PayPal and Visa announced several new initiatives as part of a partnership deal aimed at thawing their historically frosty relationship. PayPal will de-emphasize its focus on steering customers to bank transfers instead of Visa cards to fund transactions, integrate Visa's mobile payments platform, provide more transaction data to card issuers, and allow Visa's debit cardholders [...]
It is a long-established fact that fraudsters follow the path of least resistance. Recent statistics back this up. CardNotPresent points out that according to the Card Fraud Control Benchmark Study from Auriemma Consulting Group, counterfeit card fraud dropped by 18% in the first quarter, largely due to the continuing rollout of EMV which requires multifactor authentication. The [...]
In a move that could pose serious competitive challenges to PayPal and other ecommerce payment players, Apple is expanding Apple Pay to support web-based ecommerce payments starting this fall. The product will initially work only through Apple's Safari browser. 21 major retailers including Office Depot, Target, Home Shopping Network and Overstock.com have already indicated they [...]
I am currently in Orlando at the Card Not Present Expo to moderate a session on cross-border ecommerce. Hundreds of people are here from around the world to talk about what's next in payments. We had a great discussion this session with ecommerce industry leaders. Here's a summary from the CardNotPresent.com site. Sign up to [...]
The tide is turning on the time-honored process of presenting a payment card at the point of sale. MasterCard predicts that 38% of EU payment transactions by 2020 will be digital, meaning they originated on a tokenized device such as a mobile phone or wearable rather than the presentment of a payment card. MasterCard's MDES platform also [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Amazon announced it will launch a digital wallet as part of a broader strategy to become a serious player in the India ecommerce market. Smart move. Doing business there isn't easy, but the potential rewards are great. As someone who has run a payments business in India, I can appreciate the enormous market opportunity in a fragmented [...]
