Snippings

Ajay Bhalla is chief enterprise security solutions officer for Mastercard. He leads the team that develops product solutions to ensure safety and security for consumers, merchants, partners and governments in their global network. (He serves on the company’s management committee.) So when he talks about digital identity, he is worth listening to.

“What we need instead is a verified identity that is accepted globally and across multiple digital touchpoints.”

From “The future of digital identity verification will be as simple as saying ‘Hi, it’s me’ | City A.M.”.

Ajay is right about this, as you might expect. But I disagree that we need “a verified identity”. What we need, of course, are “verified identities” that we can choose from on a per transaction basis.

To illustrate the point, an anecdote. I was reading Ajay’s article.

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“The Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund works with Bank on DC and other groups to provide low-cost checkings accounts. ‘If someone is buying a salad or something, and it’s $6, and they need to swipe instead of using cash, the real underlying issue is they don’t have a bank account with debit-card functionality,’ said David Rothstein a principal with the fund. ‘That’s where the real problem is. It’s less about the use of cash, and it’s more about financial inclusion.’”

From “Do cashless restaurants discriminate against the poor? D.C. lawmakers think so. – The Washington Post”.

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If the past is any predictor for the future, the future of cards is very clear: there won’t be any of them, and we’ll be using our mobile phones as a mass market payment mechanism before 2012.

From 50 not out | Consult Hyperion.

Interestingly, I go this wrong. Because what actually happened was that the contactless card technology which was taken up by the banks proved so successful, not only for transit in London (where 

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It’s no exaggeration to say that TfL’s technology has transformed the payments industry, and contactless is quickly becoming ubiquitous

From Digital Currencies And Credit Cards Have Subways To Thank For Their Existence.

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The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

From Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares.

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if a bank fails to perform a critical verification step, then you might have a problem

From Shimmers and Skimmers: Fraudsters Find Opportunity in EMV Chip Cards – PaymentsJournal.

Hello. What are they talking about? What is this “critical verification step” that banks might fail to perform (or, at least, banks not advised by Consult Hyperion might fail to perform)? To understand what they are talking about here, you have to understand that you cannot create a counterfeit chip card in the same way that you can create a counterfeit magnetic stripe card. The chips contain a private key that is never revealed, so if you capture all of the data that is on a card or exchanged with a terminal during the process of a transaction, you will obtain the card number and expiry date and so on (these things are not encrypted between the card and the terminal) but so what? You cannot make a fake chip stripe card with these details because you don’t have that pesky private key so you can’t add the correct digital signature to a transaction.

Now, you could of course just make a random signature and hope that the issuing bank doesn’t check it. But that would be ridiculous because surely all banks would check the digital signatures on all transactions, right? Wrong. As we wrote about here many years ago, some banks do not 

This was one of the elements of the EBA’s PSD2 Guidelines that the FCA highlighted.

ASPSPs must avoid imposing unnecessary requirements (such as additional consent checks) when designing and implementing their dedicated interfaces

From FCA statement on EBA’s draft PSD2 Guidelines and Opinion for banks and others involved in open banking | FCA.

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Police believe the gang had been selling fake identification documents to help people gain work or services illegally, and open bank accounts to launder money.

From Inside fake passport factory ‘where counterfeit documents were made’ | Metro News.

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Corda is a distributed ledger platform, not a traditional blockchain platform. It was never designed to be one.

From r3.com » Blog Archive » When is Blockchain not a Blockchain?.

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Britain’s ATMs are disappearing at a rate of 300 per month across the UK

From Three hundred cash machines disappearing each month leaving villages at risk of ATM blackout.

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