Category: Risk/Compliance | Page 3

Court Of Appeals Speaks Up For The Payments Industry

When the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday (Nov. 30) slapped down the Cook County sheriff for trying to cut off payments on behalf of Backpage.com, the appellate court in effect set new rules for payment processors and card brands. The panel didn’t voice an objection to Visa and MasterCard opting to cut off Backpage, but merely to a law enforcement agent trying to persuade—bully?—those businesses.

In short, the panel stood up for the payments industry and ordered that Sherriff Thomas J. Dart not “coerce or threaten credit card companies, processors, financial institutions, or other third parties with sanctions intended to ban credit card or other financial services from being provided to Backpage.com.”

MasterCard Thinks It Can Standardize Mobile Loyalty. And It Might Be Right

For mobile payments to move into the massive adoption phase, some version of loyalty/couponing will be essential. Otherwise, once the novelty wears off, there are simply no sustainable reasons for shoppers to stick with mobile. But with every mobile player preparing to somehow push loyalty, the chance of having conflicting incompatible technology is all-but-certain. Can MasterCard change that?

On Tuesday (Nov. 17), the number two card brand introduced a loyalty middleware specification that it hopes will be adopted widely enough to give mobile loyalty a chance to grow seamlessly. Given that few if any mobile payment schemes will be offered without support for at least one issuer’s MasterCard, the card brand seems a sufficiently politically neutral player to sidestep the usual vendor resistance. In MasterCard’s statement, the brand said it’s proposed specification “enables mobile applications to offer a seamless connection between payment, promotions and loyalty redemption. It enables consumers to select their loyalty card, the coupons/promotions they want to redeem, and make a payment in a single or double tap at a contactless terminal.”

Transit Mobile Payment Is A PF Dream Come True

On Monday (Nov. 16), San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee officially brought his city’s public transit system into the mobile payment era, following similar moves by cities across the globe. Just last month, the totality of London’s black cabs said that they will accept mobile payment.

These efforts are crucial for the payment facilitator community as nowhere is the need for the speed and convenience of mobile payments more needed than in urban public transit. Of potentially greater significance are the huge volumes of consumers that are using such systems—and the extreme tendency of such communities to get comfort from what other travelers are doing. In short, successful transportation trials have a far greater chance of meaningfully moving the acceptance needle than almost any other vertical. As much as coffee shops may gravitate to every kind of mobile payment imaginable, they simply don’t have the volume—nor the copycat psychology—that comes with the transportation territory.

The Implications Of Soaring Mobile Biometric Authentication Stats

Noticed an interesting stat hit the wires on Tuesday (Oct. 27) from Juniper Research. Juniper reported “that the increased rollout of contactless payment services using fingerprint scanners will push the number of biometrically authenticated transactions to nearly 5bn by 2019, up from less than 130 million this year.”

Going from 130 million to almost 5 billion in four years is an impressive path—if the numbers are to be believed—but the changes to consumer behavior is potentially even more dramatic. Juniper limited its projection to biometrically authenticated transactions. The reality is that as consumers get comfortable with mobile biometrics, those fingerprint scans will authenticate consumers as they walk into banks, doctor’s offices, gyms and when they open secure apps. In the same way that fingerprint scans on iOS and Android devices are making consumers comfortable with all manner of biometric authentication, those devices and associated behaviors are also going to open the door to biometric authentication in areas well beyond mobile devices. Indeed, they could open the doors to, well, opening doors.