All articles by EPI editorial
EPI editorial
Barclays shines in the security race
Available free of charge to its UK internet banking customers, Barclays Banks two factor smart card authentication reader PINsentry has proved a big success in terms of customer acceptance and performance.Indeed, since its introduction customer acceptance of PINsentry has exceeded Barclays own expectations In the 12 months since its launch in July 2007 more than 1 million of the handheld PINsentry devices have been deployed, an uptake representing half of the banks online customers and 30 percent higher than original expectations.Our goal was to provide our online customers with an easy to use, highly secure product to protect them against fraud, commented Barclays director of digital banking, Sean Gilchrist Adoption of the PINsentry reader by one million cardholders in one year is a clear demonstration that we made the right choice.As significant, since its introduction not one online customer using PINsentry has suffered fraud, according to the devices developer Netherlands payments technology vendor Gemalto.To use PINsentry customers insert their bank card into the devices reader and type in their card PIN code to generate a one-use password at log on
Pay by voice at the ATM
If Nick Ogden has his way, signature-based authorisation could be a thing of the past.Ogden, chairman and CEO of Voice Commerce, a biometric voice authorisation company based in the UK, said that as payments technology continues to evolve at lightning pace, the days of needing physical authorisation with all its time delays, fraud risk and merchant hassle are over.Voice Commerce has teamed with NCR Corp to test a biometric voice authentication system that would let people withdraw money from automated teller machines without their ATM cards.Ogden said his companys technology enables people to make a withdrawal by entering their mobile phone number into an ATM. The system places a call to the phone, allowing the person to authenticate himself by matching his voice against an existing biometric voiceprint.
Canada leads online banking world
With 24 million internet users three-quarters of the population Canada has among the worlds highest internet penetration levels. Canadians are also avid online bankers reveals a study undertaken by internet research firm comScore.Based on data collected in April this year comScore found that 67.1 percent of Canadian internet users banked online, the highest level of any of the 37 countries studied. Other English-speaking countries had significantly lower penetration, including the UK (49.5 percent), the US (44.4 percent), and Australia (41.7 percent).
Ireland slashes tax on cards
Cowen announced that with immediate effect, stamp duty payable on all payment cards would be reduced significantly, a move that was applauded by Irish banking and commerce bodies as a long-awaited reform. On credit cards, annual duty payable was cut by 25 percent from 40 ($58) to 30, duty on Laser cards (the main debit card system in Ireland) by 50 percent from 20 to 10 and the duty on ATM cards by 50 percent from 10 to 5
VeriFone eyes Latin America
VeriFone eyes Latin AmericaFocusing on growth in emerging economies in Latin America, US payments technology developer VeriFone and Tienda-kit, the first Mexican non-bank company to process electronic card payments, have teamed up to establish a new merchant payment services company in Mexico called VeriFone Access.With this partnership we will be able to extend new hosted offerings in Mexico and beyond, said Alejandro Villaln, former director general of Tienda-kit and now director general of VeriFone Access The focus will be on small- and medium-sized merchants who will have access to the managed services platform via broadband and wireless internet connections.VeriFone is already well established in Mexico as the primary supplier of payment systems deployed in the Fund of Infrastructure of Electronic Payments (FIMPE), an initiative of the Mexican banking industry launched in 2005 to vastly increase the number of credit and debit card POS terminals throughout the country.According to VeriFone, it has delivered more than 150,000 systems since the FIMPE programme began
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Euronet’s unrequited love
The global ATM operator and payment transaction processors share-exchange offer, made on 4 December, was worth $1.65 billion and valued MoneyGrams shares at $20 each, a 43 percent premium to the closing price of MoneyGram shares that day.However, responding to a letter sent by Euronet chairman and CEO Michael Brown on 4 December to his counterpart at MoneyGram, Philip W Milne, MoneyGrams board pointed out that the share offer was, in fact, worth only $16.75 per MoneyGram share ($1.38 billion) because Euronets share price had fallen subsequent to it making the offer..In his letter, Brown talked up what he said was the opportunity to create a powerful new player in the international money transfer business and noted that my board and I were disappointed with your rejection of the compelling business combination proposal we submitted to you several weeks ago.MoneyGrams board, in its response to Browns letter, indicated that it would be willing to meet with Euronet to discuss its proposal, subject to the execution of a mutual confidentiality and standstill agreement.Despite this gesture, it would seem that any chance of an agreement being struck is dead in the water
Call to hasten the cheque’s demise
The paper calls for comments on the councils National Payments Plan, which is intended to provide a strategic framework for the development of payments in the UK over the next five to ten years.A voluntary organisation established in March this year, the council has 27 members including the UKs major banks, building societies and the Bank of England, and a number of major foreign banks with UK interests.Providing a background to the debate around the use of cheques, the council said many industry observers believe that the use of cheques will be discontinued in the UK at some time in the future and that a point will eventually be reached when industry-wide cheque clearing is no longer sustainable, as has already happened in a number of European countries, including the Netherlands and Sweden.Alternatives must existHowever, argued the council, before this could happen in the UK, viable and accessible alternatives would need to exist for all current cheque uses
Contactless payments achieve global interoperability
Contactless payments achieve global interoperabilityA milestone in the advancement of contactless payments was reached in November when, in a world first, executives from Korean mobile phone service operator Korea Telecom Freetel (KTF) attending the Mobile Asia Congress in Macau used near field communication (NFC)-equipped handsets to execute contactless payments for goods in Korea, Taiwan and the US The retail outlets were equipped with readers that accept MasterCards PayPass applications.The demonstration in Macau was in support of mobile phone operator body the GSM Associations (GSMA) Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, designed to provide a single global approach to enabling contactless payments using a mobile phone
Committee asserts UK government is lax on e-crime
The committee was reacting to the governments response to the committees report, Personal Internet Security, in which it made no commitment to accept any of the major recommendations the committee had made.The internet relies on the confidence of millions of users, and that confidence is in danger of being undermined unless we can reverse the trends that our witnesses told us about, warned the Earl of Erroll, a member of the committee that undertook the inquiry.The committee believes not only the government is at fault for not preventing the internet from increasingly becoming the playground for criminals
Kabira on a global expansion drive
A private company, Kabira has also attracted a number of high-profile investors such as technology giant IBM and Japanese conglomerate Mitsui Group.Building on its success, US-based Kabira has embarked on an expansion drive that includes recruiting banking and financial services system integrators in North America and pursuing expanded partnership arrangements in Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Central and South America, Africa and Russia.We are seeing a tremendous amount of new, transaction-intensive business opportunities in the financial services and mobile payments industries, said Chris Clabaugh, who is Kabiras vice-president of business development.Key to Kabiras expansion drive is its payments processing system, which, said Clabaugh, targeted financial institutions that demand rapid deployment, flexible configuration and the ability to scale to support millions of customers and billions of transactions every year.In this respect, the payment gateway system supplied to Visas North American business unit in 2003 has been among Kabiras most impressive