Why do we need real time?

Gareth, I loved the line of Debit Cards are the greatest innovation in the last 20 years, that took 10 years for it to become an over night success.

An interesting discussion and points well made by Gareth. I would agree that real-time is the future of transactions and that it would certainly affect everything touching these systems. I would add that, if a business is seriously considering real-time in order to improve the customer experience, it has to be accompanied by real-time fraud defences, even during peak periods.

Firstly, when you allow for payment transfers out of your organisation in real-time, you must at the same time be able to put suspicious transactions temporarily on hold to avoid serious fraud losses. The UK learned this lesson the hard way when introducing Faster Payments (as a near real-time offering), and for card based payments transaction monitoring in real-time is state of the art.

That said, a key challenge is that too many of the current fraud prevention techniques don’t take the consumer experience into consideration, often making the shopping experience difficult and long-winded. As we all know, most fraud prevention systems wait until check-out, focusing on the payment transaction to try and determine if a particular transaction is fraudulent. With new threats emerging all the time, the responsibility of ensuring consumer confidence in payment products falls directly on the payment infrastructure providers, and therefore on the robustness and flexibility of their systems. Real-time monitoring is crucial – you must be able to react automatically and “in-flight” at the point when the fraudsters launch their attack.