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 …

September, 2017

• 1 September

  What’s New at the OCC

  

  In 2015, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) expanded its involvement with financial-services innovation, making innovation a key area of focus. In a recent interview, Beth Knickerbocker, the OCC’s inaugural chief innovation officer, said, “The OCC is saying that it’s okay to innovate responsibly.” And although she …
• 1 September

  Bitcoin 1, Bitcoin 2 … Bitcoin 3?

  

  In late July, the currency known as Bitcoin split into two competing, incompatible currencies. The rebels who initiated the so-called fork may or may not survive the onslaught of shocked traders, many of whom rely on this currency for ransomware and other illicit payments. Still, even if Bitcoin-2 proves to …
• 1 September

  The Fraud Scourge Lessens for Debit Card Issuers

  

  Debit card fraud rates fell last year, according to a widely watched annual study of the U.S. debit market. The study also provides new insights about debit cards and mobile wallets, and debit’s increasing popularity for small purchases. The fraud-loss rate for non-PIN (mostly signature-debit) transactions fell 30% from 2.6 …

July, 2017

• 1 July

  Gift Cards Recover Their Momentum

  Gift cards issued by retailers are heating up, according to the latest research from Mercator Advisory Group. Total loads grew 6% in 2016 to reach $133.9 billion, according to Mercator’s Ben Jackson. That performance follows a decline in loads the year before. The research, which covers closed-loop gift cards as …