GDPR

As perhaps the world's most wide-reaching, comprehensive data protection rule, the General Data Protection Regulation is having a ripple effect that almost seemed inevitable.

Banks have the opportunity to transform from being the trusted custodians of our money to being the trusted custodians of our data, writes Martijn Moerbeek, director of group digital strategy and innovation at Legal & General.

The advent of this is particularly unwelcome, coming, as it does, at a time when many people not only question the role of a bank after the recent financial crisis and gradual digitization of banking services, but also when their relationship with technology has changed, writes Martijn Moerbeek, director of group digital strategy and innovation at Legal & General.

The concept of Smart Cities — which use mobile payments, global positioning and related technology to streamline parking, transit, building access and traffic — is deeply intertwined with the development of payments technology and regulation.

The Amazon effect and rules such as PSD2 and GDPR are threatening technology laggards in traditional financial services, contends Stephen Menon, vice president of product at Finn AI.

Cash is unlikely to go anywhere, while application programming interfaces promise a wealth of new innovation, according to Devon Watson, CMO of Diebold Nixdorf.

A recent study concluded there are first-mover benefits for banks that embrace open banking. But many executives see its risks instead.

This European regulation means fraud detection will inevitably need to evolve as the fraudsters find new ways to exploit new loopholes, according to Catherine Tong, vice president and general manager for Accertify.

Organizations that lack security controls and have experienced a breach can expect auditors, regulators and standards bodies to knock on their doors demanding information, writes Fouad Khalil, head of compliance and SecurityScorecard.

The transparency and responsibility you demonstrate will help you build more trusting relationships with your customers and the public, according to Carl Mazzanti, founder and CEO of eMazzanti Technologies.

Consumers generally approve of GDPR’s goals of tightening data-protection and consumer privacy, and more than half would consider fleeing to another provider if they suspected corporations were unclear in their communications or intentions about gathering data.

Europe's new data privacy rules have forced banks to get creative to protect sensitive data from in appropriate access or breaches.

Other aggregators came to the bank's defense, while one CEO suggested Plaid's very public protest was unfounded.

Technology can help an organization scale internationally and help finance departments shift their focus from managing the details of supplier payment processing to delivering valuable guidance to the business, writes Chen Amit, CEO of Tipalti.

When GDPR went into effect in May, it was expected that the European law would touch a lot of U.S. payment companies because of their international scope. Now it's clear that even purely domestic U.S. firms will have to adhere to some version of the data-privacy law.

A lack of standardization increases costs and complexity at each bank, opens the door to insecure solutions and hinders adoption by software developers that only have bandwidth to write to one or two open APIs, according to Steve Kirsch, CEO and founder of Token.

International banks are also having to adapt to a raft of regional payment and data regulations that impact their operations in certain territories significantly but in others only negligibly, according to Russell Bennett, chief technology officer of Fraedom.

The GDPR doesn’t mandate how data requests should be made, but it does say that organizations handling personal data should be prepared to handle the requests. One would be right to wonder whether companies are as prepared as they should be.

As Nvoicepay expands, the payment automation company is keeping an eye on how it may fall under European data rules that have a knack for requiring compliance even from companies that should be exempt.

The rules are a chance for card issuers to update their data management, which would be helpful in sales and cross-selling, according to Michael Hiskey, head of strategy at Semarchy.