority in Congress enacted the sweeping banking-reform law in 2010, could …

February, 2017

• 1 February

  Hacking 2.0

  

  Cyberfraud is maturing into a stable, highly profitable business, adopting modern management principles and investing heavily in innovation. It has already evolved into an impressive, sophisticated, well-managed, capitalistic environment, composed of bold hack-innovators, hack-services providers, hack analytics, hack market promoters, and some hacking line soldiers, who are the ones who …
• 1 February

  Decision Time Regarding APIs

  

  Today, blockchain/shared-ledger and artificial-intelligence technologies are getting a lot of press, but there is an older and simpler technology that is ready to use now and is comparatively easy to implement. It is changing how payments are done in a way that financial institutions need to carefully think through. Application …