Snippings

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As Booysen has put it, in a different context, ‘Payment systems are matters of national interest, and payment architecture influences economic success.

From: ‘Authorized Push Payment’ Bank Fraud: What Does an Effective Regulatory Response Look Like? | Journal of Financial Regulation | Oxford Academic.

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Later this month, people in Berlin will be able to book an hour with an AI sex doll as the world’s first cyber brothel rolls out the service following a test phase.
Customers will be able to interact verbally with the AI dolls as well as physically.

From: Concern rises over AI in adult entertainment – BBC News.

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In response to a hearing in front of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on 23rd July concerning Zelle and fraud, the American Bankers Association (ABA), Bank Policy Institute (BPI), Consumer Bankers Association (CBA) and the National Bankers Association (NBA) issued a joint statement noting that banks cannot stop criminals by themselves and suggesting that when it comes to dealing with the tidal wave of fraud overwhelming the financial system, there are other players who need to up to plate “from telecommunications firms to social media companies to law enforcement”. They are right to demand action.

The U.K. Government’s “Future of Payments Review”, written by the respected business leader Joe Garner (hence media references to the “Garner review”), was published at the end of last year. The report covers many aspects of the British payments sector, including the kinds of fraud and financial crime that the House Permanent Subcommittee were looking, at comes to a similar concusion. Specifically it refers to the allocation of responsibilities for tackling such crimes, including the need to develop high level principles of liability which simply cannot be left as they are with banks responsible for compensation under the Contingent Reimbursement Model (CRM).

(I thought that the most interesting statement in the report can be found on page 26, where Mr. Garner says that “we could not find any clear and agreed vision of the long-term future or desired ‘end-state’ of the payments landscape”. I suppose this is to be expected, because the U.K does not have any clear and agreed vision of the long-term future of anything at all and there is no reason for payments to be any different.)

Britain’s payment providers have been pushed into the CRM which means, essentially, that if you send money to fraudsters, the bank has to give your money back. This is unsustainable (especially since that liability will soon be increased to something like half a million dollars per case) and it cannot be remedied without action on digital identity.

 

 

To resolve questions of interoperability between key initiatives. The key initiatives that the report is talking about here are Open Banking, New Payments Architecture (NPA) and maybe Central Bank Digital Currency. It seems obvious to me that an effective way to respond to the need for resilience set out earlier is to create both the instant payments infrastructure (ie, money that goes through banking networks) and the central bank digital currency infrastructure (ie, money that goes from device to device) that are not co-dependent.

Take a position regarding Digital ID for payments. Well, they saved the best until last. There’s no way forward in the payments sector without something getting done about digital identity. The question in my mind is whether it is better for the payment sector to lobby the Government to do something about digital identity or to give up and do something about digital identity themselves. Personally, I think it might be time to dust off some of this old discussions about some form of financial services passport.

I cannot help but note that the strategy does not have a measurable target. I can understand why: since no-one knows how much payments cost society as a whole, it is difficult to assess whether the sector is working or not. I might have been tempted to recommend that the Government commission a study to measure the overall total social cost of payments (this is complicated, but it has been done in other others) and then set a five year target to reduce it by using a combination of competition and regulation to respond to the issues set out above.

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Ever since the dawn of relationships, scammers have found ways to take advantage of people by spinning a convincing tale. But with the rise in online dating, these scams have proliferated, evolving into more sophisticated long cons to win the trust of victims. According to the FTC report, the most popular way scammers reached out to their victims last year was through Instagram (29%) and Facebook (28%).

From Romance Scams Are Booming — Especially on Facebook and Instagram:

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The Brazilian central bank has pushed back the addition of recurring payments to its Pix platform from October until next June.

Automatic Pix will facilitate recurring charges that let users authorise periodic debits automatically, without the need for authentication for each transaction.

The central bank predicts the feature will be useful for a host of options, including schools, colleges, gyms, condominiums, social clubs, health plans, streaming services, news portals, subscription clubs, and FS firms.

From: Brazil delays launch of recurring Pix payments.

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Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is undeniably useful — it allows one to attribute things a model generates to retrieved documents to verify their factuality and means — but it certainly will not stop Large Language Models (LLMs) from hallucinating and it has many limitations that vendors tend to gloss over.

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Crypto currencies are assets not money, yet vendors persist in bringing forward payment acceptance solutions at POS.

From: Business of Payments – July 2024 – by Geoffrey Barraclough.

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This British pub says it has saved 12 hours work each week by going cashless. Cash is expensive to handle and the costs grow as volume declines. The Portuguese Central Bank believes cash costs merchants 2.96% compared to 0.78% for debit cards.

From: Business of Payments – July 2024 – by Geoffrey Barraclough.

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With early pilots looking positive, there’s growing momentum behind new biometric payment technology in the US, including palm payments (favoured by Amazon) and even face payments. JP Morgan is taking an interest in the latter with a partnership with PopID, a Californian start-up which has an early lead in the technology.

In Europe, Mastercard is backing PayEye, a Polish start-up which is piloting its iris/facial recognition product at five locations of Empik, a large retailer of books, toys and games.

From: Business of Payments – July 2024 – by Geoffrey Barraclough.

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Shopify is deactivating Amazon Pay as a payment option from all European merchants. No reason was given and merchants are really unhappy.

From: Business of Payments – July 2024 – by Geoffrey Barraclough.

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Comparing the different methods of biometric recognitions proposed for use on payment authentication, the palm recognition is by far the most suitable. The fingerprint recognition required physical contact on the scanner glass, which is not ideal especially after the global pandemic.

Other methods including facial, iris, and voice recognition are not ergonomic enough or ideal in certain environments, hence they will not offer a seamless process that is superior to what is currently available. This leaves the palm print scanning method as the most ideal, and the process is not much more different to waving a payment card or mobile phone NFC over a POS terminal.

From: Beyond mobile wallets, palm recognition will be the next big thing in the evolution of digital payments – GlobalData.

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