Opinions

There’s no doubt that blockchain technology will facilitate disruptive innovations in finance, but a world of private ledgers sounds eerily similar to a range of “private Internets.”

U.S. merchants, card issuers, and payment processors are beginning to switch over to EMV. However, there are frequent reports that large numbers of U.S. merchants are not ready.

Last week U.S. House Small Business Committee held the second part of a hearing entitled “The EMV Deadline and What it Means for Small Businesses,” which was supposed to address payment security in the United States.

With the EMV liability shift having just passed, banks and merchants alike are scrambling to comply with the card network-imposed deadline.

Target, by all accounts, the corporate face of retail data breach, is driving full force to use its complete embrace of EMV to bolster its tarnished image and put it in the vanguard of card fraud protection and data security. And it is targeting one of the biggest sticking points to EMV: user adoption.

Great news: Women snagged a handful of C-level titles at big companies this week, including Ellen Alemany, Kim Hammonds and Heather Cox, and Square stands out in Silicon Valley with a leadership team that's 60% women. Bad news: the gender pay gap is growing and there are only two women among Harvard's picks for the top 100 CEOs globally. Also in the news: Blackrock's Cheryl Mills, B of A's Cathy Bessant and ICICI's Chanda Kochhar.

Industry representatives are howling about the lack of consumer benefit from the Durbin amendment, but we still know very little about the impact of the debit fee cap.

So many banks are running systems that were implemented before 1984, the year Mark Zuckerberg was born. They’re going to be dead meat in the age of real-time connectivity in the near-free world of today’s mobile Internet.

October 1 marked the dawn of a new era in the U.S. payment card marketplace. While there are not yet rules from the card brands that demand all parties utilize EMV technology, the financial liability shift is a significant first step across a line in the sand that cannot be erased.

While migration to cards with chip technology should help mitigate card fraud, additional steps by retailers and more layers of security are needed.