The Clearing House (TCH) has launched RTP, its real-time payments system, the first new core payments infrastructure in the US in more than 40 years.

The new RTP system was designed and built through the collaborative effort of TCH’s 25 owner banks and meets the objectives of the Federal Reserve Faster Payments Task Force. RTP is open to all US depository institutions with a goal of reaching ubiquity by 2020.

The first real-time payments on the system were initiated between BNY Mellon and U.S. Bank yesterday evening. They will be very shortly followed by Citi, J.P. Morgan, PNC and SunTrust, who together represent the Industry’s earliest adopters of RTP.

“As an industry, RTP positions us like never before to meet the evolving needs of our customers and commercial clients,” says William S. Demchak, PNC’s chairman, president and chief executive officer and chairman of The Clearing House‘s Supervisory Board.

“At a time when our clients are asking for the ability to conduct their business with greater speed, efficiency and security, RTP will make everyday financial tasks such as paying bills, issuing invoices, making payroll or settling insurance claims faster, safer and more satisfying for businesses and consumers across the country.”

“RTP is one of the most important payment transformation efforts in our industry. It goes far beyond helping financial institutions address the legacy challenges of payment processing in the US (speed, transparency, cost) and improving the client experience. Bringing online a truly real time, two way, 24×7 payment and messaging system will create new scenarios and entire new markets in ways we have not even anticipated,” comments Ian Stewart, CEO of BNY Mellon Treasury Services.

RTP is open to all US depository institutions. Similar to Wires and ACH, RTP will become part of the core industry infrastructure with the potential to support many use cases and underpin financial institutions’ client-facing services. TCH is working with a wide array of industry stakeholders, including community banks, credit unions, and financial institution service providers, to drive RTP adoption.

– paymentscardsandmobile.com –

Two years after the EMV deadline for U.S. merchants, Auriemma Consulting Group, a boutique management consulting firm, has identified six notable EMV trends:

1. Counterfeit fraud claims have declined for five consecutive quarters and are down 34 percent from their peak in early 2016.
2. EMV helped trigger a shift from fake cards to fake identities. Synthetic identity fraud was responsible for up to 20 percent of credit losses in 2016, according to Auriemma.
3. While chip fallback volume is low — less than 2 percent of transactions — fraud associated with fallback is on the rise, accounting for 24 percent of total counterfeit fraud and 43 percent of lost-and-stolen fraud in Q2.
4. The decision not to use chip and PIN in the U.S. has contributed to a 25 percent increase in lost-and-stolen fraud claims since the liability shift, which costs major card issuers $50 million annually, on average.
5. The EMV user experience has been panned as slow and confusing, and has triggered calls for contactless and mobile payments. More than half of cardholders believe mobile payments are faster than chip transactions.
6. Knowledge-based authentication is considered increasingly unreliable; more than two-thirds of card issuers now use randomly generated passwords sent to a registered mobile number or email address to validate online and mobile transactions, and many see line and voice biometrics as the next step.

Referring to the rate of its growth and sophistication, Director of Europol Robert Wainwright says cybercrime is becoming a “remorseless” force of nature behind the 4,000 ransomware attacks a day. A force, he noted, that is becoming ever more technologically sophisticated — and thus an ever-larger threat to critical parts of the financial sector.

Criminals on the web, Wainwright says, are no longer lone wolves operating alone — in many cases they are building highly specialized “conglomerations” with organized corporate structures designed to make carrying out attacks on legitimate business more friction-free. Last year, police authorities in several countries arrested a host of criminals groups that had created a “service-based economy” for the rest of the criminal market, such as providing ways to launder money or sell drugs online.

“What really concerns me is the sophistication of the capability, which is becoming good enough to really threaten parts of our critical infrastructure, certainly in the financial, banking sector,” he told Reuters.

And the systems, he noted before alluding to the WannaCry attacks over the summer, are only getting more effective. WannaCry, Wainwright said, changed the dynamic of such attacks by making the attacks bigger, deeper and more extortion-oriented. Why steal by hacking when you can use your hacking skills to get someone to just give you their funds?

“The real threat comes from a sort of exponential, remorseless increase in the scale and significance of cybercriminal capability,” Wainwright said on the sidelines of the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon.

He further observed that there “seems to be a doubling, or tripling, of one kind of threat or another, in terms of scale.”

The problem, he noted, is that unlike other criminals, cyber criminals can do all their work “in their bedrooms,” making it difficult to find them.

“There is this sort of cybercriminal underworld that’s a lot bigger and smarter and adept than most people think,” Wainwright said. “And, against it, we still have generally low cybersecurity standards.”

– pymnts.com –

On 6th October 2017 at Melia Hotel in Hanoi, the ceremony of CIO & CSO ASEAN Award 2017 was held to honor CIOs & CSOs of enterprises and governmental organizations, who had made outstanding contributions to the unit as well as to the overall development of IT industry.

Together with some prominent IT directors from enterprises and organizations such as KBZ Yangon (Myanmar), LOLC Cambodia, Home Credit Vietnam, Swiss Post Solutions AG, Mr. Do Viet Ha – CIO of MK Group – was honored in CIO ASEAN award of the Enterprise sector.

The award was a recognition for Mr. Ha’s contributions in building and developing IT of MK Group in particular, as well as MK Group’s endless effort to provide IT solutions to serve tens of million end-users with optimized experiences, enhance IT solutions in public sector with the aim of saving time and ensuring the seamless and optimized operation for governmental organizations and enterprises.

With 12 consecutive years of successful event, CIO & CSO ASEAN Award has become an important annual event, gathering the most prominent IT leaders from enterprises and governmental sectors in ASEAN. In addition, the event is also an opportunity for the IT and information security leader community to share and recognize the development of information technology and security information in Vietnam and ASEAN, as well as sharing the new aspects of vision and responsibility in technology and business issues.

A new survey of shoppers has found that the overwhelming majority are open to fingerprint authenticated purchases.

According to research by Worldpay, while 63% of consumers want to be able to use biometric scans to authenticate payments when shopping, 69% said they would be most open to using their fingerprints.

In the survey, almost a quarter of consumers said they would be comfortable paying for goods by facial recognition, 33% were happy to pay by iris recognition and 18% said they would feel comfortable paying by voice recognition in store.
James Frost, chief marketing officer of Worldpay, said this adoption of technology was more about consumer convenience than anything else. “Suddenly it isn’t so scary any more,” he said.

“Yes, it may be more secure, but actually if that means the purchasing experience is just that much more slick and that much quicker, then people are willing to embrace it.”

But as technology begins to creep into the retail world, there are still some instances where consumers would prefer to interface with a person rather than an artificial intelligence (AI) or a robot.

Whereas older customers would like to pay a person at the end of a shopping experience, younger consumers are more comfortable using automated payment methods to speed up the final step of the retail experience.

Only 13% of people in the survey said they do not interact with employees in a store, 37% said they want to be able to talk to a store employee if they need something, and 35% said that if a store employee is good, they can improve the in-store experience.

A very small percentage said they do not feel shop staff are helpful or knowledgeable about products, and 10% said they would prefer to use technology for self-service.

“There is still a really critical role for store employees – we’re not going to be dealing exclusively with robots in the future,” said Frost. “People still do want to be able to speak to a human being if they have a question.”

Source: http://www.planetbiometrics.com/