November, 2016

• 1 November

  A Celebration of Randomness

  

  You can’t define it, really. You can’t identify it when you see it. It’s easily faked, and it looks totally useless. Yet, randomness is rising to become the most valuable resource in the unending cyber war. Crude oil extracted from the ground was used for light, heat, and pavement. But …
• 1 November

  Doing Payments Strategy Anew

  

  The question of payments strategy is separating those institutions whose payments business will grow from those whose payments business will shrink. Three things have changed that payments strategies have to deal with. One obvious change is payments itself. The second is how banks are reorganizing themselves to meet the changing …

October, 2016

• 1 October

  Ransomware’s Perfect Storm

  

  In the literature and in conversations about it, ransomware appears as a curious oddity on the canvass of cybercrime, a menace for which a healthy dose of cyber hygiene will serve as a satisfactory antidote. The standard advice is: “Watch for shady Web sites and phishy emails, and you will …
• 1 October

  A Case of EMV Blues for the Terminal Makers

  

  It was a surprise, but then again, it wasn’t. Leading U.S. point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. on Sept. 1 reported its second straight quarter of disappointing sales of EMV chip card equipment to small and mid-sized businesses. Less than a week later, VeriFone’s archrival, France-based Ingenico Group, reported a …
• 1 October

  Will Zelle Be the Belle of the P2P Ball?

  

  The big banks that run clearXchange are slapping a brand name on the peer-to-peer payments network, five years after founding it. The new name is Zelle, says Early Warning Services LLC, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based fraud-management company that acquired clearXchange last year. A spokesperson says the brand will not appear commercially …

September, 2016

• 1 September

  Next up: the Money of Things

  

  For almost three decades, the Internet evolved in stealth until it exploded on the public scene and changed everything. Right now, something called “The Internet of Things” is being hatched in geeknests around the world, and it will change everything—again! Sixty billion “things” are projected to combine into a network …
• 1 September

  Payments: The Long View

  

  As I start working on this month’s column, three news stories are flickering on my screen. One is about major banks using blockchain technology to move non-monetary, high-value, high-security documents and intellectual property. The second article is about more major retail chains piling on to sue MasterCard and Visa over …
• 1 September

  EMV’s Chargeback Toll: $5.8 Billion in 2016

  

  The U.S. EMV transition that began in earnest last October has brought with it a lot of pain, but few issues have been more agonizing for merchants than the flood of chargebacks they’re seeing for the first time. Now estimates are emerging that begin to quantify that pain. Some 14.7 …

July, 2016

• 1 July

  Notes From a Payments Veteran

  Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Rich Oliver, payments consultant, speaker, and retired executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. We discussed some of the hurdles he sees in the U.S. payments system as it accelerates from decades of glacial evolution to the world …
• 1 July

  Cyber Passport: The Technology

  Last month, I proposed a government-administered program that would offer citizens a cyber passport, a randomized, replaceable, short-lived code that, once issued, would become a requirement for all critical online transactions involving the covered individual. I asserted that this initiative would defeat today’s plague of massive breaches, which turns millions …