February, 2018

• 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 …
• 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, …