Tag: Evan Schuman | Page 3

Amazon Shuts Down Local Register, Having Never Really Loved It Anyway

For the world’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon certainly had a busy payments week this week, from opening a physical bookstore integrating online capabilities to pushing its Amazon button for third-party mobile apps. But it’s most PF noteworthy move this week was Amazon’s choice to give up on Local Register.

Local Register was a payments processing effort that focused on the exact kind of smaller merchant that has gravitated to Square. And Amazon’s initial promotional pricing was set lower than Square, on the rationale that price is everything for a small merchant. Apparently not.

MCX Finally Gets Its Interchange Break—After Chase Hands It To Them

When JPMorgan Chase on Monday (Oct. 26) promised new mobile capabilities for its online Chase Pay program next summer, it chose to take a decidedly retailer-oriented approach. With the lures of lower interchange fees plus all of the fraud cost protections of the EMV liability shift without having to accept EMV, Chase has given retailers concrete reasons to push Chase Pay over other payment methods.

The Chase announcement named MCX (and specifically members Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Shell) as premier partner. Interestingly, the interchange reduction effort that caused MCX to form years ago but had been all but abandoned by the group recently is the centerpiece of Chase’s 2016 plans. What MCX couldn’t get on their own was handed to them by Chase.

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.

The Non-Intuitive World Of Authentication And Social Media

A cyberthief walks into a bank branch, fully prepared to impersonate his intended high-net-worth victim. Not only is he equipped with fake IDs in the victim’s name, lots of personal information courtesy of social and search engine research, but the thief has even taken the precaution of breaking into his victim’s social accounts and replacing his thief-like face for the victim’s on the victim’s own social sites. If anyone tries to check on the Facebook or LinkedIn site of the victim, the thief’s face would be confirmed.

The banker in this case sits beneath a tiny video camera, one that is aimed at the seat where customers sit and specifically the facial area of those customers. Controls of the banker-facing screen allow the image to be precisely aimed for customers of varying heights. And while the banker is pitching her safe-deposit boxes and other bank services, software does a quick check on the thief’s face. Sure enough, it matches the social media images—but the software notes that those images were all recently changed. The software’s database maintains a record of the last 10 images of everyone it can find—and that history of images foiled our thief’s efforts.

Why Did Most Merchants Miss The EMV Deadline? Many Reasons, But Complexity Is The Top

With the liability shift and October already here, where are all the EMV-compliant merchants? Many are still waiting for software updates. And why is that, given how many years everyone has known about the October 2015 cutover? Seems that the U.S. payments processing space is a lot more complicated than even the payment itself realized, according to Randy Vanderhoof, who, as executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, is the industry’s chief EMV cheerleader.

Vanderhoof concedes that most U.S. merchants—60-65 percent, he said—are not EMV compliant today and he blames that on several factors, but payments complexity—and good old-fashioned procrastination—are at the top of his list. “The U.S. market is the most complex payments processing market in the world because we have multiple parties involved in managing the retail POS systems and multiple parties engaged in the processing and acquiring of payment transactions,” Vanderhoof said. “In other countries, other markets, the major banks who were then issuers were also the acquirers so they owned the terminals in those merchant locations. They invested in the cards and the terminals and their own banking acquiring network. In the U.S., financial institutions are separated from the merchants and acquirers. This means that there needs to be independent investments and alignments.”

Apple Pay Penetration Stats: The Less We Know, The Better It Is

Although there is no question today that mobile payments are increasing, to what degree is challenging. This confusion was magnified this month when Bloomberg quoted the Aite Group as saying that ApplePay accounts for one percent of all U.S. retail transactions.

Aite denies ever having said that—the analyst said that he said that it was much lower than one percent—and indeed Aite says that Apple Pay represents a tiny fraction of one percent of current U.S. retail sales. IDC estimates that Apple Pay today accounts for about one-tenth of one percent of all retail in-store transactions in the U.S., while Javelin puts that figure at about half—roughly one-twentieth of one percent. When moving from Apple Pay to Google Pay, the estimated slices get even thinner. Crone Consulting president Richard Crone sees Google Pay representing about one-third of Apple Pay transactions. IDC analyst James Wester put Google Pay’s figures in an even more vague area: “Google Pay is so small to be incalculable. I can’t even estimate what it is because it is so small,” he said.