Opinions

After several years of dormancy, Apple resurrected Near Field Communications (NFC). However, it remains to be seen if NFC will ultimately prosper and become the kind of ubiquitous payment technology that today is unique to payment cards.

Multinational banks that delay preparation for the European Union's proposed General Data Protection Regulation could pay a steep price: hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the pitfalls of using alternative data to score "credit invisibles" and whether Benjamin Lawsky's successor should play nice with big banks.

Before Target, there was TJX, the major 2007 breach that impacted about 45 million credit cards. The crime and its prevention were basic, and provide a lesson for today's retailers that are battling a new wave of data theft.

Banks are under significant pressure to modernize payments or lose customers to more nimble digital challengers. But regulatory obligations, which at times hold banks back from being innovative, are also the reason banks become the hero in resolving disputes over charges.

Apple Pay's security shortcomings were likely deliberate, done with the goal of making signups and initial usage as easy as possible for shoppers. And so far, it's worked.

There have been various media reports about some of the security shortcomings within Apple Pay. The shortcomings are not security holes per se, in the sense that a hole is generally unintended. No, the security issues were deliberate, done with the goal of making signups and initial usage as easy as possible for shoppers.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week, including the debate over how to expand access to mortgage credit and the dangers and opportunities presented by large-scale corporate data mining.

Same-day payments will be a big improvement for business-to-business transactions, but banks are still bound to lose market share to technology firms that are taking the complexity out of the payments process.

Facebook's new Instant Article service for publications underscores the competitive threat that the site's business model poses to banks. There's one particular feature that should have banks worried: because Facebook's primary interest is ad income, product pricing is of secondary importance.