Opinions

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

Mobile money products are taking off in countries including Bangladesh, Kenya and Somaliland — and banks have a historic opportunity to get involved in this rapidly advancing market.

Financial institutions all over the U.S. are making decisions about how they will implement and manage their EMV infrastructure moving forward; decisions that will impact their operations for years to come.

Rather than wait until after a data breach to increase information-security investments, banks should put into place practices that help prevent cyberattacks in the first place.

This year has been so bad for merchant data breaches that President Obama felt the need to advance the timeframes to be EMV-compliant at government points of sale.

Designed as an alternative to current payment systems, digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, XRP and Dogecoin, are a way for people to track, store and send payments over the internet. They are intended to make payment processing cheaper and faster.

Walmart and Best Buy were up-front about their disinterest in Apple Pay; CVS and Rite Aid followed after the fact. Reportedly, these Merchant Customer Exchange participants are placing their bets on the group's upcoming CurrentC wallet, but there's another reason they may want to distance themselves from Apple Pay.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover have placed a timeline for U.S. EMV adoption, in the form of liability shifts, which has elevated chip card migration from conceptual to imminent.

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

ATMs are an important component of the move to EMV chip payment technology in the U.S.