Payments on Fire™

The Internet’s designers quickly realized that no one’s very good at remembering IP address numbers. Unless you type the same number over and over again (and I did when I ran an ISP) a human readable version is a lot easier. That’s what the domain name system or DNS is all about, connecting human readable names to specific IP addresses.  You can imagine then that Bitcoin, with its long alphanumeric addresses, suffers from similar challenges. That insight is what this podcast is about and the reason Justin Newton and Dawn Newton formed Netki. Try it out by sending bitcoin to me at wallet.geopeabody.bit (kidding) or, better, take a listen as the Netki leaders discuss their directory service for virtual currency wallet addresses.   

Every payment pro in the US is also a shopper and we all know that the largest retailers are poised to support EMV. Nearly all have EMV capable hardware. A few have turned it on. Most are waiting for the October liability shift so the temporary pain and awkwardness of clerk and consumer confusion is spread across everyone.    But what about the small and medium business (SMB) market? Mike English, VP of Product Development, at Heartland Payment Systems has a front line view on the EMV transition of its SMB customers. Take a listen as Mike discusses EMV, the future of contactless and the NFC evolution. Mike also discusses how Heartland is thinking about omnichannel payments and commerce, proving that the definition of “payment processor” is morphing far beyond its traditional remit.   

Host card emulation (HCE) was invented back in 2012. It was supposed to do for NFC on Android what Apple Pay has done for NFC in the iOS ecosystem. But it’s taken longer, a lot longer, for a robust Android-based NFC capability to get deployed. In this conversation with HCE inventor Doug Yeager, CEO of SimplyTapp, we review how HCE works, what it requires, and take a look at why it’s taken so long to gain momentum. The good news is that momentum is increasing with a growing set of HCE technology providers pushing it forward and, it appears, a pipeline of HCE-based apps on the way.   

The domain of point of sale (POS) has three legs to its security stool: EMV, point to point encryption, and card number tokenization. Card not present (CNP) merchants and issuers have the more challenging task of assembling fraud mitigation tools on their own. The networks have had, until EMVCo’s move into payment card tokenization, not much more than 3D Secure to offer. Merchants and card issuers have a lot of transaction and fraud data and when that data gets shared, improvements are possible. That’s what Ethoca is about. Its growing network of merchants and issuers share their fraud data to improve fraud detection and lower chargeback rates. Take a listen to this discussion with Keith Briscoe, Ethoca’s CMO, on what’s possible through collaboration. 

Tokenization is, and will continue to be, a hot topic in payments. After all, it's what powers Apple Pay. Last week I chaired the Mobile Payment Innovation Summit where tokenization was a recurring theme. I asked Glenbrook partner Russ Jones to return for an update, to help us dig deeper into what’s happened over the six months and to consider where tokenization is going. He’s bullish on the capabilities of this technology and likes what he’s seen so far. Take a listen to what Russ has to say.  

We all know EMV is coming to the U.S and that it will take years to build a complete EMV security perimeter. But the work starts with issuers sending out chip cards to their customers. Take a listen to this conversation with Chase’s Dina DeMerell, Director, Card Services Chip Security, to hear how Chase is deploying EMV credit, debit, prepaid and co-branded card products. She wasn’t kidding about their accelerated push of credit cards to frequent transactors. I received my new EMV United co-branded card the day after we spoke - and it wasn't special treatment.  

Decisions about point of sale transactions are largely made using card data alone but in e-commerce the merchant has to use a rich mix of data sources to manage fraud. The merchant is, after all, liable for both the transaction as well as the goods or services lost due to fraud. E-commerce merchants use publicly sourced data from firms like Whitepages to perform both automated and manual reviews. This discussion with Tom Donlea, Director, e-Comm/Retail Practice at Whitepages, looks at how the data is provided to the merchant, the challenge of data sourcing in international markets, the care and control of PII, and what the US EMV roll-out could mean for CNP fraud.

This week's CNP Expo in Orlando brought together some 1,000 fraud technology vendors, processors, merchants, commerce-focused entrepreneurs and others to discuss the arrival of EMV in the US, global payments, and more. We took the opportunity to speak with two enterprise focused firms, Nu Data Security and CardConnect. We also spoke with the founder of mobile shopping service SelfPay. Nothing like good conversations! 

Paying invoices and moving funds aross borders for small and medium business (SMB) is expensive and full of uncertainties. How much does the recipient actually get once the transaction is finished? (Hint: it's not always what was sent.)  How long does it take a San Francisco firm to pay an invoice to a contractor in Berlin or Hyderabad? (Hint: it's hard to know exactly when it gets there). Since there's no such thing as an international wire, entrepreneurs in the virtual currency space have been looking at how these new math-based "rails" can move money faster at lower cost across borders. In this Payments on Fire episode, Marwan Forzley, CEO of Align Commerce, talks with Glenbrook's George Peabody about how his firm moves value for its SMB customers from the sender's currency to the receiver's over bitcoin rails.

EMV and its moving parts presents a far more complex payments method for merchants, ISVs, payment processors, and financial institutions than the good old magstripe. It continues to have ramifications throughout the payments ecosystem.  As Executive Director of the Smart Card Alliance and director of the EMV Migration Forum, Randy Vanderhoof has shepherded a sometimes fractious payments industry as well as encouraged a a skeptical merchant community toward EMV adoption. Now that the US EMV deployment is a certainty, Randy and Glenbrook’s George Peabody discuss what got us here, where the challenges are, and how EMV will evolve in the US.