News

May, 2017

• 2 May

  Savvier Techniques Help Criminals Loot More Victims Through Call-Center Fraud

  

  Call centers remain a prime target for criminals looking to perpetrate fraud. In 2016, call-center fraud jumped 113% from 2015, according to Atlanta-based Pindrop Labs’ annual Call Center Fraud Report. Fraudulent activity took place with one in every 937 call-center calls, compared to one in 2,000 calls in 2015“With tools …
• 2 May

  Mastercard’s Transactions Grow 17%, Partly Because of More U.S. PIN-Debit Volume

  

  Mastercard Inc. reported Tuesday that it switched nearly 17% more transactions in the first quarter than it did a year earlier. Most of the growth came from overseas, but some of it resulted from more U.S. PIN-debit volume, company executives said. Purchase, N.Y.-based Mastercard said it switched 14.7 billion transactions …
• 2 May

  First Data and Flywire Team Up and other Digital Transactions News briefs

  • Processing giant First Data Corp. and cross-border payments specialist Flywire Corp. announced a collaboration by which Flywire education and health-care clients will be able to more easily accept cross-border card payments and First Data clients will be able to more readily accept high-value international remittances. • Gro Solutions, a vendor of digital solutions …
• 1 May

  The Top-Heavy Acquiring Industry

  

  Consulting firm The Strawhecker Group is out with its 2016 rankings of U.S. merchant acquirers, and they show that 240 acquirers and independent sales organizations processed more than $5 trillion in payment volume. The 10 biggest acquirers accounted for 80% of that volume. Topping the list is JPMorgan Chase & …
• 1 May

  Slow on the Uptake for Faster Payments

  

  The subject of faster payments has been in the news almost continually for months now, but apparently awareness of the subject, and in some cases adoption, remains lower than expected among the financial institutions that will be depended on to implement speedier settlement. That’s if survey results released in April …
• 1 May

  The IoT Challenge: Securing Devices Without Impeding Usage

  

  With a forecast of 15 billion new devices as part of the Internet of Things potentially coming online as payments devices by 2021, securing these devices, whether they are cars, wearables, or appliances, is emerging as a top concern. “We are seeing a huge increase in inadequately protected devices,” Graeme …
• 1 May

  Chuck Your Password

  

  “What?!” That’s the mildest reaction I get from my clients when I dispense the advice encapsulated in the title of this month’s column. “A password I remember I don’t need to write down, so it cannot be pilfered,” says the incredulous client. “Not so,” I reply, and people are not …
• 1 May

  ACQUIRERS TARGET DIGITAL MARKETING

  Savvy execs look beyond payment processing for earnings growth. Text Receipts are a natural starting point. Credit card processing has long been a commodity business in the United States. Just as in other markets, large merchants have unbeatable pricing and it’s the small and medium sized businesses, or “SMBs”, who …
• 1 May

  Should Fintech Be Regulated?

  

  If you want to see a rowdy debate, try gathering a group of colleagues and posing the question of whether or not fintech companies should be regulated. In posing this question to several groups of payments professionals, I have observed that the same arguments, pro and con, keep coming up. …
• 1 May

  THE NOT-SO-FRIENDLY WORLD OF FRIENDLY FRAUD

    By Jacob Bennett, ETA CPP It’s important to understand the significance of friendly fraud, the damage it can cause, and how merchants can avoid it. Friendly fraud. The name is misleading as there’s really nothing “friendly” about it. Friendly fraud is a type of chargeback in which a customer …