Community

Since merchants / banks are the ones who have to bear the loss arising from fraud from current non-EMV technology, I'm sure they'll eventually get around to trying EMV / CAP and other technologies once they've sorted out other real-world issues like cost, potential benefit, ROI, conflicting investment priorities, and so on. 

Talking of EMV and CNP, leading analysts like TowerGroup to whom banks tend to listen, have stated that EMV provides no fraud mitigation for online transactions. US merchants seem to be finding it difficult to justify the business case for EMV itself in the first place. I can't name a single leading US e-commerce website (e.g. Amazon, GoDaddy, eBay) that uses VbV / SecureCode / 3DS despite their being around for years and having reached mandatory status in some countries (e.g. India). I'm not sure how many of them would think adequately out-of-the-box to even dream of implementing USB EMV Card Reader / CAP / equivalent at this point. End of the day, it's possible to keep adding technologies to keep reducing fraud, but merchants have to weigh their costs and incremental friction with increased security - and that's an equation that is very specific to local business cultures and consumer attitudes in different countries. As an online shopper, I find the US online shopping experience to be the best in the world, which tells me that US online merchants have struck the right balance between convenience and security. If fraud rates go up to unmanageable levels, I'm sure they'll implement the required security measures, EMV / CAP being only one of them. 

Not necessarily. According to the complaint filed in the latest case - link to which is available in my below Finextra post - the plaintiff (Village View Escrow) spotted the loss the very next day. 

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5590

Astute marketers have always known and acted on the basis that 'perception is reality'. It's just that social media has the power to accelerate and magnify perception. A single negative sentiment might subsequently be proven inaccurate and unfair based on post-facto qualitative and quantitative analysis. However, before that happens, social media has the power to make it explode into a huge flood of negative perception. Banks and other companies have to listen and take remedial action (if any is merited) as such sentiments happen, even if their accuracy or fairness is as yet unknown. Postponing remedial action until after the analysis is complete might be too late. 

There's also a flipside to this. Just as negative perception can build quickly thanks to social media, it can also dissipate equally quickly. While I don't have any concrete incidents to illustrate this, I personally believe that a couple of negative flareups in social media hardly affect a brand in the medium or long term.

This is a solution for Card Not Present credit card transactions where EMV is irrelevant. 

Personally, since I keep complaining about the friction involved in a typical bank-provided ePayment and have complemented FiServ ZashPay's simplicity in the past, I won't grudge the US$ 1.00 fee to make a ZashPay. However, studies have shown that the difference between FREE! and one dollar is far more than the difference between, say, 1 dollar and 2 dollars, or, say, 88 dollars and 89 dollars. Going forward, the rate of adoption of BBVA's ZashPay will indicate which of the two sources of friction is more severe among the mass market of BBVA's customers.  

Assuming that the average person has more than one checking account and credit card, it's obviously not possible for any one bank to carry out a holistic analysis and present personalized offers based on that person's spending pattern - unless one of his / her banks offers a Mint-like portal to which one can, and is prepared to, link all other accounts. I know at least one bank that offers such a portal (OneView from HDFC Bank in India).

I know one third-party service in the USA called Offermatic which offers such a facility for US-based credit card accounts. (Full Disclosure: Apart from having blogged about it in the past, I've no interest in this company).

@Brett K:

Great post. Glad to note that we finally have a customer walking into a bank branch in one of your posts! 

I agree that banks need to eliminate friction in almost all scenarios you've described. Let me add a few more of my pet peeves about which I've blogged and commented on earlier occasions: Forcing e-payment iniators to decide between between FPS, BACS, CHAPS without presenting a menu of choices based on reachability, delivery date and fees; calling billers by whatever names banks have on their masters instead of using the names by which payors know them; restricting payment narration to the field lengths that the bank can process instead of letting them be what payor would like to convey to the beneficiary.

But, to give credit where it's due, the following recent developments convince me that many banks are listening to feedback and doing something about it: The first direct lab; realtime SMS alerts we've started receiving for every use of credit card  issued by all / many banks in India. 

Great move, props to first direct.

Dear Pol: Thank you for your comments. You'd no doubt agree that finding the appropriate usage scenarios for mobile would be a critical success factor in bolstering adoption of this channel. I've previously expressed the view that Mobile Remote Deposit Capture is the first "killer app" for mobile banking / payments. Amidst all the buzz around NFC, mWallet and mPayments, cheques seem so uncool and using them via mobile, almost sacrilegious. However, if we take away the hype, Mobile RDC offers what is probably the most compelling reason for customers and banks alike to adopt the mobile channel today. Kudos to Banco Sabadell for being the first bank to launch Mobile RDC in Europe. To me, this shows that Banco Sabadell has begun its mobile banking / payments journey on a solid footing and is posed for great success in the coming months and years. Best wishes!