It's a well-understood phenomenon in the payments space: Fraudsters are opportunists who will adapt their tactics to focus on the most vulnerable parts of the payments ecosystem. Sort of a criminal version of "whack a mole". According to a report by TransUnion, adoption of EMV at the retail point of sale is causing a steep [...]
Stripe's Atlas program promises to create an instant U.S. presence for non-U.S. merchants who want to access the U.S. consumer market and avoid the complications (and costs) of cross-border transactions. The program bundles a Delaware corporation, a bank account and Stripe's U.S. payments platform. But as this tech.eu article appropriately points out, there are a number [...]
Decades-old restrictions on financial transactions involving Cuba are falling rapidly. Ahead of the president's historic visit this weekend, the U.S. Treasury department announced an easing of sanctions and restrictions, including a lightening of some Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) restrictions. Today, Western Union announced it will launch full remittance services into Cuba as a direct result of [...]
Mastercard announced it has integrated IBM's Watson technology into its platform to launch a subscription-based customer analytics offering to merchants in mid-2016. Bravo to MasterCard. It has always bewildered me that the major card networks haven't effectively leveraged their position as the central clearing point for card and merchant transaction data to provide customer insights to merchants [...]
Google recently announced a handsfree payment product which feels more like a publicity stunt than a serious attempt to disrupt the payments ecosystem. My top reasons that Google's offering won't be successful: It requires an exotic point of sale setup to authenticate users. Merchants are generally unwilling to invest dollars in upgrading the point of sale [...]
The FTC has questions about how PCI-DSS Qualified Security Assessors (QSAs) conduct their audits and recently ordered itself to study the issue. Merchants and service providers whose processing volume exceeds established volume thresholds are required to use a QSA to assess PCI compliance. The FTC wants to know (among other things) whether QSAs are allowing clients to remedy potential PCI issues before their [...]
Some in the payments industry saw this one coming, but nobody expected it to be this big. Card-present merchants are experiencing up to a 50% increase in chargebacks since the EMV liability shift took place last October. Under the new policy, merchants who don't process a chip on an enabled card during a card-present transaction accept unilateral liability [...]
What is it they say about an "ounce of prevention"? Home Depot's recent $19.5 million consumer compensation announcement brings their costs related to the 2014 data breach to $161 million, and that doesn't include costs to upgrade internal systems security and beef up their risk management team. Even scarier: Home Depot's lawyers say the settlement [...]
When you want to get some laws on the books, encouraging someone to sue you is an interesting strategy. That’s what is happening in Alabama where the state is implementing an ecommerce sales tax rule they’re hoping will force a retailer to sue. Getting something on the books, they believe, may resolve questions of federal and [...]
MasterCard is testing a number of methods such as facial identification, voice recognition, fingerprints and even cardiac rhythm to improve authentication and replace traditional processes requiring the cardholder to remember PINs or passwords. To avoid scammers simply taking a selfie of a photograph, the technology will require the user to blink when taking the photo. Orwellian [...]
