SEPA and European Payments

The Single Euro Payments Area, the Payments Services Directive, the Eurosystem, TARGET2, STEP2, the Euro and related matters.

Hubert O'Donoghue Managing Director at O-C Group

The need to get serious about PCI DSS

It seem like every second day we hear about another security breach or data compromise involving usually tens of thousands of card numbers and often additional and even more sensitive information which if used in conjunction with the card number can result in serious financial loss and reputational damage to the compromised party. At the same time...

11 September 2008 /security /payments

Retired Member 

Who is going to take on the Central Banks?

It's all very well that there is missing or incorrect reference data such as IBAN and BIC, but some things seem so simple to address, and yet they somehow fall by the wayside... It is a given that one of the biggest obstacles to STP of inbound cross-border payment messages, at least for those of fairly large reportable amounts, is central bank repo...

03 September 2008 /payments

Retired Member 

Interchange regulations trigger credit card surcharges

If you want to see the real-world impact of interchange regulations, the best place to look is obviously Australia. This is a country where the most sweeping changes to the interchange model have taken place, a country seen by regulators everywhere as something of a model to learn from. If you can’t go to Australia to learn first-hand (maybe you'...

31 August 2008 /payments

Retired Member 

Why do some merchants make you sign twice?

This is something I am running into more and more frequently. The clerk asks you to sign both the credit card slip as well as the cash register receipt. Presumably, they need to keep the signed cash register receipt to deal with chargebacks. There could be an opportunity here for a payment provider to offer a better service to retailers so that th...

16 August 2008 /payments

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

The great ACH sell-off

With Sepa opening up choice of clearing infrastructure for banks in the euro-zone, many banks no longer see ownership of their national domestic infrastructures as necessary. Italy's SIA-SSB has appointed Citi as an advisor, as its major bank shareholders Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit look to sell. Atos Origin was recently named in press reports ...

08 August 2008 /payments /wholesale

Retired Member 

Mercator: Acquirers need to develop value added services

PaymentsNews reported yesterday on a Mercator report titled,"Merchant Acquiring in the United States 2008: Birth of the perfect storm". Pressure on merchant acquirers has always been strong, but things are expected to get worse. Mercator encourages acquirers to protect their businesses by focusing on value-added services leveraging paym...

31 July 2008 /payments

Retired Member 

Are banks having second thoughts on outsourcing acquiring?

Last week, an executive with a regional bank in Asia explained to me that they were beginning to regret the decision to outsource their acquiring activities to a major third party processor. They are finding that without direct control of their acquiring business, it is now much harder to develop marketing promotions and partnerships with merchant...

28 July 2008 /payments

Retired Member 

Do banks even need to innovate and offer mobile payments?

Since contactless credit cards are not taking off as fast as expected, and neither customers nor merchants are excited about tapping a card instead of swiping it, some analysts have started looking at contactless as a bridge to mobile payments, which is now seen as the next great revolution. I'm having trouble buying this. How can contactless cre...

24 July 2008 /payments

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

e-invoicing - Dwindling workforce as a driver for change

On his blog, Bo Harald outlines 5 of the "mega class" drivers for the business and banking sectors to embrace e-invoicing. Some of them are obvious, though it's great to see them quantified so well -- cost savings, productivity and automation, reduced environmental impact etc. But what struck me as particularly interesting was the figur...

23 July 2008 /payments /wholesale

Retired Member 

5 ways to prepare for the risk of lower interchange

When Australian banks got hit with mandated interchange fee cuts, virtually all of them reacted the same way. They devalued their rewards currencies and increased the annual fees charged to cardholders. Some began issuing American Express cards in addition to Visa and MasterCard, for higher rewards rates. Whether or not interchange gets regulated...

29 May 2008 /payments