Deployment of “clean sheet of paper” payment systems is a once in a generation event. In over 50 countries, new account-to-account push payment systems are either in full scale operation, implementation, or fully committed planning stages. The U.S., for example, has the RTP Network in operation and, in a few years, the FedNow system will be online.

This is hard, serious work. Technology decisions need to be paired with equally rigorous rules making. One of the major concerns for these systems is what to do when a transaction is sent in error or initiated by a fraudster. In contrast to card systems, dispute resolution capability is not a standard feature. These choices should reflect clear agreement and follow through by the system’s key participants.

In this Payments on Fire® podcast, Glenbrook’s Elizabeth McQuerry talks with builders of dispute resolution, complex messaging, and connectivity capabilities developed around Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP).

Joining Elizabeth are Jack Baldwin, Chairman of BHMI, a U.S.-based developer of bank-grade settlement and reconciliation systems, and Nathan Churchward, Head of Product, Emerging Services at Australia’s Cuscal Limited. Cuscal is a developer of payments capabilities that include card issuing and acquiring, mobile payments, fraud prevention, switching and settlement.

There’s a lot to be gained by learning from someone else’s experience. Nathan and Jack address the dispute resolution process, ISO 20022 messaging, and the significant effort needed to build out systemically important payment infrastructure. Take a listen and you’ll gain a deep appreciation of the interplay of rules, regulations, technology, and effort.

Glenbrook Partners is working with the U.S. Faster Payments Council to help shape rules in the U.S. and address significant concerns around system interoperability, directory services, and dispute management. Take a look at the Faster Payments Barometer based on our industry survey. And visit the U.S Faster Payments Council site for more

Direct download: EP110_Cuscal.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:20pm EDT

If you thought bitcoin was dead as a payments system, take a listen to George and Jimmy Nguyen, founding president of the Bitcoin Association, as they discuss Bitcoin SV, a new version of bitcoin that is a significant upgrade to the performance and capabilities of the original bitcoin protocol put into the world a decade ago.

 

From a payments perspective, bitcoin has failed. While successful as an albeit volatile store of value, its failings include:

  • It is slow, only able to handle 2 or 3 transactions per second with a peak rate of 7. Visa handles 50K at peak holiday times with aplomb.
  • While transactions are irrevocable, they are not immediately written to the blockchain. Core design specifies that that happens every 10 minutes but when the network is under load it has taken hours.
  • Processing cost is too high, measured in dimes and dollars, and also volatile
  • As the processors, known as miners, are rewarded with fewer bitcoins for their work, they’ll have to rely on processing revenues, transaction fees, to stay viable. Costs are already too high
  • There’s the high power usage of the network that’s needed to maintain consensus, essentially trust in the network.

If you thought bitcoin was dead as a payments system, take a listen to George and Jimmy Nguyen, founding president of the Bitcoin Association, as they discuss Bitcoin SV, a new version of bitcoin that is a significant upgrade to the performance and capabilities of the original bitcoin protocol put into the world a decade ago.

Jimmy brings a refreshing view on cryptocurrencies and payments. Jimmy provides a great review of how bitcoin works and why both its performance and its economics are broken. He explains the advantages of the Bitcoin SV fork and why it was necessary. Suffice it to say, bitcoin’s evolution is subject to the often fractious politics of that community where competing interests inhibit long term thinking.

Bitcoin SV has intriguing potential. Micropayments, sub $1 transactions, have never found a home in electronic payments. BSV could apply there.

BSV is also designed to use enormous blocks in order to keep processing costs low and provide the ability to store massive amounts of data about the payment. 

 

Direct download: EP109_BSV.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:40pm EDT

Join Jeff Brown, president of VPay, a firm specializing in insurance claims payments, and George Peabody of Glenbrook Partners in this deep dive discussion of how the work of claims processing is done and how he approaches B2B payments, compliance, and the value-added services needed by the company’s customers.

The B2B Domain

We’re all familiar with the card present POS domain, card not present Remote domain, P2P payments, and the Bill Pay domain. A phone tap here, a card swipe there, a bill payment to the utility company. On a day to day basis, our personal experience with payments is these areas.

The B2B and B2C payment domains are very different. There is a wide range of industries with very specific payment needs. (Listen to episode 92  to hear how customized payments can become. Roadsync’s Robin Gregg talks about the special paper check type built just to serve independent long haul truckers.)

Insurance is Huge

One of the biggest industries is insurance. Premium payments in the U.S. alone are over $1.2 trillion. Payouts by stakeholders, such as healthcare systems and property & casualty insurers, and made to individuals claimants and service providers amount to trillions more.

Insurance is definitely big enough to be a very attractive vertical to a payments service provider.

Knowing Your Customer's Business

If you are a PSP serving a particular vertical market in the B2B space, you have to know at least as much about the vertical you serve as you do about payments operations and services. For example, if you’re making healthcare payments, you have to comply with the strict data privacy requirements specified by HIPAA regulations. You may have to support specific data formats. And you should help your business customers deliver useful features to their own customers.

If you want a great explanation of how payments fits into a vertical market, you can’t do better than listening to this episode of Payments on Fire®.

Direct download: EP108_VPay.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:26pm EDT

Digital disruption and financial inclusion are focus areas throughout the developing world and the topics are white hot in Colombia. Listen in as Hernando Rubio, CEO of Moviired, speaks with Elizabeth McQuerry and George Peabody about Movii and payment / financial inclusion ecosystem in Colombia.

Financial Inclusion in Colombia

Although one of the first countries in Latin America to make a big policy push for financial inclusion, those efforts focused a “banking correspondents” or agents in local stores carrying out basic financial services on behalf of banks. While these correspondents greatly improved access to financial services, they have not fully produced the desired results. According to the World Bank, fewer than half of all adults have a bank account and only a handful (less than 5%) have a transaction account from a telco led service. Very few Colombians use those accounts to pay bills or buy something on the internet. Cash is still preferred.

Enter the SEDPEs

In 2015 regulators in Colombia created a new category of licensed financial institutions called a   special company for electronic deposits and payments, or SEDPE by the Spanish language initials. While a bank can also pursue this type license to focus financial inclusion efforts, the main conceptualization of SEDPEs are fintechs that gain authorization to take deposits and make payments – the two most basic (and still lacking) aspects of financial inclusion. SEDPEs are not allowed to make loans but can partner with others to make small credits available.

Movii

Rubio’s Movii was the first SEDPE to be authorized by regulators. Movii is a classic digital service that offers a wallet for storing funds, access to a reloadable debit card from Mastercard for buying in stores and on the internet, bill payment, mobile top ups and transfers to other Movii users. Movii also recently connected to the new national real-time payment service (Transferencias Ya) in order to be able to reach all account holders in Colombia. Movii builds off the company’s experience managing Moviired, an extensive network of physical agents in stores and bank correspondents throughout Colombia, that people use for those basic payments. Hear how a company disrupts itself as it lays the foundation for the next generation of financial services.

Direct download: EP107_Movii.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:17pm EDT

The merchant acquiring industry continues its large scale shift from a payments-led to an operations-led purchasing decision for the merchants it serves. Historically based on independent sales organizations (ISOs) and non-bank acquirers, the party that increasingly provides payment acceptance is the independent software vendor (ISV).

This makes sense for a number of reasons:

  • Software is Vertical. Today, the first IT choice more merchants make is the software they use to run their business. This makes sense. Tools that improve overall business operations have a greater impact on success than the comparatively minor differences among payment providers. Auto parts stores need inventory management. Salons need scheduling. Ice cream and coffee shops need quick order entry. Daycare providers need security controls.
  • Payments are Horizontal. Every merchant, regardless of its segment, needs to take payments. While many segments have particular requirements for payments, payment acceptance alone is a commoditized service.
  • The ISV is the First Point of Contact. Given its primary role, the ISV has moved into an excellent position to sell and profit from payment acceptance.
  • Taking a Back Seat in Selling, Payments is Infrastructure. The payments industry has multiple ways of enabling ISVs to sell payments. The ISV may use a gateway to reach multiple acquirers with the gateway itself selling value-added capabilities in areas like fraud management. The ISV may use the payfac model for fast onboarding of new merchants. The ISV may, itself, become an ISO. Multiple forms of business relationship all provide some measure of revenue sharing with the ISV.

Differentiation in Payments Via New Paths

Differentiation based on value-added services drive revenue in payments. For that reason, we have seen non-bank acquirers and ISOs focus on particular vertical market segments to drive and secure long term revenues. A decade and more ago, Heartland Payment Systems (acquired by Global Payments) doubled down on the restaurant vertical by developing special services for restaurant operators as well as acquiring restaurant-focused ISVs. That lesson has been learned by many since.

Over the last few years, differentiation has also stemmed from how well the payments provider serves the ISV and its developers. Integration of payment services both into the ISVs code and within the provider’s own code base is important. A single API that exposes all of a provider’s services is preferable to integration work requiring knowledge of an API tied to each function. Micro-services based capability is also welcome.

Payment Facilitation as Enabler

While not, in and of itself, a new approach, the payment facilitation model is a major enabler of payment service delivery via ISVs. The payfac model is based on network rules that allows an intermediary to act as the merchant of record in order to provide payment system access to smaller merchants. PayPal did this first for ecommerce merchants. Stripe is another card not present example. Square used the payfac model to offer sellers in the physical world access to card acceptance.

ISVs who become payfacs assume responsibility for the activity of their small merchant customers. So, choosing to become a payfac has its complexities and risks. A number of providers, including Finix, bring expertise in the payments facilitation model to help ISVs make that decision.

In this Payments on Fire®, take a listen to Glenbrook’s Nicole Pinto, Drew Edmond, and Finix CEO and founder Richie Serna as they discuss the payfac phenomenon and the larger shift to the ISV as payments provider. This is a cool conversation about a sea change event in the merchant services industry. 

Direct download: EP106-Finix.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:58pm EDT

Take a listen as George and Nick Starai, Chief Strategy Officer of NMI discuss the role of the independent payments gateway and its evolution as a technology and business enabler for today’s providers of payment acceptance: ISOs, ISVs, and merchants.

 

A key technology and business partner for merchants and the first-line providers of payment services (think ISVs and ISOs) is the payment gateway.

At their simplest, gateways provide a single interface to their users that, once built, lets the party using it switch between acquirers with relative ease in order to get better performance, service levels, and/or pricing.

For independent software vendors (ISVs) selling line of business software this flexibility allows their customers to choose their acquirer of choice from the range of acquirers supported by the gateway. Many such relationships are in place long before the ISV relationship is established. ISVs can’t insist that their potential customers change acquiring banks in order to use their software. That’s one use case for a gateway.

Another is the Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) that also realizes the necessity of using gateway technology in order to reach their increasingly demanding merchant customers. Placing stand-beside payment terminals next to a cash register is no longer nearly enough. Integration of payments into the overall business process of even a smaller merchant is now table stakes. Gateways can help make integration of more advanced capabilities happen.

Independence Means Acquirer Neutrality
Many formerly independent gateways have been acquired by processors. What processor wouldn’t want to move all the transactions managed by the gateway onto its own systems? It’s all about volume, after all.

But for independent software vendors, independent sales organizations selling to ISVs and merchants, and for many merchants themselves, an important virtue of the gateway function is its processor and acquirer independence.

Value-added Services
Gateway operators generally charge flat fees for each transaction handled so they have every incentive to expand the volume of transactions they manage as well as to provide value-added services that increase revenue on each transaction handled.

To increase volume, gateways make it as easy as possible for a customer to integrate to the gateway. They make their APIs simple and robust so it’s easy to add new services. The gateway provider builds software developer kits (SDK) to support in-app payments and makes sure their code runs on every important operating system.

Gateways often specialize on a particular payment domain such as large ecommerce merchants or in-store systems. Others offer a broader set of services. NMI, the subject of this Payments on Fire® podcast, supports both EMV terminals and the card not present environment.

Payment Facilitation
The payment facilitation business model has broadened card payment acceptance to the wide base of small merchants who would otherwise not qualify for a traditional merchant account.

The greatest impact of this payfac model is how it streamlines the onboarding process. Instead of the days-long underwriting process traditionally needed, sellers working through a payment facilitator (PayPal, Square, and Stripe all employ that model) can start to take payments within minutes of creating an account.

Because of that swift onboarding, the payment facilitation model reduces sales friction for ISVs. Their customers can install the ISVs line of business software and start taking payments at the same time.

For the ISV, there’s also the opportunity to earn revenue from their customer’s payment transaction flow. We’ve seen multiple merchant companies selling software services earn substantial revenue from the payments side of their business. NMI provides essential infrastructure services for the payfac business model including onboarding, sub-merchant account creation, KYC, and other reporting services.

The NMI Story
Nick relates NMI’s growth and service expansion. It’s a cool story that speaks to the industry’s evolution as well as the company’s own growth. By the end of the podcast, you’ll understand how enabling technology and new business models have shifted, yet again, the payments ecosystem. The gateway and payment facilitation services offered by NMI help move ISVs and tech-forward ISOs into a first position over traditional providers of merchant services.

 

Direct download: EP105_NMI.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:52pm EDT

Take a listen to Ian Drysdale of Zelis Payments and George as they discuss how complex the payments process is in the healthcare industry. 

 

Near the peak of payments complexity and specificity is the healthcare industry. If you’ve ever looked at an explanation of benefits letter from a healthcare insurer, you’ve had a glimpse into the complexity of these payments. Multiple parties are paid a lot of money, before you may be required to ante up a co-payment yourself.

Regulation, compliance, the huge range of services delivered, and the scale of the healthcare ecosystem—from giant healthcare insurers to the local dentist—make healthcare payments a challenging, and attractive, market to serve. It is an enormous business-to-business market. Americans spent $3.5T, over $10K per person, in 2017. We spend something like 1 in 6 of our dollars on healthcare.

Simply getting the payment to the right party is complicated. Consider the imaging clinic that operates within a big regional hospital. It has its own back accounts, its own P&L, its own accounts receivable. Getting payments routed into the right account isn’t easy.

Checks still dominate in this industry because the development and maintenance of databases to track bank accounts is a major headache for a payer like an insurance company. Dropping a check in the mail, along with invoice information, at least communicates what’s necessary despite slow speed and high cost.

That’s where Zelis Payments and Ian Drysdale, its president and guest on this Payments on Fire® podcast, come in. Zelis Payments specializes in shifting healthcare payments from check rails to ACH rails. Using the service, providers get paid within a two or three days instead of two weeks. That speed has a huge impact on cash flow, a business metric of particular importance to smaller providers.

Zelis Payments also enables an EDI message format that communicates what’s being paid for in a manner consumable by the accounts receivable software in almost every healthcare provider’s office. Matching up the ACH deposit to what it covers is automated. While neither ACH or EDI are considered modern technologies, pairing them tightly produces real efficiencies.

Another area of complexity Ian discusses is healthcare fraud. Unfortunately, no small number of providers enter fraudulent claims into the system. They add up to huge numbers.

Zelis Payments adds value specific to the healthcare industry around the general functionality of EDI and ACH rails. If you’re a dentist getting paid 10 days faster than before, that added value is a very good thing.

 

Direct download: EP104_ZelisPayments.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:04pm EDT

Need an early warning system for what payment system hackers are about to do? Then knowing what’s happening on the dark net is imperative.

In this episode of Payments on Fire®, George speaks with Aamna Zia, VP of Finance and Growth at Flare Systems, and David Hetu, its Chief Science Officer. Based in Montreal, Flare Systems operates a dark net monitoring system that brings intelligence to the InfoSec and fraud management teams at banks.

The dark net is a mysterious place for most of us. It exists on something called Tor, an internet overlay that is designed for anonymity. Using a purpose-built browser, users can access websites, chat rooms, and the like, similar services to those we use on the open internet. The anonymity feature makes performance slow but it also works.

And that’s why it is the hub that marketers of stolen card numbers, user IDs and passwords, personally identifiable information, and hacking tools use to buy and sell. It’s this activity and the discussions around it that Flare Systems monitors and reports on.

Among the findings of Flare’s analytics is the fact that the vast majority of card data sellers probably have to live with their parents to get by. There’s not a lot of money in that particularly tired approach.

Obviously, there’s plenty of money to be made in payment fraud, though. Account takeover (ATO) fraud is growing quickly as recent losses on the UK’s Faster Payments system demonstrate. Synthetic identity fraud is fueled by the kind of data sold on the dark web.

Take a listen as Aamna Zia and David Hetu as they describe how Flare Systems works and what the hackers are up too. Then, if you’re on a bank’s infosec or security team, try to get some sleep.

Direct download: EP103_FlareSystems1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:57am EDT

Listen to George and Jacques Soussana, General Secretary, of nexo Standards, an organization based in Europe with global goals to establish interoperability of hardware, software, and data across the point of sale and e-commerce domains.

Interoperability in a Complex Ecosystem

The payments industry is in a period of especially swift change. New methods of payment, new payment systems, new ways to initiate a purchase.

Innovation can be wonderful, improving convenience, speed, and reliability. But there is a downsides to all of this creativity: Interoperability. Connecting disparate systems is technically challenging and faces business questions such as “what's the ROI on connecting to yet another system?”

Today interoperability may be difficult or impossible by design. Payment methods stood up by individual companies often remain closed or must rely on other payment systems to actually move transactions.

In what is an increasingly integrated world with payments as an embedded experience, interoperability challenges show up both at the physical point of sale and online. Acquirers often use proprietary adaptations of standard protocols to “enhance” their capabilities and, to a degree, erect competitive barriers. The software used to connect point of sale terminals processed by one vendor must be changed when those same POS devices are connected to another provider.

Further complicating the merchant challenge is the merchant-facing software that connects to those terminals. That software connects to each brand of payment terminal in a proprietary fashion. While gateway providers simplify the payment interface for these independent software vendors (ISVs), each gateway provider has its own approach.

For merchants, then, there’s no such thing as “plug and play” software to connect to terminals or to connect those terminals to payment networks.

This complexity was bad enough when card rails were the only payment method of consequence. Today, however, domestic and regional payment methods are changing, adding account-to-account push payment systems like the U.S Real Time Payment Network from The Clearing House or the European SEPA Instant Credit system.

In other words, there are new payment rails, the systems that actually move money, that matter.

So, this complexity problem must overcome and that is the goal of nexo Standards, the organization Jacques represents and the topic of today's Payments on Fire® discussion.

Getting stakeholders to work on the common goal of interoperability is no easy task. Most often, participants come from competitive companies. Most of these organizations are large because, first, they have to be large to afford the investment in participation, and, second, they have to be large to realize the financial benefits of actual implementation.

This is known as the “Herding Cats Problem” and they aren’t kitty cats.

nexo Standards, and its prior incarnations, has been working on point of sale standards for over a decade. The nexo FAST standard that addresses the physical point of sale, EMV, and how to connect within the SEPA framework is nearly 1,000 pages long. And there are multiple nexo specifications including the Retailer protocol that describes the interfaces between a card payment application and a retail point of sale system

Other nexo standards address security, terminal management, the acquirer connection, and implementation.

So, a complex technical and business environment with nexo Standards bringing a comprehensive set of specifications to address it.

nexo Standards Annual Conference (attendance is free, in London)


Direct download: EP102_Nexo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:42pm EDT

A  Better Way, Please

Last week I tried to connect my accounts at two different banks. Between account type mismatches (my bad), long account numbers, ACH micro-deposits, and balky websites, well, I’ll confess I put a check in the mail as a “quicker” way of overcoming the electronic barriers. Snail mail. Really?

That situation, and many more where speed matters, is exactly why the world is turning to faster payment systems that allow the accountholder to push money from an account she controls to a recipient in near real-time. To eliminate entry, and sharing, of bank routing and recipient account numbers, today’s faster payments systems are often enhanced by a directory that maps the recipient’s name to a mobile number or email address. The director connects those to the underlying bank account.

This is great stuff, especially for the United States where so many push payment methods exist based on closed loop or incumbent payment rails. The U.S. now has providers like Venmo using balance transfers and card rails (Visa Direct, Mastercard Send) to make realtime P2P transfers workable. NACHA has sped up the automated clearinghouse (ACH) system to run batches a few times a day to accomplish its Same Day ACH service.

We have Zelle, the P2P service stood up by Early Warning Services,  that combines a directory with immediate funds transfer availability for the recipient and interbank settlement running over, yet again, an incumbent payment system, in this case the ACH.

Every one of these approaches has merit and traction.

New Rails, New Rules

That said, the new realtime systems are growing here too. Built with modern software and messaging protocols, they promise to change how both end-user settlement and inter-bank settlement is accomplished.

The first on the scene was the Real Time Payment (RTP) network from The Clearing House (TCH). Launched in 2017, the largest financial institutions and bank processors are integrating their core systems—the software that manages accountholder balances and transaction activity—to the RTP Network.

And this summer, the Federal Reserve announced it will build and operate its own faster payments system called FedNow. Like TCH, the Fed has operated multiple payment systems and been the preferred operator for the nation’s smaller financial institutions.

New Complexities

Competitive pressures, market guidance, and regulation are what move the U.S. economy. The Federal Reserve provided plenty of guidance to encourage development and deployment of faster payment systems. THC’s RTP Network was among the first to respond.

These new rails are a result of a multi-year effort by the Federal Reserve to shepherd the highly competitive U.S. payments industry toward the development of these faster payment systems. The RTP Network and FedNow are proof of its success and that of the Faster Payments Task Force, the group convened by the Fed to define the characteristics of the new approaches. 

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Questions of governance, implementation, and more abound. Interoperability concerns are especially high. These are, after all, competitive systems.

The New Organizing Principle - The US Faster Payments Council

To keep the evolution of the U.S. faster payments moving forward, the US Faster Payments Council was formed. Many Task Force members have joined as members of the Council.

The Council serves as an industry-led organization that supports collaboration across multiple areas including security, end user education, and interoperability.

In other words, the Council will be herding some very big cats.

The U.S. Faster Payments Barometer

To support its education and collaboration efforts, the US Faster Payments Council is conducting a survey of industry views on faster payments advancements. A multi-year survey, to monitor the momentum and evolution of Faster Payments here in the U.S. market.

The survey is designed to identify key criteria for market adoption, broadly gauge momentum for various use case applications, and seek to address challenges to be solved in order to have a well-established Faster Payments ecosystem.

Take the Survey

Talking Faster Payments

In this Payments on Fire® episode, Faster Payments Council Executive Director Kim Ford discusses the Council’s work, the U.S. Faster Payments Barometer survey, and where we are today with Glenbrook’s Beth Horowitz Steel and Elizabeth McQuerry. Take a listen and take the survey. You’ll contribute to the Council’s education, planning, and prioritization work.

Direct download: EP101_FPC.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:26am EDT

For a nanosecond, about seven years ago, I thought the payments industry was entering a steady state where change, while sure to be accelerated by technology, was going to settle down to the familiar sedate pace the payments industry had taken for decades.

Hah! Payment industry evolution has leapt forward since then based on, yes, technology, but also new rules, regulations, business models, and changes in attitude toward how money moves, security, and privacy.

One major trend I didn’t anticipate then was the global phenomenon of faster payments, now in active implementation or operation in some 40 countries around the world. Another, of course, is cryptocurrencies but I’ll leave that one alone for now.

The emergence of faster payments is a function of new technology with new transaction switching infrastructure and (mostly) a common messaging standard in the form of ISO 20022. But it’s also a function of rules and market response.

Even in the United States, a nation whose payment strategy is largely set by competitive forces, the central bank has had significant influence in launching new settlement capability. (And now, the Fed is planning to build its own version).

Europe and India are standouts when it comes to government guidance and strategy setting for banking and payment systems.

The European Union’s active role in evolving payments policy is recently expressed in the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2).

PSD2 has chosen to address one of the most vexing digital security challenges: strong customer authentication or SCA. Article 4(30) of the directive defines SCA as:

“an authentication based on the use of two or more elements categorised as knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user possesses) and inherence (something the user is) that are independent, in that the breach of one does not compromise the reliability of the others, and is designed in such a way as to protect the confidentiality of the authentication data”

For anyone familiar with authentication requirements, this is hardly a novel approach. That said, as far as the payments ecosystem goes, however, this is a sea change.

This is also a necessary change. Faster payment systems, where the sender pushes the payment to the recipient, make the sender’s bank responsible for authenticating its accountholders. The accountholder has to prove to her bank that she has the right to access her own account and to initiate a payment.

Unfortunately, phishing and malware are attacks that make account takeover easier than ever. There’s been an uptick in authorized push payment fraud in the UK due to ATO.

Therefore, enforcement of multi-factor authentication is seen as a necessary response.

Point of sale transactions already meet the SCA requirement. The card is something you have; The PIN is something you know. That’s enough to meet the SCA requirement. Oh, right, in the US, we don’t put PINs on credit cards. They do in Europe. We’re going to need biometrics in the US (something you are).

PDS2’s SCA mandate requires that multi-factor authentication be used whenever a user logs into her bank account or makes an e-commerce payment. Whenever payment risk is a possibility, SCA has to be used (there are plenty of exemptions but that doesn’t change the point).

Every stakeholder—every bank, every e-commerce site—must comply by doing something they have not done before.

That means a lot of work.

In this Payments on Fire® episode (Episode 100!), I speak with Russ Jones, Glenbrook’s partner in charge of our Education work and a preeminently insightful payments consultant. Russ takes us through SCA, its relationship to other standards, and the impact of its now somewhat delayed implementation.

Russ concludes the conversation with the rather chilling observation that history is about to repeat itself. The US will experience in the digital arena what the US experienced at the physical point of sale.

When EMV chip cards were mandated in Europe, card fraud at the POS and the ATM migrated to the US. Reliant on the static data of the mag stripe, the US became a global magnet for magstripe card fraud.

Once SCA becomes broadly implemented in the EU, in 2021 and beyond, online fraudsters will redouble their already considerable attacks on US financial institutions, tech providers, and merchants. While security tools are more common than ever—FIDO capable smartphones are one example—the US lacks a single entity to mandate and enforce multi-factor authentication in payments.

Scared yet?

Direct download: EP100_SCA.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:57pm EDT

One of the privileges of using a card to make a payment is the ability to dispute that charge should something go wrong. Maybe you ordered one garden rake but got charged for two. Perhaps you ordered a sweater and, as my colleague Allen Weinberg puts it, “got shipped a box of rocks.” Or you discover a charge that you didn’t make on your card account and believe it’s fraudulent.

In all those cases, the dispute process involves a chargeback.

The cardholder disputes the charge, the issuer credits the customer for the amount of that charge if it’s an obvious mistake or fraud, and, depending upon the chain of liability rules and the type of transaction, one party—the issuer, the acquirer, or the merchant—will have to bear the cost of the chargeback.

For merchants, just getting a chargeback message is a cost in the form of a fee paid to its acquirer. How does $5 and (way) up sound? Chargebacks, as a payments cost, are no financial joke.

The card system also views the chargeback rate—the percentage of transactions that result in a chargeback—as a leading indicator of poor merchant behavior. Once a merchant’s chargeback rate approaches one percent of its transactions, the merchant’s acquirer or PSP is going to put it on notice. If the merchant doesn’t lower that rate pronto the merchant could lose the ability to accept card payments.

The chargeback process is also a cost to issuers who are generally the party first called by the unhappy customer (issuers will often ask the customer if she or he has called the merchant, too).

In other words, chargebacks are a result of something going wrong and they can be a costly hassle for everyone because, for many stakeholders, chargeback handling is still dealt with manually.

In this Episode 99 of Payments on Fire® we talk with Rick Lynch, VP of Business Development from Verifi, about the impact of chargebacks on merchants and issuers. He updates us on rule changes by Visa and Mastercard. And he addresses the process and techniques needed to handle these post-authorization events.

While only mentioned in passing during the episode, Verifi is being acquired by Visa, in another example of expansion by card network operators into adjacent payment ecosystem roles.

Direct download: EP99_Verifi.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:36pm EDT

The global spread of digital payments gets a huge boost from giants like Google. Google’s Google Pay is far more than just a wallet, and the subject of this Payments on Fire® episode with Steve Klebe.

Steve heads Google’s Processor and Partnerships business and has terrific experience in our industry, working with payment gateway CyberSource, payment security firm RSA, and carrier billing firm BilltoMobile. He’s also served multiple times on the board of the Electronic Transaction Association.

In other words, a true payments geek.

Here’s what we talked about:

  • The evolution of Google Pay from its 2011 launch as Google Wallet and the various incarnations since then
  • Google’s business model for GPay and the degree to which the data generated by GPay transactions influence (or not) the advertisements we see on sites using Google’s advertising services
  • Transit payments, Google’s role in the W3C’s Payment Request API, and how Google pulls it into its own tools
  • The Google Pay value proposition and how it combines the value of hundreds of millions of cards on file, their organic growth through Chrome’s auto-fill, Google’s own sales, and making those credentials available to third parties via Google Pay
  • The new Google Pay APIs that focus more on convenience than payments: event ticketing, airline boarding passes, and more
  • Google Pay India, renamed from Tez, and its role in the UPI framework that enables secure bank-to-bank transactions.

We conclude with thoughts on the Open Banking phenomenon and Google’s intentions in that area.

 

 

Direct download: EP98_GPay.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:12pm EDT

Here on Payments on Fire® we've spoken a lot with risk and fraud management firms that generally offer some combination of services and technologies that promises to lower customer exposure to payments fraud, data theft, and operational risk.

There’s another dimension to cyber security that’s based on expertise - before and after a data breach. That's the subject of this episode.

First, a company needs to understand its overall exposure. What do we have and what can we afford to lose? That takes a technical assessment of the firm’s internal and external defenses. It also takes an understanding of what the company has to lose, from reputation-based good will to loss of R&D investment through the theft of intellectual property. Such concerns are now top of mind for corporate directors tasked with shepherding their companies in the complex cyber domain.

Yes, there’s a role for insurance.

Post breach, there is the work of uncovering what happened, the maintenance of evidence so that proper forensic procedures can be taken, and the painful resolution process that may include fines (PCI) and litigation.

All of this is well understood territory for Chris Uriarte, Chief Information Officer at Aon Cyber Solutions who joins George in this episode.

Topics discussed include:

  • The kind of activities and efforts needed to address today’s cyber risk
  • How IoT threats are no longer confined to cheap surveillance cameras
  • The sophistication of the cyber criminal industry
  • The interlocking roles of threat analysis, risks assessment, and insurance
  • The rise of ransomware and the particular exposure larger organizations face from this threat
Direct download: EP97_AON.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:17pm EDT

The task of risk management in the payments business keeps getting bigger. Where once the concern was confined to payments alone - starting with counterfeit checks and currency - payment electronification has created a universe of potential risks. Risk now includes fraudulent cards, system and network hacks, data breaches, and account takeover with all the havoc that can produce.

And we’re seeing how these impact the reputation and value of businesses even when the hack has nothing to do with payments. (By the way, bogus checks and counterfeit twenties are *still* a problem.)

We’ve touched on this topic in multiple ways on Payments on Fire®. We’ve spoken with Ethoca about its data sharing capabilities. We’ve spoken with Feedzai about its AI and machine learning technology. We’ve spoken with White Pages Pro and its data correlation capabilities. And we’ve spoken to companies deeply involved in the problem of online identity.

Each of those has a particular approach, a particular technology, or a combination of approaches, to apply to the problem of e-commerce or CNP fraud.

In this podcast, we talk to Tricia Phillips, SVP of Product and Strategy, at the fraud and risk management firm Kount. Protecting some 6,500 e-commerce merchants, banks, and payment platforms, Kount takes a deeply layered approach to the risk and fraud management.

This deep dive discussion takes us into not only Kount’s approach but into what fraudsters are doing today and the damage they can do, even to non-payments companies like Yelp. It’s a scary scene. Tricia takes us through it with insight and experience.

If Risk in Payments is a topic of interest, check out our upcoming Insight Workshop by the same name. Led by Russ Jones and Yvette Bohanan, you won’t find a more knowledgeable team to guide you through what is, as I hope we’ve demonstrated, one very complex topic.

Direct download: EP96_Kount.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:16pm EDT

One of the biggest payments challenges for merchants is how to handle payment data - whether it’s at the POS or in the remote domain where e-commerce and mobile payments take place. A lot of this concern is driven directly by PCI DSS compliance and broadly by the reputational risk data breach represents.

One of the major techniques merchants employ, in order to remove the need to store payment data, is tokenization - the replacement of the high value card data with a low value representation managed by another party. Merchants just store the token for lookup purposes while the third party maintains the database that links these low value tokens to the true primary account number or PAN.

At Glenbrook, we refer to these as merchant tokens because they are specific to and paid for by the merchant. We’ve also heard them referred to as acquirer tokens because the tokenization function is often performed by the merchant’s acquirer, processor, gateway, or payment service provider.

Makes sense, right? Put the radioactive payment card data into another party’s hands.

But for large and mid-size merchants, the provision of tokenization services to an acquirer has a few downsides:

  1. The token database maintained by the provider is specific to the merchant. If the merchant wants to shift to another provider, tokenization portability can be an issue and a costly one.
  2. In our merchant work, we are seeing the largest ones looking at a multi-acquirer topology for cost, redundancy, and channel flexibility purposes. But each acquirer will use its own tokenization scheme, adding complexity and limiting functionality.
  3. Omnichannel merchants may employ one provider for POS transactions and another for ecommerce. That doesn’t work when you want to provide a consistent experience to your returning customer. You want a token that works across channels, i.e. an omnichannel token.

In this Payments on Fire® episode we talk with Alex Pezold, CEO of Token, an acquirer neutral, independent tokenization provider. We talk a lot about protecting payment and bank account data. But we also address the growing need for protecting other data assets and how tokenization can help accomplish that.

Direct download: EP95_Tokenex.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:26pm EDT

Digital identity is one of the most solution resistant challenges to online commerce and, indeed, our online lives. It is basic to online trust, an elusive condition undermined by data breaches, abuse of our data by service provider, and fraudsters.

That’s not say we aren’t trying. Providers of all stripes are applying their value add to the problem. Smartphone makers have a role. Fraud management providers see themselves as having a role because they see so many users visiting their merchant customers’ websites or using their apps.

Networks do, too, as evidenced by Mastercard’s recent interest in identity services.

Then there are specialists in identity who play a role between the end user and the party granting access to a service, i.e. a bank. Today’s podcast is with SecureKey, a Canadian firm that has built a system to generate online trust while not sharing too much data between the parties.

Blockchain technology has increasingly gotten the attention of those in the identity space because the idea of having an immutable database as a single source of truth for identity credentials just seems so obvious.

Well, it’s not exactly as simple as putting your drivers license on a blockchain. SecureKey has partnered with IBM to use blockchain technology in support of its function as a provider of identity services.

SecureKey’s Verified.Me service gives the user the ability to quickly identity themselves and to share only the personally identifiable information they consent to share. Customers include Canadian banks CIBC, Desjardins, RBC, Scotiabank and TD. BMO and National Bank of Canada will be available later this year.

Take a listen to this conversation with Andre Boysen, SecureKey's Chief Identity Officer, and Glenbrook’s George Peabody and imagine the power of coupling a service like this to strong authentication services that use biometrics.

Direct download: EP94_SecureKey.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:29pm EDT

Ever wonder about EMVCo's role in the development and implementation of its technical specifications? Take a listen to Bastien Latge, EMVCo's director of technology and Glenbrook's George Peabody as they discuss EMVCo's EMV®* QR Code Specification for QR code-based transaction initiation in the card system. While developed card markets are shifting to contactless cards and NFC-using mobile phone wallets to kick off payments, the QR code offers a flexible, very low cost alternative. There's a lot to learn here.

Most of us are familiar with QR codes to retrieve product information from websites or print media, or perhaps when authenticating a mobile device to a web page.

In payments, many of the caffeine-reliant among us use the Starbucks app with its 2D barcode to initiate the transaction. It makes it so easy to know when we have enough gold stars to ask the barista for a drink on the house.

Some merchant apps use a QR code for the consumer to present when initiating a payment transaction that calls on card on file payment credentials. Walmart Pay for example.

In China - and really throughout Asia - providers like Alipay and WeChat Pay have been hugely successful with QR code-using payment apps.

In Japan, the proliferation of closed loop QR code-based payment tools, each encoding data differently, has created a cacophony of incompatible approaches. A new industry collaboration effort is attempting to lower the technical noise level by using a common technology provider. 

The card industry, named because of those 85.60 mm × 53.98 mm (​3 3/8 × ​2 1/8 inches) pieces of plastic we carry around, is, of course, far more than the cards it uses to initiate a transaction. Their rules and global networks are unparalleled in reach and sophistication.

But at the edge of those networks, the card format is becoming less important (think mobile wallets) and useless in those markets lacking a terminal infrastructure. To make sure card network transactions can take hold in card-less regions, the card brands put their technical specification organization to work.

In 2017, EMVCo released its EMV QR Code Specification, designed to encode and represent the card message structure in QR code format.

A major hallmark of the EMV Chip Specification in cards is the generation of dynamic data, of a cryptogram unique to that transaction, that prevents replay attacks. The EMV QR Code Specification supports such dynamic data as well as the issuer tokenization framework also codified by EMVCo. Even the payment account reference number (PAR) is accommodated here.

To accelerate use of QR code EMVCo recently built self-assessment tools for both merchant- and consumer-presented that validate the QR format. Certification to individual networks and acquirers is not supported by the EMVCo tools.

* EMV® is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries and an unregistered trademark elsewhere. The EMV trademark is owned by EMVCo, LLC.

 

Direct download: EP93_EMVCO_QR.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:48pm EDT

Payments on Fire® usually focuses on a single topic, typically a fintech company and the business or personal challenges it addresses. In this episode, we take another direction by bringing together three fintech leaders to talk about their company offerings, how they connect up to payments, and some of the obstacles they’ve faced.

George talks with the leadership of three companies working in very different areas: remittances, small business logistics payments, and healthcare.

  • Mike Gaburo, CEO of Brightwell Payments, a company delivering a mobile payments app to global workers for their payroll distribution, enabling card-based purchasing as well as remittance services
  • Robin Gregg, CEO of RoadSync, a business software provider that enables electronic payments to SMBs in the logistics sector; and
  • Alan Nalle Chief Strategy Officer of Patientco, a payments platform with intuitive, mobile-friendly tools for Health Systems to enable patients to pay their healthcare bills.

This conversation illustrates the breadth of payments and the focus required to solve the specific payments needs of each industry segment.

Robin, Mike, and Alan will join Glenbrook partner Beth Horowitz Steel on her panel called Innovative Solutions - Solving Difficult Payment Needs at the Fintech South conference, held April 22 and 23 in Atlanta.

Direct download: EP92_FTS.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:17pm EDT

Five years on from Apple Pay’s release, contactless payment cards are just getting off the ground here in the US but in much of the rest of the card world, contactless payments of both kinds are common practice. In London, half of the card transactions are contactless. The same is true in Canada. While it’s true that the vast majority of these are card-based, not via mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, even the mobile wallets are gaining momentum.

To expand contactless usage, Mobeewave has developed software tools for financial institutions to integrate into their merchant app that turn the merchant’s smartphone into a contactless acceptance device. No added hardware: software only.

We’re talking with Maxime de Nanclas, Mobeewave‘s co-CEO and co-founder. A firm based in Montreal, Mobeewave has worked to turn smartphones into general purpose contactless payment terminals.

This is cool tech and, as Maxime tells it, a great journey for the company. Take a listen as he describes what their software does, how they built it, and their experience navigating the complexities of device certification.

Direct download: EP91_Mobeewave.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:27pm EDT

The UK and the EU take a very different approach to payments industry evolution than here in the States; the former directed by government mandate, the latter by marketplace dynamics and the lighter touch of regulators. But both are responding, at different speeds, to the need of fintechs and enterprises for access to bank-based data and services.

The Payment Services Directive 2, PSD2, written in 2015 and in effect since January of 2018, addresses a range of concerns including a ban on surcharging on card payments and limiting consumer fraud liability exposure from 150 to 50 euros. But its major impact is its enablement of Open Banking through the granting of access to payment rails and payment data managed, up until PSD2, only by banks. Banks are required to open up programmatic access, via APIs, to that data.

In this Payments on Fire® episode, we dive into the UK and EU experience with the PSD2 a year after it going into effect. We take a look at its impact on Open Banking, the opening up of payment rails to these fintechs and other non-bank players.

To do that, Myles Stephenson, CEO of B2B payments firm Modulr, discusses his firm’s experience as an Electronic Money Institution, an organization chartered by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under PSD2 rules. Under its provisions, Modulr gains, or will gain, the ability to initiate payments on behalf of its customers as well as access customer data.

While incumbent financial institutions are hardly thrilled at the prospect of opening up their systems to fintech competitors and the cost of doing so, the operational improvements for customers and increase in competitive activity are expected to generate many benefits.

Direct download: EP90_Modulr.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:11pm EDT

Cross-border B2B payments are frustrating, time consuming, and expensive, especially for small and medium businesses. To dig into why and what's being done to overcome those concerns, join George and Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem, for an explanation.

SMB B2B payments, particularly cross border payments, have always been time consuming to accomplish and expensive to do.

They are time consuming because sending an international “wire” payment was historically slow with uncertain delivery timing and with uncertain, and high, costs to both the sender and the receiver. For the sender, the process of initiating a cross-border payment has always taken no little time compared, for example, to writing a check.

Cost is a second concern because cross-border payment economics are not always transparent. At least a few times a year, when Glenbrook gets paid by one of our international clients, the funds we receive are less than what we invoiced. While our client sends us the correct amount at the prevailing exchange rate, intermediaries along the way may take “bene deduct fees” - beneficiary deductions - from the funds in transit in order to compensate themselves for their services. I prefer the more accurate term of “lifting fees."

This uncertainty of timing and cost affects millions of small businesses participating in the global supply chain.

Companies like Veem, Western Union, TransferWise, PayPal and many others compete on speed, predictability, low cost, and global reach. Super helpful integration into business accounting and AR/AP functions is a big plus.

Veem’s story is compelling as it began using the bitcoin blockchain to send money between its operations in multiple countries. Since then, the company has added other partners and its own in-country account balances to fund transactions. Veem’s SMB customers can send money to 90 countries and receive funds in 25. The company has served over 100,000 SMB customers.

If blockchain, cross-border, B2B, small business and fintech are terms that interest you, take a listen to George and Marwan as they catch up on the company, SMB pain points, and the impact of Chinese tariffs on Veem customers.

If you're in Atlanta in April, check out the Fintech South Conference. Glenbrook partners Elizabeth McQuerry and Beth Horowitz Steel will be there. Get in touch!

 

Direct download: EP89_Veem.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:44pm EDT

The digital marketplace model brings together buyers and sellers and, frequently, handles the money and payouts to the sellers.

As my guest today has determined, digital infrastructure, e-commerce usage, competition, and workforce characteristics influence a country’s ability to establish a flourishing marketplace component to the economy.

This marketplace economic model is a useful one enabling, among other use cases, the gig economy. Adopted in countries like China, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and other established markets, this episode’s guest, Tomas Likar, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Hyperwallet, has done a lot of thinking about its role in these and other countries.

This podcast was prompted by Hyperwallet’s February 2019 release of its Marketplace Expansion Index report, the MEI, that evaluated the marketplace readiness of some 36 countries.

A surprise is the early stage of marketplace adoption in a number of otherwise highly developed countries.

The application of the marketplace model to human labor is, of course, not without controversy and concern. Steady employment with guaranteed benefits is no longer an attribute of employment in many countries, replaced by the uncertainties of the gig economy. That’s the downside concern. On the other hand, these marketplace services provide access to otherwise unavailable work and that is good news for individual and, by extension, domestic economic well being.

Take a listen to this conversation with George and Tomas Likar of Hyperwallet for an overview of marketplace adoption and the variables affecting its uptake.

Direct download: EP88_Hyperwallet.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:52pm EDT

The business of merchant services continues to undergo two forms of transformation. First, the merchant services businesses, either as acquiring banks or via non-bank acquirers, has undergone massive consolidation over the last five years and more. Fiserv’s takeover of First Data, announced on January 16, is just the latest example.

The second sea change is the expansion of products and services these entities deliver. What was a fairly innovation-averse industry has become, under the competitive pressure of companies like PayPal and Square, far more committed to delivering value that helps customers run their business, not just accept card payments.

At the POS, Square changed the merchant services game by delivering a great deal more business value to the small merchant than the traditional ISO or agent focused on placing stand-beside terminals next to dumb cash registers. For the price of payment processing, Square has given those merchants inventory, time and attendance, sales and marketing focused reporting, and more.

As a result, the giants in this game have been forced to respond. In 2013, First Data acquired Clover to reach small retailers and restaurant customers. Others, like Global Payments’ Heartland unit, have invested heavily in serving the mid-tier and larger restaurant industry.

To deliver similarly broad services, TSYS recently come out with three new merchant offerings targeted at micro merchants, single shop operations, and larger merchants. The new line is called Vital, at vitalpos.com and its solutions are called Vital Mobile, Vital Plus, and Vital Select.

Along with the new Vital hardware, we can expect the offering, taking advantage of cloud delivery, to expand its software and services line-up in the future - a trick that the old POS terminal model never could pull off.

Take a listen to this episode’s discussion with Gavin Rosenberg, vice president of product marketing, at TSYS. It’s a revealing conversation about the decision making and product strategy of a major provider of merchant services.

Direct download: EP87_Vital.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:51pm EDT

This Stuff is Hard

As the remote payments domain (think in-app and browser-based payment transactions) continues to grow at around 15% a year, that growing number means the size and scale of fraud losses are going to increase. And they have - in both absolute terms and as a percentage of overall transaction volume. That also means rising chargeback rates for many merchants.

Rising fraud in the online world is also a result of better security technology in the physical world. While EMV chip cards have dropped counterfeit losses way down, the fraudsters still have their own bills to pay. They’ve just shifted more aggressively to the card not present channel.

A Delicate Balance

All e-tailers face a delicate balance in managing fraud. If they err too far on the side of fraud minimization by tightening approval standards too far, they leave good sales on the table and insult customers with unnecessary declines (the “insult rate”). Of course, those customers promptly go to another site to make their purchase.

The e-tailer’s sales and marketing team, then, tells the fraud manager that she’s killing sales.

If the approval standards are too loose, on the other hand, the e-tailer risks the twin threats of higher fraud and chargeback costs and, if the chargeback rate exceeds 1%, placement on a watch list if that rate stays over 1%. Not a good list to be on because the the merchant could lose card acceptance privileges if the problem is not addressed.

The Smaller E-Tailer is Challenged

While Amazon continues to gobble up half of the growth in US commerce volume, it still means that there is room for smaller online merchants to prosper. It also means they face growing fraud losses. Unlike their larger competitors who can afford internal fraud management teams and technology, small and mid-tier e-tailers have limited time, budget, and skills to meet those needs.

Fraud management is a non-trivial problem even for the largest enterprises. They deploy a layered set of technologies, ranging from table stakes tools like address verification system (AVS) to device and behavioral fingerprinting and on to rules engines, AI, and machine learning controls.

That level of sophistication is beyond what the mid-tier e-tailer can handle. Some enterprise customers don’t want to deal with that complex task either.

The Outsourced Option

That’s where the wholly outsourced proposition comes in. The third party fraud management service provider assembles the necessary technology, makes the right integrations with shopping carts and other software providers, puts an analyst team in place to decide on questionable transactions, and offers its services for a fee.

ClearSale (www.clear.sale) is a provider in this space. Take a listen Rafael Lourenco, its EVP, and George as they discuss fraud management in this segment, how the ClearSale service is deployed, and some merchant best practices. Rafael breaks down this topic very clearly. Definitely worth your time.

Direct download: PoF_EP86_Clear.Sale.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:49am EDT

Ecommerce fraud rates are rising and that means more cardholders are seeing unauthorized charges on their accounts.

The cardholder remedy is to call either the merchant or the issuer to flag the problem. If the cardholder turns to the issuer to resolve the problem, the remedy is often an expensive chargeback for the merchant and a generally lousy experience for everyone.

Ecommerce Merchant Pain

Ecommerce merchants have invested heavily in fraud detection tools because in the remote payment domain liability rules make them responsible for fraud losses. Ecommerce merchants employ sophisticated fraud management processes and tools to detect fraud in realtime to stop authorization (best in class fraud rates are 25 bps - 35 bps).

On top of that, they must eat the direct costs associated with stolen goods and services. These include a chargeback processing fee from the acquirer as well as the merchant’s internal costs to manage the chargeback process. If the merchant fights the chargeback, the merchant has to gather the supporting evidence (the receipt or copy of the order) and submit it to the acquirer.

Disputes and chargebacks re initiated by cardholders for a range of reasons including fraud, authorization, various processing errors, and consumer-specific disputes. Examples of consumer dispute codes include products or services not as described, counterfeit, misrepresentation, and failure to process a credit.
https://www.worldpay.com/global/support/support-articles/what-are-chargeback-reason-codes-visa-and-mastercard

Issuer Pain

For issuers, disputes and chargebacks are painful, too. In the POS domain, issuers hold the liability for fraud losses. If a counterfeit card is used and the issuer authorizes the payment, the issuer owns that liability. Issuers also bear the customer servicing and communications costs as chargebacks initiate with the cardholder’s call to the issuer.

Consumers Game the System

Zero liability rules have taught U.S. cardholders that they don’t have to worry about fraud and that they have broad powers to dispute a transaction.

Knowing that, too many cardholders are taking advantage of these rules. Digital merchants, in particular, are suffering from friendly fraud (not exactly an accurate term) that occurs when a cardholder, for example, disputes the charges made by another family member. For some digital merchant, over half of their chargebacks are friendly fraud, purchases for which the cardholder is truly responsible but able to renounce (“It wasn’t me!”) because of the rules.

Such high chargeback rates carry other risks for these merchants. Once a merchant’s chargeback rate exceeds 1% of its transactions, that merchant is put on a watch list, a remediation plan, and faces the possibility of losing card acceptance privileges. High chargeback rates also increase authorization declines for the merchant, losing even more good transactions.

Card Network Remediation

On the face of it, there’s an asymmetry when it comes to liability. Merchants shoulder a large burden. With that in mind, both Visa and Mastercard updated their chargeback rules in 2018.

In a chargeback mitigating move, Mastercard recently announced an end to the automatic renewal of free trial subscriptions.

Timely Data Sharing

In other words, chargebacks are a pain. Steps to reduce chargeback cost and frequency are a Good Thing.

One approach is to speed up data sharing. For example, once an issuer determines that a transaction is fraudulent, a timely message to the merchant could halt a product shipment. While the rules would still make an ecommerce merchant liable for the chargeback costs, the merchant wouldn’t lose the cost of order handling, shipping, and the item itself.

Similarly, if merchants can share their cardholder fraud experience back to the issuer then that financial institution can adjust its fraud detection models and algorithms.

Such data sharing is the proposition of Ethoca, a firm that federates bank fraud signals from hundreds of major global issuers and connects to thousands of merchants in the developed world in order to share alerts and chargeback messages.

In this conversation with Keith Briscoe, CMO at Ethoca, we talk about the chargeback problem, hear some truly astounding chargeback stories (hackers aren’t the only fraudsters), and discuss Ethoca’s role in this space.

Direct download: EP85_Ethoca_3.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:19pm EDT

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