Imagine, it’s a Saturday morning and you receive a call from a bank: – Hello? – Hi [insert your name], we suspect that a fraudster is trying to use your card at a grocery store in Texas. – Well, I am at a grocery store in Texas! – Oh my gosh! Do you see him? If only credit card fraud was funny.
In June, our team participated in The 2021 Payments Canada Summit, Canada’s premier payments conference. One of the main topics raised at The SUMMIT was the future of payments: why real-time payments (RTP) will be a game-changer for Canadians and the financial industry. The trend towards instant and faster payments is a global one. While Real-time Rail (RTR) is expected to go live in Canada in 2022, other regions have been using RTP for several years.
You just started reading this blog post. But are you reading it alone? Or is there a “man in the middle” watching and recording everything you do online? While it may sound like a plot from a Hollywood blockbuster, the reality is far from amusing. A man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack can quickly occur when an unsuspecting victim joins the same public Wi-Fi network as a malicious attacker, for example, at a cafe.
A couple of weeks ago The Payments Canada SUMMIT gathered more than 2,000 delegates from financial institutions in Canada and around the world for a virtual one-week conference. INETCO was a sponsor of Canada’s premier payments event. Our team participated in industry discussions, met peers, and learned more about future innovation opportunities in the financial ecosystem. 2021 was a record-breaking year for The Payments Canada SUMMIT.
Do you remember a time when you were amped up to buy that new pair of shoes, or any special item online – only to have your credit card or other payment information (which you know is real), declined? All of that time spent browsing, selecting, getting off of your couch to find your credit card, entering payment information wasted? You are not alone!
Hallowe’en is still months away, but Frankenstein is out trick-or-treating even as you read this, and the operative word here is “trick”. Payment fraud criminals continue playing their games with financial institutions’ (FIs) customers and online merchants.
The banking landscape is changing. The days of walled garden banking where customers can’t see or access information from all their financial institutions in one place are coming to a close. For banks, and the entire financial services industry, open banking isn’t a threat but a customer service opportunity. Instead of putting barriers between customers and their financial information at other institutions, banks can offer value-added insights across accounts and institutions.
A customer walks into a bank, asks a question at the information desk, and then leaves. Later that day an operations manager notices an unmarked USB device left on the counter. He doesn’t remember who might have left it, so he plugs it into his computer to see if he can potentially spot the owner. As the USB loads, the malware shuts down the entire system, while the hackers get the bank’s customers’ account details.
A few weeks ago Seattle-based financial services and data management firm Automatic Funds Transfer Services (AFTS) suffered a serious ransomware attack. A gang called “Cuba” hacked and stole approximately 20 months’ worth of AFTS data, including financial documents, correspondence with bank employees, account movements, balance sheets, and tax documents. The compromised data then was offered for sale on the dark web.
