Snippings

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“Innocent people have been questioned by police, had computer equipment confiscated and faced arrest when suspected of serious crimes following errors made by internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms companies, police and other public bodies in gathering intelligence through electronic surveillance.”

From “Innocent people arrested following surveillance blunders, IPCO reveals”.

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“In October an investigative report from BuzzFeed detailed how Ads Inc. paid to place deceptive ads on thousands of personal Facebook accounts. Ads Inc. reportedly paid Facebook users $15 to $30 per month for access to their account, then sold those accounts to other marketers for $800 each.

By paying Facebook users to post ads on their personal page, Ads Inc. and other companies are able to circumvent Facebook’s policies for paid advertisements. Facebook prohibits account rentals and deceptive advertisements, and Facebook has been actively banning accounts sharing posts for Ads Inc.

However, Ads Inc. CEO Asher Burke and other employees offered multiple Facebook contractors payment in exchange for reversing the bans”

From “Facebook contractor accepted bribes to restore banned accounts: report – Business Insider”.

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Oh man! 2017!

This was the first public “live five” of technology-driven changes in the secure transactions field that we thought would have a real business impact over the previous year. We’d used the idea internally before, but in 2017 we made the predictions public in the spirit of openness and honesty that we are famed for, to see how the predictions held up.

1. RegTech. I think we did pretty well with this prediction. Interest in regtech has grown throughout the year and the ability of regtech to make real differences in major markets is established.
2. Digital Identity. As we noted, one of the key regtechs, if not the key regtech, is digital identity. It did shoot up the agenda over the year and some interesting initiatives opened up.
3. PSD2 (still). No commentary is needed!.
4. Paying on the Go. We thought that a key use of open APIs will be payments, and very likely mobile payments. MasterCard’s purchase of VocaLink would tend to support this view!
5. Invisible POS.  The shift from “check out to check in” paradigms is underway but it is fair to observe that we did not see the number of launches we were expecting as many of the projects remain in beta and will be holding to wait for the arrival of PSD2 (and CMA remedies in the UK).

Not bad. Actually a pretty good high level view of the kind of areas our clients began to prioritise five years go.

2018 not bad!

This was the “live five” for 2017. Let’s see how we did…

1. Open Banking. Well, it was hardly a tough call and we were bang on with this one. We were working on open banking projects in the UK, on the continent and beyond, so there was no need to guess at the importance.
2. Conversational Transactions. Yes, we were spot on with this one and not only in financial services. Many organisations began planning to move to messaging both for customer support and for transactions.
3. The Internet of Cars. This continues to develop, although the security concerns that we spoke about before continue to add friction to the development of new products and services in this space.
4. Artificial Intelligence. Again, this was an easy prediction because many of our clients were already active, although to be fair most of their spending was on machine learning rather than “true” AI.
5. Tokens/ICOs.  Well, we were right to highlight the importance of “tokens” (the basis of Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs) and our prediction that once the craziness is out of the way, then regulated token markets will become significant looks to be borne out by mainstream commentary.

As we said back then, 2018 saw disruption because the shift to open banking, starting in the UK, meant the reshaping of financial services.

On a roll for 2019!

Last year we began organising our “live five” in a slightly different way, listing them by priority to our clients rather than as a simple list. So we put together the four key technologies that we thought would be hot last year together with a new technology that we were looking at out of the corner of our eyes. We went with…

1. The most important technology at the customer interface from the secure transactions perspective is going to be the technology of Secure Customer Authentication (SCA). We knew that better authentication technology would make life easier for clients in a number of ways, not only because of PSD2.

2. We thought more organisations around the world would look at the cross-sector digital identity initiatives and this is what happened in Canada and Australia for example.

3. From our work on ticketing around the world we saw a renewed focus on the deployment of real digital wallets  because transit (and other forms of ticketing, such as the sporting events) are what make consumers start using digital wallets, not payments.

4. We expected to see a growing use structured risk analysis for IoT. This has begun, but not to the extent that we though it would. The 

5. We thought it was time to start talking about post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in the mainstream and we were very right about this.

 

So a pretty accurate outline for the previous 12 months and in fact the renewed focus on identity, authentication and authorisation as the basis for transactions was emphasis early in the year when Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, spoke early in the year about the significant need for, and the high priority of, digital identity infrastructure for the financial sector.

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Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981, in a short story called “Burning Chrome.”

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real | The New Yorker:

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US officials are also concerned about the possibility that foreign countries will increasingly use mass-market digital currencies, such as Facebook’s planned Libra coin, to avoid sanctions.

(1) FBI says blockchain expert aided North Korea | Financial Times:

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Mr Couré recently praised an initiative by about 20 large European banks including BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank to create a new digital payments system — dubbed the Pan European Payment System Initiative, or Pepsi. The idea is to enable instant cashless payments through a European rival to ApplePay in the US and Alipay in China [but] the project is becoming bogged down with competition authorities in Brussels for being too much of a closed shop.

(1) Central bank talk of launching cryptocurrencies is all bluff | Financial Times:

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Huang Qifan, vice chairman of CCIEE (China Center for International Economic Exchanges), speaking at the Inaugural Bund Financial Summit of 2019 in Shanghai, said that “in the current digital age, the payment and settlement methods between enterprises and countries need to be reshaped”. He also went on to say that cross-border liquidation of China’s renminbi (RMB) is “highly dependent” on SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system and CHIPS (the US Clearing House Interbank Payments System). He added that the two financial instruments that are “gradually becoming effective tools for the US to exercise global hegemony and carry out widespread jurisdiction control”.

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Money has always been a powerful, blunt instrument. It’s an imposition not just of will, but of values. After World War II, the dollar became the foundation of the international monetary system. That gave the U.S. government a special tool.

Brace for the Digital-Money Wars – WSJ:

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