Payments on Fire™

Tablet-based ePOS cash registers are growing in popularity and capability. A boon to smaller retailers who have been laggards in store automation. But without technical support staff on hand, solving issues when they arrive, never mind securing systems, is an expensive proposition. Join Glenbrook’s George Peabody and payments industry veteran Chip Kahn, founder of Boomtown, a marketplace for merchant tech support pros, for a discussion on tablet POS trends, what SMB retailers needs, and the payments programmability.

Digital identity is one of the most solution resistant challenges to online commerce and, indeed, our online lives. It is basic to online trust, an elusive condition undermined by data breaches, abuse of our data by service provider, and fraudsters.

That’s not say we aren’t trying. Providers of all stripes are applying their value add to the problem. Smartphone makers have a role. Fraud management providers see themselves as having a role because they see so many users visiting their merchant customers’ websites or using their apps.

Networks do, too, as evidenced by Mastercard’s recent interest in identity services.

Then there are specialists in identity who play a role between the end user and the party granting access to a service, i.e. a bank. Today’s podcast is with SecureKey, a Canadian firm that has built a system to generate online trust while not sharing too much data between the parties.

Blockchain technology has increasingly gotten the attention of those in the identity space because the idea of having an immutable database as a single source of truth for identity credentials just seems so obvious.

Well, it’s not exactly as simple as putting your drivers license on a blockchain. SecureKey has partnered with IBM to use blockchain technology in support of its function as a provider of identity services.

SecureKey’s Verified.Me service gives the user the ability to quickly identity themselves and to share only the personally identifiable information they consent to share. Customers include Canadian banks CIBC, Desjardins, RBC, Scotiabank and TD. BMO and National Bank of Canada will be available later this year.

Take a listen to this conversation with Andre Boysen, SecureKey's Chief Identity Officer, and Glenbrook’s George Peabody and imagine the power of coupling a service like this to strong authentication services that use biometrics.

With all its associated technologies (neural networks, symbolic reasoning, search algorithms, probabilistic reasoning, expert systems, and more), AI has been evolving in universities, the government, and corporations for decades. But only those with a keen interest in this technology have been paying close attention to its progress. Meanwhile, a chatbot helped you when you contacted support. Or you used Alexa or Siri to answer a question, play some music, turn on your lights, buy something online, pay your bills, or tell a joke. In our lives, we have caught glimpses of AI’s potential but no clear line of sight as to how powerful the underpinning technologies have become or how quickly they are evolving.

With the unveiling of ChatGPT and similar tools, we are now face to face with the AI era. In his book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman says, "Much of what we do as modern people—at work and beyond—is to process information and generate action. GPT-4 will massively speed your ability to do these things, and with greater breadth and scope. Within a few years, this copilot will fall somewhere between useful and essential to most professionals and many other sorts of workers. Without GPT-4, they’ll be slower, less comprehensive, and working at a great disadvantage.

The Payments Industry is interesting because it is constantly changing, and technology has always been a significant change agent. For decades, networks, processors, PSPs, merchants, and financial institutions have invested in technology to increase adoption, create new services, manage risk, and accelerate initiation, clearing, and settlement.

In this episode, Yvette Bohanan is joined by Frank Young, a 35-year veteran of the fintech space, and Glenbrook’s Russ Jones to think about how AI might transform the payments industry and how organizations should mobilize for this transformation. It’s time to start talking about this topic seriously - with each other - and not just asking ChatGPT.

Digital identity is the black hole of the internet. Our online lives simply aren’t protected by a system without strong authentication. Killing the password is Mission One for security professionals because they’re so readily stolen through phishing attacks and malware. Users, warned to make passwords complex and unique, have no hope of remembering them. And a password is simply one factor of secure authentication. Biometrics and data, when used in combination, can relieve password fatigue and, for the relying party, increase security substantially, bringing some light to that dark place on the internet.

We talk with MasterCard’s biometrics and authentication leader, Bob Reany, about where biometrics work and the intersection of device-based tools with what the cloud provides through Big Data, particularly device profiling and behavioral analytics. Your fingerprint’s not just for unlocking the phone anymore.

There are a lot of headlines in the payments world. PaymentsNews is Glenbrook’s curated news feed of the headlines that matter most every day, but we’ll readily acknowledge that it can be a lot to digest. That’s why we’ve introduced PaymentsPost, a month-end roundup of the news items that got us talking as a team along with some commentary about why we think they’re particularly important to the direction of the industry.

Glenbrook’s Justin Pituch joins Yvette Bohanan in this Fanning the Flames episode to discuss the implications of the top March headlines, including stumbling blocks for fintechs and their sponsor banks, a bank-led battle for the checkout page, and a clearer view of the path forward for U.S. fast payments.