Take a listen to Don Cardinal, GM of the Financial Data Exchange and Glenbrook's George Peabody as they discuss the FDX API and its importance to the fintech and financial services community. It's important to end users. And it's a great example of how comprehensive standards can be developed swiftly.
This is our era's unprecedented event. I hope you're staying safe, your family is all well, and you've got what you need for what looks to be a pretty long time. On the upside, I've seen and experienced people helping one another like never before. That gives me confidence we'll be able to mitigate COVID-19's impact on our healthcare system - and on all of us. The downside is obvious. The weight of the pandemic is going to come down heaviest on those with the fewest resources. Helping out is our best response.
Fraudster innovation is a constant. As the defenders of payment transactions thwart one fraud vector, these innovators, playing offense, switch tactics.
Today, the problem of knowing who you are, that you are who you say you are, in the digital domain demands stronger authentication techniques. Many of those rely on the attributes, the data, provided by the user or by the applicants in the case of credit extension.
Need an early warning system for what payment system hackers are about to do? Then knowing what's happening on the dark net is imperative.
For a nanosecond, about seven years ago, I thought the payments industry was entering a steady state where change, while sure to be accelerated by technology, was going to settle down to the familiar sedate pace the payments industry had taken for decades.
One of the privileges of using a card to make a payment is the ability to dispute that charge should something go wrong. Maybe you ordered one garden rake but got charged for two. Perhaps you ordered a sweater and, as my colleague Allen Weinberg puts it, "got shipped a box of rocks." Or you discover a charge that you didn't make on your card account and believe it's fraudulent.
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.
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.
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 eCommerce 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.
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 providers, and fraudsters.
