February, 2023

• 1 February

  Payments 3.0: An Unfazed CFPB’s Big Agenda for ‘23

  

  Even though the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be working to secure its future throughout much of the year, the agency still has big regulatory plans for 2023. As this column discussed in November, the Bureau will be facing court fights over the prepaid-accounts final rule and, separately, the source …
• 1 February

  Security Notes: Digital Money As a Privacy Tool

  

  After panicking when Bitcoin surged, central banks reconsidered the new technology of money and ostensibly figured out how to fashion it into the most powerful population-control tool ever— a means for fine-tuned surveillance of subjects and citizens alike, and a weapon to monitor people and steer them according to their …
• 1 February

  Why the FTC Singled Out Mastercard

  

  The Federal Trade Commission announced two days before Christmas it had leveled a preliminary consent order against Mastercard Inc. The order—issued to correct what the agency saw as roadblocks the card company had erected against routing online debit transactions to competing networks—may have surprised at least some observers. That’s because …

January, 2023

• 1 January

  Payments 3.0: With P2P Fraud, Focus on Before, Not After

  

  The discussion about fraud in Zelle and other person-to-person payment apps focuses on the wrong question. Providers, industry observers, and regulators are all discussing what should happen when someone is scammed out of money on these apps. Recent conversations have revolved around whether or not banks, payments providers, or the …
• 1 January

  Security Notes: Payments As a Disaster-Recovery Plan

  

  Last month, we noted 81 years since the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. The leaders of the day, smart and learned, did not draw timely conclusions from a very similar attack Japan unleashed on a Russian naval base in 1904. Nor did the same leaders pay much attention to Hitler’s …
• 1 January

  How the Big Banks Are Addressing P2P Scams

  

  An ongoing controversy regarding consumer losses to authorized but fraudulent transfers on the Zelle peer-to-peer platform has stirred at least some of the country’s biggest banks to work out a range of solutions, including wider adoption of scam defense and detection technology, sources tell Digital Transactions. This development comes as …

December, 2022

• 1 December

  Payments 3.0: A Court Clouds the CFPB’s Future

  

  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been under fire since it was created. Now, though the bureau has survived a number of challenges, a recent court ruling has cast a cloud over its future. In October, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in Community Financial Services Association …
• 1 December

  Debit Ruling? What Debit Ruling?

  

  It was only a matter of time before the two big international card networks responded to a recent Federal Reserve requirement that issuers make at least two unrelated networks available to merchants for debit card transactions. That time arrived at earnings season. During an earnings call with equity analysts in …
• 1 December

  Security Notes: The Death And Birth of an Industry

  

  The pandemic drove people from brick-and-mortar stores, causing them to depend on card-not-present transactions. The fraudsters pounced, unleashing wily new schemes and hurting shoppers and shops alike. Merchants resorted to a vigorous identity-management strategy, exploiting artificial intelligence, tapping deep analytics, and using non-algorithmic randomness—a method invented by BitMint. Business is …

November, 2022

• 1 November

  The Fed Says Online Debit Counts, Too

  

  Consumers’ usage of debit cards has finally surpassed that of credit cards. Through the second quarter of 2022, 56.2% of consumers preferred debit as their primary payment card, compared to 39.5% for credit, according to a report from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Those numbers represent a dramatic change in the …