The PaymentsJournal Podcast The PaymentsJournal Podcast

Organizations turn to fintechs for payment solutions that are as efficient and seamless as the transactions they facilitate. However, behind these smooth interfaces lies a labyrinth of challenges. Security concerns, regulatory compliance, and constant technological upgrades are just a few of the hurdles fintechs must navigate to provide what appear to be simple solutions. For clients, the expectation is straightforward: a payment solution that works flawlessly. The intricate complexity involved in meeting this expectation, though, often goes unnoticed.







It’s easy to make something simple complicated. But it’s difficult to make something complicated simple. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Kieran Draper and Tom Jennings, the U.S. and EU/UK CEOs of B4B Payments, and Brian Riley, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, spoke about the strategies fintechs employ to ensure their solutions remain both effective and invisible to the user. Highlighted is the delicate balance between simplicity and complexity, especially in the world of international embedded payments.





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Fintechs Deal With a World of Complexity







Ideally, payments get processed with the press of a button, no different from dialing a number and knowing, without having to think about it, that the right person will answer. Customers making payments expect something simple and effective.













But it’s a challenging environment for fintechs right now as they try to deliver that experience, with their funding drying up and regulators coming down on them. On the upside, it’s also a vibrant market. Demand is expanding, as more and more businesses seek to make payments across geographic boundaries and across platforms.







“For a fintech like us, there are a tremendous number of things that we need to take into consideration,” Draper said. “The transactions need to be secure, we have to be compliant in multiple jurisdictions, and the solution needs to be auditable. The trick is to try and figure out how to present a solution to these businesses that shields them from all of this complexity.”







One area with great complexity for companies is offering services across borders and the need to juggle varying regulations and payment methods. To take one example, B4B works with maritime businesses that make and receive payments in multiple currencies,

With gift card spend projected to reach $267.3 billion by 2028, it’s clear that gift cards  are an influential force in the market. And the rise of digital gift cards, a trend that continues to gain momentum, is opening up new avenues to engage younger generations.







During a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Blackhawk Network’s (BHN) Sarah Kositzke, Director of Research and Hilary Spidaliere, Director of Product Marketing, as well as Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid at Javelin Strategy & Research, explored, analyzed, and amplified the insights from this year’s Benchmark Report: 2024 Digital Gift Card Leaders, conducted by NAPCO research in partnership with BHN. This market-leading report on the gift card industry, which evaluated the digital gift card programs of 100 U.S. merchants, identifies best practices and opportunities for how retailers can optimize their own gift card programs.  





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Gift Card Industry Trends







During the 2023 holiday season, the average individual received around three gift cards, totaling roughly $160 in value. However, when recipients made their purchases, they spent an average of $78 more than the card’s value1. Leveraging a gift card to purchase a bigger-ticket item is commonplace and one of the reasons why gift cards are so valuable to retailers – driving that additional overspend and store visits.







“About a third of people said their favorite gift was a gift card,” Kositzke said. “Most people are still getting single-branded cards, like Starbucks or Amazon, which account for 75% of gift card buys. The Visa and Mastercard options and multi-branded cards are picking up steam though1.”







According to BHN, 77% of purchases were physical cards, even when the transactions occurred online. Physical cards are considered more personal, especially when there’s an option to customize the card. Despite the increasing popularity of online shopping, most gift card transactions still happen in-store, making up 85% of purchases1. But that is likely to change.







“Looking a little further out to 2030, digital cards are going to continue to gain ground,” Hirschfield said. “By the end of the decade, it’s likely to be a 50/50 split. That’s driven by Gen Z and Millennials, who are also significantly more likely to extend their purchases beyond the gifted amount.

Reconciliation is an essential aspect of the accounting process that improves transparency, maximizes decision-making, and ensures regulatory compliance. However, many merchants and payments organizations still rely on inefficient processes that can result in errors, financial losses, or violations.







In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Nick Botha, Global Payments Sales Manager at Autorek, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the importance of optimizing the payments reconciliation process and explored the influence of automation on its efficiency.





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An End-to-End Process







The reconciliation process is often fragmented among business divisions, which can lead to inaccurate reporting.   







“It should be viewed as an end-to-end process,” Botha said. “That includes financial controls, operational processes, payment flows, the whole of financial operations. Reconciliation has become integral to the success or failure of a middle and back office these days, and it must be a single, continuous process.”













Another pain point is the reliance on legacy-based processes or manual workarounds to process complex financial data. As a business scales, inefficient methods increase the potential for a costly reconciliation error.







“A function of paying money out is reconciling it,” Apgar said. “There’s been so much growth in the fintech space, and so many companies have stepped in that don’t realize how complex it is. They don’t understand the sheer number of data sources there are, the number of categories, and how many feed types to apply.”







The move to faster payments is likely to compound reconciliation challenges. As instant payments rails like FedNow and RTP gain traction, companies will be compelled to adopt reconciliation processes capable of operating in real-time environments.







Fit for Purpose







Mastercard and Visa recently settled with merchants, agreeing to relax certain restrictions and reduce credit card interchange fees. The settlement is expected to save merchants $30 billion over the next three years.







“It’s a splashy headline,” Apgar said. “It boils down to a four-basis-point rate reduction for merchants, which is not much. The big news was the rules changes that allowed large enterprise merchants to negotiat...

The United States is a unique banking market, with more than 11,000 financial institutions and some of the most stringent regulations in the world. With the launch of FedNow last year, The Clearing House’s RTP network, and a new messaging standard in ISO 20022, U.S.real-time payments have finally arrived. There’s only one problem: The infrastructure here is not ready. 







In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Himanshu Pujara, Managing Director for Euronet Worldwide, and Elisa Tavilla, Director of Debit Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, spoke about how instant payments are happening around the globe today, and how banks can develop payment platforms that take advantage of increased standardization and interoperability, as regulatory bodies push for a more interconnected financial ecosystem.





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Playing Catch-Up With the World







The state of global payments varies depending on where you look.













“We’ve connected to many RTP networks and have been processing instant payments for over a decade now,” Pujara said. “In India, the Unified Payments Interface has been a game-changer, enabling billions of transactions monthly with its simple, mobile-driven approach. Then there’s the EU’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, which streamlines cross-border payments efficiently within Europe. In Brazil, the Pix system has revolutionized the speed of payments, quickly becoming a mainstay in their financial ecosystem. We process millions of transactions every single month for our customers in the emerging markets, and in all of these markets real-time payments has become a dominant form of payment in the day to day lives of consumers.”







These global trends have not yet matured in the U.S. market. While the United States has had limited access to instant payments in the past, FedNow has sped up the timeline for banks to offer such payments to consumers and merchants. This gives banks the opportunity to enhance transaction efficiency, financial inclusion, and economic growth.  







Seeking Harmony







Although there are different U.S. regulatory and market environments, the future points toward more collaborative efforts to harmonize regulations and technical standards, making it easier to transact instantly and across borders. Financial institutions have the opportunity to use the real-time payment rails to launch innovative use cases for custome...

The end-of-the-year flurry of holiday shopping is a classic example of business seasonality. As fraud professionals have long observed, fraud activity also follows seasonal patterns, with seasonal upticks and slow-downs. The challenge has been reacting to seasonality with precision in real-time, instead of just recognizing them in the rear-view mirror. And new data shows that this seasonality doesn’t correlate to the business year as much as one might expect—fraudsters have a seasonal calendar all their own







In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, NeuroID Head of Operational Strategy Nash Ali and Tracy Kitten, Director of Fraud & Security at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the seasonality of fraud. They analyzed the methods criminals use and offered solutions to keep businesses safe.





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Winter Fraud







Fraud attempts are rising overall, up 57% from 2022 to 2023. Due to the holiday frenzy, December might seem like the logical peak of fraudulent activity.







“In fact, it’s January,” Ali said. “January has a 78% higher fraud attack rate than the average monthly rate. That includes a 59% increase in application fraud, where criminals falsify data or misrepresent themselves to business owners. There’s also an 85% increase in the hours businesses are under attack in January compared to the rest of the year.”













After a February slowdown, there’s a 44% higher fraud attack rate in March compared with the typical monthly average. A higher portion of March attacks consists of identity fraud, identity theft, or creating synthetic identities with bots and scripts. After another lull in April, fraud picks back up in May.







“We see 50% more application fraud in May compared to monthly averages,” Ali said. “A lot of that fraud is concentrated fraud attacks committed via fraud rings. After a slow summer, fraud rates pick back up in the fall, peaking again in October.”







Identify the Compromise







Criminals are constantly looking for weaknesses, and seasonal fraud trends are no doubt spurred by company vulnerabilities. Business owners should also understand that there can be a delay between when their business is breached and when fraud actually occurs.







“Company information is likely being compromised during these high-usage months, like the holidays,” Kitten said. “Then we don’t start to see the fraud until several weeks to a couple of months later.

Now that the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 4.0 has gone into effect, merchants have a year to conform to the 63 new or updated requirements. With many moving parts to the standard, some businesses may struggle to understand their compliance obligations. Simultaneously, they also don’t want to risk creating friction in the customer experience as they introduce the new security measures.







In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Sukanya Madhavan, Payments Chief Product and Technology Officer, at CSG Forte and Don Apgar, Director of Merchants Payment Practice for Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the new rules. They examined the implications of the change and mapped out steps business owners can take to ease the shift to the new standard.





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Evergreen and Ongoing







One of the main things to know about PCI compliance is that it’s an evergreen and ongoing process. The purpose of the compliance program is to build a safety net for consumers to make sure they’re protected against bad actors. It also streamlines merchants’ card payments operations.







“The program is designed to ensure that customers have peace of mind when they provide their data to us,” Madhavan said. “It should be considered a continuous improvement process, where businesses look for innovative ways to solve the evolving challenges.”







In response to ongoing data breaches, the PCI standard mandates that merchants conduct quarterly internal and external vulnerability scans. Due to the sophisticated technology involved, it’s critical to have an individual who is well-versed in the systems to review these scans.







If merchants need help, quality security assessors (QSAs) and payments processors can give guidance. Often, the issues turn out to be basic security vulnerabilities involving passwords, such as password sharing or passwords that aren’t strong enough. There is help, however, if the issue is more complex.







“Merchants should know they can reach out to their processors, and there is a whole network of support,” Madhavan said. “It’s a partnership between the processor and the merchant to ensure that they are jointly taking care of the consumers’ data. Some processors have gone so far as to create instructional webinars, and there’s even a hotline.”







Not a Burden







Maintaining PCI compliance isn’t just about protecting customers.