SEPA and European Payments

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

Gary Wright Analyst at BISS Research

Will we see the return of trade barriers?

In 1929 one of the biggest factors was the introduction of nationalistic trade barriers. These were protective measures to ensure domestic businesses were supported over and above those of the global economy. The effects were disastrous both domestically and worldwide! It was only through the creation of financial instruments in the USA that were ...

08 October 2008 /wholesale

Gary Wright Analyst at BISS Research

New Risks for Banks

For years the market has prided itself on its ability to measure and manage a number of risks that are inherent within financial markets. Counterparty Risks, Operational Risks and those risks based on price movements have had countless amounts of attention and all have had a number of systems developed to assist in risk management. Today the world...

07 October 2008 /regulation

Gary Wright Analyst at BISS Research

Primary market under threat

Corporate finance remains aloof from many of the operational assessments that are focused on systems and procedures in the secondary market. Many people working in corporate finance also have an aloof attitude to operations with hardly any awareness of the settlement requirements of many of the deals they create. Incidentally this also includes cr...

06 October 2008

Retired Member 

PCI DSS Dos and Don'ts

PCI DSS Dos Secure your network, deploy firewalls and disable unnecessary services and protocols. Even if you are a Card Present merchant, you most likely have internet connectivity which may indirectly expose sensitive data. Be particularly careful with wireless (remember TJX) When you make changes to systems carry out security testing to ...

12 September 2008 /security

Retired Member 

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