Payments on Fire™

Here on Payments on Fire® we've spoken a lot with risk and fraud management firms that generally offer some combination of services and technologies that promises to lower customer exposure to payments fraud, data theft, and operational risk. There's another dimension to cyber security that's based on expertise - before and after a data breach. That's the subject of this episode. First, a company...

The task of risk management in the payments business keeps getting bigger. Where once the concern was confined to payments alone - starting with counterfeit checks and currency - payment electronification has created a universe of potential risks. Risk now includes fraudulent cards, system and network hacks, data breaches, and account takeover with all the havoc that can produce. And we're seeing...

One of the biggest payments challenges for merchants is how to handle payment data - whether it's at the POS or in the remote domain where e-commerce and mobile payments take place. A lot of this concern is driven directly by PCI DSS compliance and broadly by the reputational risk data breach represents. One of the major techniques merchants employ, in order to remove the need to store payment dat...

Digital identity is one of the most solution resistant challenges to online commerce and, indeed, our online lives. It is basic to online trust, an elusive condition undermined by data breaches, abuse of our data by service provider, and fraudsters. That's not say we aren't trying. Providers of all stripes are applying their value add to the problem. Smartphone makers have a role. Fraud management...

Ever wonder about EMVCo's role in the development and implementation of its technical specifications? Take a listen to Bastien Latge, EMVCo's director of technology and Glenbrook's George Peabody as they discuss EMVCo's EMV®* QR Code Specification for QR code-based transaction initiation in the card system. While developed card markets are shifting to contactless cards and NFC-using mobile phone w...

Payments on Fire® usually focuses on a single topic, typically a fintech company and the business or personal challenges it addresses. In this episode, we take another direction by bringing together three fintech leaders to talk about their company offerings, how they connect up to payments, and some of the obstacles they've faced. George talks with the leadership of three companies working in ver...

Five years on from Apple Pay's release, contactless payment cards are just getting off the ground here in the US but in much of the rest of the card world, contactless payments of both kinds are common practice. In London, half of the card transactions are contactless. The same is true in Canada. While it's true that the vast majority of these are card-based, not via mobile wallets like Apple Pay...

The UK and the EU take a very different approach to payments industry evolution than here in the States; the former directed by government mandate, the latter by marketplace dynamics and the lighter touch of regulators. But both are responding, at different speeds, to the need of fintechs and enterprises for access to bank-based data and services. The Payment Services Directive 2, PSD2, written in...

Cross-border B2B payments are frustrating, time consuming, and expensive, especially for small and medium businesses. To dig into why and what's being done to overcome those concerns, join George and Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem, for an explanation. SMB B2B payments, particularly cross border payments, have always been time consuming to accomplish and expensive to do. They are time consuming becaus...

The digital marketplace model brings together buyers and sellers and, frequently, handles the money and payouts to the sellers. As my guest today has determined, digital infrastructure, e-commerce usage, competition, and workforce characteristics influence a country's ability to establish a flourishing marketplace component to the economy. This marketplace economic model is a useful one enabling,...

The business of merchant services continues to undergo two forms of transformation. First, the merchant services businesses, either as acquiring banks or via non-bank acquirers, has undergone massive consolidation over the last five years and more. Fiserv's takeover of First Data, announced on January 16, is just the latest example. The second sea change is the expansion of products and services t...

This Stuff is Hard As the remote payments domain (think in-app and browser-based payment transactions) continues to grow at around 15% a year, that growing number means the size and scale of fraud losses are going to increase. And they have - in both absolute terms and as a percentage of overall transaction volume. That also means rising chargeback rates for many merchants. Rising fraud in the onl...

Ecommerce fraud rates are rising and that means more cardholders are seeing unauthorized charges on their accounts. The cardholder remedy is to call either the merchant or the issuer to flag the problem. If the cardholder turns to the issuer to resolve the problem, the remedy is often an expensive chargeback for the merchant and a generally lousy experience for everyone. Ecommerce Merchant Pain Ec...

Fraud prevention today is about how quickly we can separate good customers from questionable ones and, for those doubtful transactions, use the right set of tools and data sources to optimize speed, costs, and fraud losses. When it comes to fraud prevention, it turns out that data is key. No revelation there, but how we manipulate it, gather it, and assure its provenance is undergoing major change...

Payment Innovation Moves to the Core When we conduct our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp, our first graphic illustrates the three essential steps in every transaction - initiation, funding, and completion. When looked at through the lens of of the past decade most innovation has been in initiation. Consider: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, QR codes. The list is long of ways to kick off a transaction. F...

Restaurant payments is a complex area especially for those companies serving the mid-sized and large restaurant operator. They have different needs that extend well beyond payment acceptance but even that is a highly variable concern. Ever notice that we pay differently depending upon the type of restaurant we're in? It's always been walk up and pay the central server at McDonalds. Applebees uses...

For those of you who didn't make it to Money20/20 and want to hear the latest on The Clearing House's Real Time Payments Network (RTP), take a listen to this update conversation with Steve Ledford, SVP at The Clearing House for the RTP Network.    A year ago, The Clearing House got out of the gate with its Real Time Payments Network, a wholly new payments system based on the push payment model.   ...

The payment industry's responses to ongoing payment security are many. We have procedural approaches and technical ones. For example, we are requiring merchants to attest to their compliance with PCI security standards that themselves include procedural requirements. Technical solutions are also called out by PCI and are, of course, being applied across the ecosystem. Encryption of payment data in...

In the US, there's the automatic assumption that payment cards and perhaps PayPal are the way to pay online. But if you're an ecommerce merchant trying to sell in the Netherlands, you'd better support the domestic system known as iDeal. Connectivity into domestic payment systems is an important and complex issue. There are over 150 such systems across dozens of countries around the world. While no...

Knowing who you're dealing with online is critical if you're taking transaction risk. Digital identity is tough. To address that challenge - and it is a challenge - relying parties, those who take on risk, employ two broad categories of technology: active tools that require user interaction and passive network-based approaches. When the user is required to explicitly provide identifying informatio...

Alexa. Siri. Cortana. We're talking to or at our machines. I walk into my office and say "Hey Google, what's the weather?" or "Hey Google, when's my first appointment?" When I'm driving in a strange town, it's "hey Google, navigate to the [fill in the blank] hotel." This kind of hands-free access to information is hugely helpful and hugely popular. But there's a long way to go toward a general pur...

During the Glenbrook Payment Book Camp  we make clear that national payments systems are domestic by definition. Each country has its own set of systems to effect payments. We point out that national payment systems differ in many of their details. Regulation, operating rules, governance, ownership, technology, and more are highly variable. At the same time, we also point out that major components...

In this second discussion with First Data execs, George and Scott MacKay, Vice President, Strategic Solutions talk digital commerce in the automative space, both at the fuel pump and in the Connected Car. The importance of full stack security, whether it's sole sourced or the result of an integration effort, to successful deployment of mobile commerce is a theme here. Enabling the mobile experienc...

In this, the first of a two-part podcast series with First Data executives, Ajay Guru, VP of Merchant Fraud Solutions at First Data and George discuss the impact of fraud on the merchant, what the merchant has to do to manage it, and the classes of tools and techniques available to mitigate fraud. Ajay addresses machine learning technology's remarkable ability to identify anomalies and makes candi...

Online trust requires a context-based understanding of who we transact with. Attributes about us are needed to build that trust but in many transaction contexts we share more than we need to. To pick a simple example, the law says you must be 21 to buy alcoholic beverages but our current method of proof is to show our driver's license, an unnecessary oversharing of personal information. Why show t...