How are e-commerce websites using "dark pattern" techniques to influence people into making more purchases or disclosing more information than they would otherwise?
Today TrustPay brings its merchants Apple Pay, which is transforming mobile payments with an easy, secure and private way to pay that’s fast and convenient.
Security and privacy are at the core of Apple Pay. Using a credit or debit card with Apple Pay, the actual card numbers are not stored on the device, nor on Apple servers. Instead, a unique Device Account Number is assigned, encrypted and securely stored in the Secure Element on the device. Each transaction is authorized with a one-time unique dynamic security code.
David Rintel, CEO of TrustPay commented: "We are excited to bring Apple Pay to all our merchants as it is becoming more and more popular contactless payment system in the world. By integrating Apple Pay, TrustPay will provide effortless real-time transactions and more security protection to prevent fraud."
Apple Pay is easy to set up and users will continue to receive all of the rewards and benefits offered by credit and debit cards. Apple Pay works with iPhone SE, iPhone 6 and later, and Apple Watch.
Emirates NBD, a leading bank in the region, has announced the successful implementation of a digitised payment solution for Dubai Department of Finance (DoF) to achieve full Host-to-Host (H2H) integration of all payment processes through the bank’s smartBUSINESS Connect solution.
Emirates NBD’s smartBUSINESS Connect supports high volume transactions with assured data exchange, providing data for reconciliation as per industry standard formats. Through smartBUSINESS Connect, DoF will be able to conduct automated and secured outgoing payments with simultaneous transfer of payment data and approvals.
"In line with the vision of the wise leadership to transform the Government of Dubai into a fully smart model, DoF has gone a long way in achieving full electronic connectivity with banks, under the Dubai Paperless Strategy launched by H. H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council," said Jamal Hamed Al Marri, Executive Director of Central Accounts Sector at DoF. "Our fruitful cooperation with Emirates NBD is aimed at reducing the burden and workload on employees, saving on financial resources and reducing paper waste, as well as enhancing security and speed of work. We are keen to continue looking at advancing our relationship with the bank in the future."
“Emirates NBD is at the forefront of driving technologies to digitise clients’ processes, bringing greater efficiencies in their day-to-day operations and making banking smoother, faster and more secure,” said Ahmed Al Qassim, Executive Vice President, General Manager of Corporate Banking at Emirates NBD. “We were delighted to support DoF in this critical project that reflects our commitment to enabling the leadership’s Smart Dubai agenda of a paperless economy. Emirates NBD looks forward to future such collaborations with public and private sector clients to transform this vision into reality.”
Sweden's popular mobile P2P app Swish is moving into in-store payments, running a pilot trial of Nets' bluetooth checkout technology at two restaurants owned by one of the country's leading corporates, cantina.
Pär Ekroth, marketing manager, Swish, says: "Seven million Swedes walk around with the Swish app in their pocket, and it’s clear that the demand for easier in-store payments is increasing. As such, we are pleased to offer mobile payments functionality to our customers.”
For the trials, Swish will be tethered to a Bluetooth module developed by Nets that provides an NFC-like ‘tap and pay’ experience for consumers. Integration with merchants’ systems requires only the addition of a ‘Bluetooth box’ to Nets payment acceptance terminals.
The in-store payments functionality also enables better loyalty programmes, as Bluetooth technology opens up use cases such as real-time, geo-tagged offers.
Nets already provides this Bluetooth feature to Danish merchants, enabling them to accept in-store payments from locally issued wallets.
Jan Lundequist, SVP, Nets Merchant Services, says: "The payment experience is similar to making a contactless payment, which consumers are accustomed to - particularly in countries like Sweden with high digital penetration. Not only can merchants easily install the solution and accept Swish payments through their existing Nets terminals, but it’s also easy and intuitive for consumers to use."
Japanese payments app and putative challenger bank Kyash has raised $14 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Mitsubishi UFJ and Goodwater Capital, the VC firm that recently participated in Monzo's £113 million raise.
Two-year old Kyash is riding a Government-inspired push to raise the share of cashless payments as part of an effort to better to serve foreign visitors who prefer to use credit or debit cards. The government’s goal is to increase cashless payments from a lowly 20% to a 40% market share by 2025. As part of this initiative, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry intends to launch a Rebate Project for consumers who use cashless payments starting on 1 October, 2019. Kyash has been named a payments provider for the Project.
“The integration of finance with technology coupled with changes in the regulatory environment in Japan are leading to new conceptualizations of money and financial services for consumers,” says Eric Kim, managing partner at Goodwater Capital. “As Japan's nearly $3 trillion retail market transitions to a cashless society, fresh approaches like those of Kyash will not only facilitate the move away from notes and coins but also allow greater flexibility in receiving salaries and compensation, among other innovations.”
The latest round brings Kyash's total funding to $26 million, and with the addition of Mitsubishi to previous investors SMBC and Mizuho means the startup now has the backing of the country's three largest banks.
Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) and Fidor Solutions today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to launch fintech programmes in Kazakhstan and promote economic development across Central Asia.
The AIFC was created by the first president of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev on 7 December, 2015, to drive innovative financial and technology initiatives. The organisation focuses on research and development in new digital technologies. It has implemented accelerators and incubator programmes and attracted partnerships and investments from leading fintech and VCs.
Based in Dubai, UAE, Fidor Solutions’ international entity, sister-company to Fidor Bank, known as ‘the oldest fintech bank in the world’, is a pioneer in the area of open banking. Fidor Solutions provides technology and advisory services to financial institutions and contributed to the creation of three innovative digital banks in 2018 alone. The organisation contributes to fintech programmes in key global financial centres.
This MoU foresees AIFC and Fidor fostering fintech collaboration to boost the digital economy and increase financial literacy and access.
It includes:
- Initiatives to support the development of a cashless economy in Kazakhstan.
- Development of joint fintech education programmes with key regional universities.
- Support in developing the AIFC fintech marketplace to boost financial market innovation and collaboration while driving e-commerce activities.
- Mentorship and partnership on accelerator programmes.
Kairat Kelimbetov, Governor of AIFC, stated: “AIFC has great ambitions for its fintech innovation programme that go beyond borders. We are proud to be growing our fintech network by signing an MoU with Fidor, a European fintech that has successfully developed internationally. Their contribution will be valuable to all our members and partners.”
Gé Drossaert, Board Member and Group CCO of Fidor, commented: “We are glad to be joining AIFC’s fintech innovation programme. Fidor share similar core values to AIFC, such as openness and knowledge sharing. We are glad to put this into action by offering our expertise in launching this fintech education programme, and financial marketplaces while mentoring regional fintechs. The collaboration between our organisations will pave the way for fintech success in the region with a direct impact on the digital economy and financial access.”
At the beginning of July, we’re right in the thick of what travel agencies and tour operators across the northern hemisphere know as the summer high season. The confluence of warmer weather, brighter days, and school summer holidays has turned would-be travellers into actual travellers, driving up the travel industry’s revenues to heights unreachable in the depths of winter. But just because revenues are climbing doesn’t mean they couldn’t climb higher, and there are a number of travel payment technologies that could see those revenue molehills turn into revenue mountains.
Giving Customers the Travel Payment Technologies They Want
Practically any travel site you care to name can accept a single lump sum payment from a Visa or Mastercard credit/debit card, and while it’s still essential to make that process as smooth and pleasant as possible, it’s nowhere near enough by itself at this point. Travellers want the ability to structure their own payments, now, whether that means splitting them across the entire group or paying in increments. To meet customer demand, Airbnb developed their own split payments mechanism, while payment service providers can offer incremental payment options for operators aiming themselves at holidaymaker market segments with a lower average income.
Here, There, Everywhere: Travel Meets Global Payment Technologies
So, opening up your card payments to things like split and incremental payments will earn you some fans, but it’s far from the only thing you can do. Why restrict yourself to card payments? In a payment technology ecosystem that’s increasingly mobile-focused, it’s more and more vital to adapt to payment methods beyond the traditional. That can mean the obvious stuff like Apple and Google Pay, but it can also mean things like WeChat Pay and Alipay, whose meteoric rise in China has seen over 400 million people making mobile payments in the last year alone. If your business is sending tourists across the globe, it pays to be global!
Travel Payment Technologies for Intelligent Growth
So, expanding your capacities is key to making the most of the high season, but it’s still as important as ever to protect yourself against malicious activity. With travel industry fraud predicted to cost in excess of $25 billion by 2020, it’s more important than ever to take steps to defend against it. That means investing in technological solutions that can analyse your business’ payments for potential fraudsters and stop it at the root. Luckily, there are more than a few companies out there that offer solutions for precisely this, it’s just a matter of finding the one that best fits the needs of your business.
Travel operators are quite literally responsible for running global businesses. Global businesses need global payment solutions, and in this case, that specifically means payment technologies targeting the travel industry. By investing time and resources in expanding the range of payment methods available to travellers, you stand to make the absolute most of the summer high season, and by dedicating some of that time to security, you can even clamp down on fraud while you’re at it. Not bad for a summer job.
As one of the leading payments conferences in Europe, EBAday is a great forum to gauge industry sentiment on a number of challenges and opportunities taking place in the rapidly changing payments landscape. Through some very interesting conversations with clients and delegates, we were able to identify a few key themes from the event. These include the new opportunities around open banking, innovation arising from Request to Pay, the slow adoption of instant payments and the challenges of migrating to ISO 20022 messages.
Open Banking, a Slow Open
With final compliance dates for PSD2 imminent, the conversation is shifting from compliance to service provision – what can banks now do on top of the provided APIs to continue being viable in a marketplace when they are becoming increasingly remote from the customer experience relationship? The reality is that aside from some banks that took APIs and open banking as a call to action very early – some before PSD2 was formalised – the vast majority of banks continue to breathe a sigh of relief from their compliance projects and are not yet in a position to take advantage of the wider world of open banking.
One reason is the continued need for effective and efficient orchestration between external APIs and internal systems, particularly given that many of the latter are still not well suited to API access and real-time operation. Banks may have solved those orchestration needs for the basics of payments initiation and account access as required by regulation, but not in a scalable way, so more work is needed when it comes to opening up additional services such as lending or FX, or account-opening – all of which will be required in a truly open banking world. In addition to “known unknowns” like the impact of 24x7x365 real-time open banking on bank liquidity management, new concepts are arising. For example, the concept of “B2D” as a new entrant into the financial technology lexicon, standing for “Bank to Developer” or “Business to Developer” – the notion that banks now need to add the developer community as a set of stakeholders, in addition to the traditional ones of client/partner/regulator.
Request To Pay, coming soon to a device near you
As Request To Pay (RfP) starts to move from concept to emerging reality, a number of distinctive features are coming into focus. The first is that RfP opens up the possibility of requesting a payment, either in a business or consumer context, in a recipient’s preferred method. This helps improve financial inclusion in areas such as Asia-Pacific and other regions, where many people don’t have credit cards but do have bank accounts, or indeed don’t have bank accounts but have mobile phones and emails connected to digital wallets.
RfP can also be used as a means to combat fraud, such as “CEO fraud” where a bad actor sends a payment request to a finance employee impersonating the company’s CEO. RfP would eliminate sending of payment requests by email and similar unsecured and unauthenticated channels. While fraudsters will eventually find ways to play the system, the barrier to entry will be raised.
A key element that makes this possible is the proposed design of European Request To Pay which decouples the request mechanism and request customer experience from the payment rail. This is unlike, for example, the US TCH Real-Time Payments network request for pay mechanism, which requires fulfilment of the request through the RTP network. On balance, while it’s early days yet, RfP looks well positioned to deliver new waves of payments innovation to benefit European consumers and businesses. This provides opportunities for new innovators and poses a threat and opportunity alike for incumbent providers.
Instant payments yes, instant adoption no
This was the first EBAday with two live instant payments rails – the ECB’s TIPS and EBA Clearing’s RT1. While this in itself was a cause for celebration, any celebration of the growth of the networks in terms of number of banks signed on or meaningful transaction volumes relative to the huge volumes of non-instant SEPA, was muted. Adoption is proving slow even by the most forgiving of measures.
The reasons for the relative slowness of adoption are familiar: the lack of a mandate such as PSD2; the challenges of 24x7x365 real-time operation overall; the difficulty that many banks are having in adapting existing SEPA bulk payment systems from legacy vendors (or their homegrown SEPA engines) to the requirements of instant payments; and the lack of clear monetisation pathways and business case structures for instant payments. There is also the issue of the availability of two networks each with different properties and advantages and disadvantages – for example, TIPS has no transaction limit making it well suited to corporate payments, while the current transaction limits of RT1 tend to favour retail flows. This has created a ‘paradox of choice’ where an increase in the number of choices results in a decrease in the number of decisions being made.
“Do nothing” in the face of complexity and uncertainty is certainly a possible course of action, but our discussions with banks indicated a different response to the instant payment landscape. There is a clear preference for multi-scheme instant payment solutions, easing the burden of committing to one network or the other or requiring two separate connectivity solutions. Banks are looking for APIs that enable them to quickly build end-to-end customer experiences and products based on instant payments, beyond basic connectivity. There is also a need for openness to managed-service and cloud-based solutions for instant payments, as these have multiple benefits. These capabilities allow banks to onboard onto instant payments networks quickly and with minimal upfront cost, while preserving agility as business cases and product offerings are released and validated. It also helps banks deal with the great unknown of volumes.
Transition strategy for ISO 20022
The industry is working on the migration approach for ISO 20022. UK and European banks (at least direct participants) will need to be ready to send and receive ISO 20022 messages in early 2022. Initially this will be a like-for-like migration, with the extension of the standard one year later. This has caused some concerns among the European Financial Institutions around how to create a unique migration strategy, what kind of support Central Banks, ACHs, Payment associations will offer for the testing phase around schemas, how to define testing windows, and how to avoid a “big bang” cut-over weekend. Post migration, there is also some concern over the “post mortem strategy” – the scenario where one or more participants won't be ready.
There was a real mix of excitement and some hesitation when it comes to the changes happening in payments at EBAday this year. What is clear, however, is that banks must start innovating if they want to stay relevant and continue generating revenue, as yesterday’s technology cannot deliver on the business opportunities of today.