Snippings

xxx

In India, Facebook sees a colossal market ripe for growth, and has invested heavily. On April 22, the company announced a $5.7 billion deal for 9.99% of Reliance Jio, a telecommunications network operator with 370 million subscribers. But Indian society has been riven with violence catalyzed by the unfettered spread of malicious rumor through the company’s platforms. Security services want access to private messages, while other government ministries worry about the data that Facebook is collecting on citizens.

How the two sides resolve these clashes could have implications for the way that social media and the internet are regulated globally.

From Friend request: How India’s battle with Facebook will change the internet – Nikkei Asian Review:

xxx

xxx

Around the world, social media companies have come under intense pressure since the beginning of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic once again demonstrated their role in facilitating the spread of dangerous misinformation — something World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called “an infodemic.”

From Friend request: How India’s battle with Facebook will change the internet – Nikkei Asian Review:

xxx

Kevin C. Desouza is a Professor of Business, Technology and Strategy in the School of Management at the QUT Business School, a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the China Institute for Urban Governance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University so he has a pretty interesting perspective on things. I enjoyed his recent conversation with Bonnie S. Glaser, senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on the ChinaPower PODCAST. Kevin and Bonnie were discussing China’s plan to develop a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). I looked at China’s CBDC system (the Digital Currency/Electronic Payment, DC/EP) in some detail in my latest book The Currency Cold War and have speculated on its impact myself, so naturally I wanted to double-check my views (coming from a more technological background) against Kevin and Bonnie’s informed strategic, foreign policy perspective.

One particular part of their discussion concerned China’s ability to advance in digital currency deployment and use because of the co-ordinated plans of the technology providers, the institutions and the state. 

Normal people don’t pay much attention to this sort of thing, but I was very interested to see a new sign outside my local Waitrose a few days ago…

I don’t ever remember seeing one of these signs before, but I was happy to see it all the same because thanks to COVID-19, people are discovering that using their mobile phone to pay for their weekly shop is pretty convenient (because the £45 limit does not apply, so you can pay for all of your shopping by mobile) and I doubt they’ll go back to cash. Barclaycard has just reported that more than 90 per cent of face-to-face transactions are now made using contactless (which increased by a quarter in 2019 compared with the year before).

 

So why is there no limit (well, £10,000 in Waitrose) on mobile payments? Well, it’s actually not a new development! As I wrote here back in 2016, when my colleagues at Consult Hyperion were advising a number of issuers and acquirers about high-value contactless payments and their implications at retail point-of-sale, “Waitrose takes contactless, and they’ve implemented in properly (with CDCVM)”.

If you are not familiar with CDCVM, here’s a quick primer on high-value contactless payments that I wrote a few years ago to explain how authentication options work with the contactless no-CVM (consumer verification method) limits. The no-CVM payment limit is for “tap and go” transactions where there is no PIN, signature or anything else required from the customers who are waving their cards over the contactless readers. This limit has just been raised from £30 to £45, which is why (I assume) that Waitrose had decided to put these signs outside the store.

The “Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method” (CDCVM) is a type of CVM. CVM is, as I am sure you know, part of the EMV specifications, which allows for a number of different CVMs and any particular card will have the acceptable CVMs stored on it, in an order set by the bank that issued it.

CDCVM is the type of CVM that applies to transactions originating from a contactless device rather than a contactless card. Verification is used to evaluate whether the person waving the phone around to make a contactless transaction is in fact the legitimate user and affects where the liability lies for fraudulent transactions. It’s called device verification because the customer authenticates to their own device, not the reader in Waitrose. It’s not the point of this post, but frankly this is how everything should work in the future, since customers should never be required to authenticate themselves using any device that is not their own. Putting a PIN in your phone is better than putting a PIN into Waitrose’s terminal and not simply because you might catch a deadly disease from it.

When you have a device capable of implementing CDCVM, such as a phone with Apple Pay or Google Pay, then this is used as the CVM. Provided that the terminal is running the correct software, your phone will take care of verification and the issuer can then decided whether or not to authorise the transaction or not based on the enhanced authentication. In the UK the rollout of this “high value contactless” infrastructure began some time before the Apple Pay launch.

What all this means is that the £45 limit does not apply to mobile phones with strong authentication, provided the terminal is running the correct software, of course. Writing about this a few years ago, I noted more than once that consumers, as far as I could tell, the industry could do with some better communications around this sort of thing because consumers are not aware of the high-value transaction capability of their devices, and if they were aware of these capabilities, they would have no way of knowing whether the retailer had implemented the necessary software change or not. So if I go to Tesco, for example, I would have no idea whether the limit is £45, £250 (which it is if I use the TescoPay app, plus extra Clubcard points) or whatever is for Apple Pay / Google Pay.

COVID is pushing us from contact to contact-free (via contactless), so now is a good time to follow Waitrose’s lead with clear messaging at POS to help consumers along on this journey.

I thoroughly enjoyed the FS Club discussion with eminent futurologists looking back to 2020 and forward t0 2040.. especially because of one the speakers was Gill Ringland. Gill is now a Director of Ethical Reading, set up to energise an ethical business climate in the Thames Valley, but in the past was head of strategy at ICL amongst other things.

xxx

First, the compiler must be loaded from paper tape. The ALGOL program itself is then fed into the tape reader… Once compiled, a program would be free to use the space originally occupied by the compiler.

From ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you’ve never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree • The Register:

xxx

xxx

That faster growth rate is also the result of an often overlooked economic fact. Compared to the card networks and even checks, the ACH is pretty cheap, something that just adds more momentum to the network’s growth. “Cumulatively, it feeds on itself. It’s the least-cost payment,” says Bob Steen, chairman and chief executive of Bridge Community Bank in Mechanicsville, Iowa.

The network processed 24.7 billion transactions last year, up 7.4%.

From The Surging ACH – Digital Transactions:

xxx

Payment facilitators give merchants the ability to accept payments of many kinds without those merchants having to obtain a “traditional” merchant account from an aquirer or get involved with the details of EMV, ACH and so on. Last year facilitators processed almost a trillion gross volume (more than a twentieth of worldwide merchant volume). This is a sector that is growing at almost one-third per annum worldwide and will soon be a $4 trillion global business. Merchants like this approach because of the fast onboarding and value-added services that are often very specific to their verticals: the facilitators develop their own risk management and credit management strategies, based on the intelligent use of transactional data. Half of the market belongs to the “mega-facilitators” PayPal, Square, Stripe and Shopify but there are thousands of specialist focused facilitators as well.

A fascinating example of the specialist facilitators is in the legal cannabis market in the USA, where for legal reasons customers are not allowed to use their credit cards or debit cards to buy Mary Jane over ISO 8583. What with the necessity being the mother of invention, new players stepped in to fill the void. Far from stimulating interest in the exciting new payment technology of the future (eg, Bitcoin) these new players often exploit one of the older payment technologies: the Automated Clearing House (ACH). Players such as Canpay allow customers to link their marijuana purchasing app to their bank account to create a “decoupled debit” product.

This isn’t the only reason why ACH transactions are growing fast, of course. There were almost 25 billion transactions in 2019 and the growth rate went up over 7% per annum. I like many other observers, I expect this to continue because of the embedding of payments inside the merchants’ own apps or specialist sector apps, as has happened with weed.

One reason for thinking that ACH growth might accelerate further is the integration of directory services. The one thing that’s alway been a hassle about direct-from-account payment is the need to obtain and verify the account details: it’s very easy to make a mistake when transcribing an international bank account number (IBAN) or a sort code or an account number, and that’s setting aside the deliberate fraud that stems from the use of account details to misdirect payments. There are a couple of ways to tackle this. One (as in, for example, the UK) is to allow payments to a registered mobile number, another is to create a directory (as in, for example, the USA where NACHA’s “Phixius” is about to go live).

(As an aside, there are many reasons why I prefer the Australian approach of “pay names” over the use of mobile numbers, primarily because mobile numbers are personally-identifiable information that should be disclosed as a byproduct of transactions, but that’s a separate point.)

xxx

But ACH payments rely on information that may not always be practical to obtain, such as a recipient’s account number and bank routing number.

“There are multiple directories that help to do that, but they aren’t necessarily complete,” says Sarah Grotta, director of the debit and alternative products advisory service for Mercator Advisory Group, a Marlborough, Mass.-based consultancy. “Clarifying that area is a good place to start.”

One solution aiming for that clarification is a Nacha initiative called Phixius, set to start up next month to act as a directory for ACH payments (box). Without some kind of easily accessed, accurate information, many businesses are likely to go on writing checks, say some observers. “A business will write a check because it’s the path of least resistance,” Grotta says.

From The Surging ACH – Digital Transactions:

xxx

xxx

esearchers at Northeastern University, MIT and IBM have designed a top printed with a kaleidoscopic patch of colour that renders the wearer undetectable to AI. It’s part of a growing number of “adversarial examples” – physical objects designed to counteract the creep of digital surveillance.

From This ugly t-shirt makes you invisible to facial recognition tech | WIRED UK:

xxx