/payments

News and resources on payments systems, innovations and initiatives worldwide.

Sehrish Alikhan

Top payments stories you missed in April

Sehrish Alikhan - Reporter, Finextra
Discussion
Payments processor BlueSnap reaches $10m settlement with FTC
Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan

  We keep hearing that merchants lose their merchant accounts if chargebacks exceed a tiny percentage like 0.5% per quarter. In the case of this fraudulent merchant, Visa reported it was 29-40%, albeit over a longer period. Given that Visa was involved in each transaction from this merchant, why couldn't it block them? Even assuming that Visa "outsources" the blocking decision to acquirers / PSPs, why didn't Visa block the PSPs for continuing to acquire transactions from a merchant with such a high chargeback rate? Why did this have to go to regulator FTC?
Payments processor BlueSnap reaches $10m settlement with FTC
A Finextra Member

A Finextra member

  The FTC compliant is fascinating in how the Bluesnap execs stiff armed the requests from the Fiserv account staff.   While at First Data / Fiserv I recommended serveral times acquiring services for Bluesnap be ended due to a series of Bluesnap misbehavior and malfeasance.   Each time senior staff blocked my recommendations, apparently due to personal cronysim and financial relationships between Mr. Dangelmaier and First Data executives (Alledgedly).  The FTC did the acquiring industry as a whole a favor here, its regrettable Fiserv executives abdicated their responsibilities.
Global Instant Payments - the next big thing
Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan

  For global payments that involve India at one end, the combination of India's A2A RTP (UPI) with the domestic payments scheme of the non-India country on the other end, has gained good traction. While it may involve SWIFT in the settlement cycle, AFAIK it disintermediates SWIFT in the basic payment workflow. IME, banks have consistently ignored the retail cross border payments business during the last 35 years. The only sensible reason I've heard for their reluctance is too politically incorrect to be stated publicly. On a side note, I've been hearing about SCTInst EU cross border payments for over 5 years. If that works fine, what is the need for a separate mandate for EU cross border payments w.e.f. 2024? If that does not work fine, will a separate mandate lead to a new scheme that works any better?
The Strategic Value of Code Audits Before Selling or Merging Your Business
Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan

  Nice post! Keen to know if there are any code analyzers that also surface (1) Bugs (2) UX deficiencies / areas of improvement. Also, while your post already mentions that your code analyzer can identify bottlenecks impacting performance, keen to know if it can also judge whether the code will deliver a certain TPS in production - without actually running a benchmark on the required hardware infrastructure? In an old life, just to run a benchmark to prove a certain throughput of our software, we had to send three engineers from Singapore to Germany because the hardware vendor didn't have the kind of gear required to run that kind of high TPS in any of its facilities in Asia Pacific.