Opinions

The term has gone from a common brand name to a catch-all for innovative technologies in financial services to a somewhat patronizing plural noun to describe startups and their founders.

Though the EMV transition is a significant step in the effort towards making payments more secure, this EMV liability shift won’t solve mass data breaches on merchants.

"Pricing will have to be changed," American Banker declared in 1977, "to help motivate banks to start such programs with their own customers."

While large banks are risk-averse, conformist and bureaucratic, marketplace lenders are inspiring the best and the brightest with their high-energy cultures.

Outdated and inefficient processes come at the cost of face time with customers and weigh banks down with unnecessary expenses. Here are some of the most common problems faced by the industry and ideas about how to fix them.

In updating cards with EMV technology, Visa and MasterCard have neglected an important element of what makes the security standard so successful elsewhere. The need for PIN verification is clear.

Many card issuers are well on their way to the migration to chip cards or have a plan to do so. But many merchants are still completely unaware of the shift in fraud liability taking effect Thursday.

Some critics argue that it's a bad idea to introduce chip cards without PIN requirements. But this debate is a distraction from the payments industry's robust and multifaceted efforts to fight cybercrime.

Nacha's same-day ACH payments are unlikely to improve business-to-business payments without additional tweaks. Other payment rails can also help put a solid infrastructure in place.

The merchant EMV liability shift is coming this week, and many merchants argue they don’t need to invest in new payment terminals because they’ve had only one or two fraudulent incidences in the entire history of their business.