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Although the USA remains the world’s largest single payments market and the world’s largest economy, it is a complex market which has proven slower to move to new technologies such as EMV compared with other developed economies. Despite a firm pattern of overall growth in payments, and a continuing switch from cash to electronic payments, [...]

The post THE US PAYMENTS MARKET – READY TO MOBILISE? appeared first on Payments Cards & Mobile.

During a lecture given in Germany in February 2018, Agustin Carstens, general manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), described Bitcoin as “a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster.”  This counterblast found an echo in a recent leader from The Economist, which described cryptocurrencies as, “useless…few vendors accept them [...]

The post THE CHALLENGES AND OBSERVATIONS FROM CENTRAL BANKS appeared first on Payments Cards & Mobile.

In recent years, interchange rates have come under increasing pressure from a variety of judicial reviews by the US Federal Reserve, the European Union and individual countries such as Canada, Australia and the UK. At the same time, new technologies such as P2P and mobile are beginning to eat away at the dominance of card [...]

The post ALL CHANGE FOR INTERCHANGE? appeared first on Payments Cards & Mobile.

Cybercrime is booming. Banks and financial services companies are targets for criminals following the money and for nation-state actors and others looking to destabilise financial infrastructure. Ethical hackers, sometimes known as penetration or pen testers, are tasked with finding vulnerabilities before the bad guys. So, how bad is it out there? And what can financial [...]

The post CYBERCRIME: TESTING TIMES appeared first on Payments Cards & Mobile.

The benefits and functionality of prepaid are now being appreciated by all types of issuers and customers. Prepaid is increasingly becoming the infrastructure of choice for FinTech innovation. So, what does the future hold, and what can other parts of the payments industry learn from prepaid? Prepaid is a real-time product in a batched world. [...]

The post PREPAID REBOOTED appeared first on Payments Cards & Mobile.