Mobey Forum, the global industry association empowering banks and other financial institutions to shape the future of digital financial services, today announces the formation of the Digital ID Expert Group. 

The group, co-chaired by Jukka Yliuntinen, Vice President at Giesecke+Devrient Mobile Security and Simon Austin, Director at UBS Innovation Lab, will define the role of banks within the identity management ecosystem, explore the key market drivers and opportunities, and analyse the feasibility of potential business models and revenue streams.

“Truly convenient, secure and scalable digital identity solutions have proved elusive to date,” comments Jukka. “The rapid pace of digital transformation, coupled with the ongoing impact of massive data breaches, means many industries are still playing catch-up when it comes to establishing and verifying identity for online and mobile services. As social media platforms and tech start-ups, for example, converge on the identity ecosystem, the question over who creates and manages digital identities is growing in importance.

“The good news is that digital ID plays to the core strengths of banks. Banks are trusted institutions with a proven record of establishing and verifying identity to protect assets and transactions. And as banks already create strong digital identities for their own services, they have the regulatory know-how and established processes in place to play a key role within the identity management ecosystem. There are huge opportunities for those who get it right, and banks may be best-placed to capitalise.”

Elina Mattila, Executive Director at Mobey Forum adds: “There are of course challenges to consider. The identity ecosystem has become fragmented and complex, with too many solutions of limited applicability creating both confusion and vulnerabilities. Developing strategies to deliver interoperable identity, therefore, should be a central consideration.”

Mobey Forum’s Expert Groups provide members with exclusive insights, strategic evaluation and unparalleled opportunity to establish relationships with international experts in a non-commercial environment. By exchanging ideas, mapping the technologies and exploring the potential business models, the Digital ID Expert Group aims to enable banks to both address the challenges and seize the opportunities presented by this evolving market.” 

The Digital ID Expert Group will be meeting at Mobey Day Europe in Vienna, 04-05 December. For further information and to register, visit the Mobey Day website.

Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the all-flash storage leader that helps innovators build a better world with data, today announced Pure Storage Cloud Data Services, a suite of new cloud offerings that run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With these new products, customers can invest in a single storage architecture that unifies application deployments on-premises and on the cloud to flexibly turn data into value virtually anywhere.

Enterprise application mobility, coupled with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and deep analytics, has increased the strategic importance of infrastructure exponentially. Applications of all types -- traditional and emerging -- demand flexible, location-independent data accessibility, and this has had a profound impact on infrastructure. Modern organizations need real-time access to any and all data, which requires applications to move freely between on-premises and the cloud. Historically, a lack of purpose-designed, strategic integrations between on-premises storage and the cloud have been a primary inhibitor of application mobility.

“Today, there exists a cloud divide - the cloud is not purpose-built for enterprise applications, and enterprise infrastructure isn’t as user-friendly as the cloud," said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage. “Customers should be able to make infrastructure choices based on what’s best for their environment, not constrained by what the technology can do or where it lives. Today's announcement extends Pure's data centric architecture to the cloud, allowing our customers to build hybrid applications that provide true mobility and freedom.”

Customer demand clearly indicates that a unified hybrid cloud architecture is the best model to bring agility to the modern enterprise. Today, organizations are too often forced to choose between on-premises or cloud, while the best pathway to innovation and operational effectiveness comes from a hybrid strategy -- an architecture that provides access to all clouds.

Nothing is more important for hybrid than the right data strategy, as data is key to efficient development and application mobility. Pure unifies cloud and delivers a common set of data services across on-premises and cloud, enabling consistent storage capabilities, APIs, and resiliency so that applications can be built once and run everywhere.

Pure Storage Cloud Data Services are a new set of capabilities designed to run Pure Storage software on AWS. They include:

Cloud Block Store for AWS. Industrial-strength block storage that runs on AWS. Designed to enable mission-critical applications to run seamlessly in the cloud, Cloud Block Store enables hybrid mobility and adds new storage services to webscale applications.

CloudSnap for AWS. Cloud-based data protection, built right into Pure FlashArray. CloudSnap allows FlashArray snapshots to be easily sent to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which enables cost-effective protection in the cloud along with flexible recovery both on-premises or in the cloud.

StorReduce. Cloud-native deduplication technology, designed to enable fast, simple, cost-effective cloud backup to AWS S3 storage, in conjunction with on-premises flash for fast recovery.  

Pure Storage Cloud Data Services allow customers to more easily embrace a hybrid cloud architecture. Customers can more easily migrate applications to the cloud, build and run hybrid across on-premises and cloud, use the cloud for backup and disaster recovery, and develop more sophisticated webscale applications which leverage advanced storage capabilities like data reduction, snapshots and multi-zone replication. In addition, Pure's recent acquisition of StorReduce, an object storage deduplication engine, enables organizations to replace purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) with flash for fast recovery, and tape with Amazon S3 object storage for offsite data retention. This new backup architecture -- flash-to-flash-to-cloud -- modernizes backup and recovery processes using flash, the public cloud, and allows for flexible re-use of backup data with different AWS services.

"Pure has built upon the reliable base of AWS storage offerings to create value-add features and help enterprise applications to work across on-premises and AWS.” said Sabina Joseph, Head of Global Partnerships & Alliances, Digital Innovation, Storage, HPC Solutions, AWS. “Pure Storage is delivering a unified hybrid cloud experience, providing consistent APIs and automation for developers, and offering uniquely differentiated backup and data protection solutions on AWS through StorReduce and CloudSnap.”

Endpoint protection solutions and prevention are very effective when it comes to fighting commodity cyber threats like malware. But F-Secure and its managed service providers now give businesses an even better weapon with the new F-Secure Rapid Detection & Response and its innovative features including Broad Context Detection™ and Elevate to F-Secure.

F-Secure Rapid Detection & Response, available through F-Secure’s global partner network, is an industry-leading endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution that monitors organizations’ IT environments and their security status to identify suspicious behavior.

It gives contextual visibility to automatically identify and visualize advanced threats by combining lightweight endpoint sensors with advanced data analysis, AI, and machine learning capabilities.

Trained by an experienced threat hunting team, the solution enables a company’s own IT team or a local, managed, and certified service provider supported by F-Secure’s experts to protect an organization against advanced threats.

Broad Context Detection™ mechanisms narrow down the data and distinguish malicious behavior patterns from normal user behavior to quickly identify real attacks, significantly reducing the number of alerts that IT staff has to pay attention to.

79% of security teams report being overwhelmed by high numbers of threat alerts and they are forced to let the majority of alerts triggered on a daily basis go without attention, according to an EMA study*. Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Report shows that 68% of breaches take months or longer to discover, and an overload of security warnings – including false positives – can create alert fatigue amongst a firm’s IT staff**. 

“F-Secure Rapid Detection & Response detects targeted attacks swiftly and enables efficient incident response with built-in automation to stop the attacks when they happen,” explains Jyrki Tulokas, Executive Vice President, Cyber Security Products & Services at F-Secure.

Some detections may require deeper threat analysis and guidance by specialized cyber security experts, however. F-Secure’s Rapid Detection & Response has been boosted with the option of sending tough incidents to F-Secure’s threat hunters.

This service is activated by selecting the on-demand ‘Elevate to F-Secure’ feature. It leverages cyber security experts from F-Secure’s 24/7 managed detection and response team. This is now made available as an on-demand elevation service to give expert guidance on how to contain and remediate targeted attacks.

“In this unique service F-Secure’s cyber security experts analyze methods and technologies, network routes, traffic origins, and timelines when an attack is detected,” says Tulokas. “That means businesses now can be confident about having the required skills and resources to respond to even the toughest targeted attacks.” 

F-Secure’s unified endpoint protection, detection & intelligent response solution is cloud managed and delivers a single-client for Windows and Mac. It works also alongside other endpoint protection vendors’ software. The solution is available through F-Secure’s global network of certified partners.

Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO), the world leader in digital security, has today announced it is expanding its delivery footprint for Access Management as a service solutions across the European Union with additional data centers in the region. These newly added facilities will help the company respond to rising demand for its cloud-based authentication and access management solutions while also helping EU customers meet requirements around data sovereignty. 

As more companies use multiple cloud-based collaboration, infrastructure and storage services that are delivered from data centers around the world, securing data across all cloud platforms while meeting local regulatory mandates has become an increasing challenge. The addition of the new Gemalto data centers will give organizations the ability to take full advantage of Gemalto SafeNet Authentication and SafeNet Trusted Accesssolutions while ensuring the service is delivered from within the European Union.

"With GDPR and other legislations putting pressure on our EU customers to ensure that their data is secure, we've seen a large increase in demand for control over where cloud services are delivered from." said Francois Lasnier, Senior Vice President of Identity and Access Management at Gemalto. "As our service expands, it's important that we continue to provide our customers with the best means to manage access to multiple cloud services, and provide  the flexibility and agility to scale as they require." 

Major technology highlights of the data center expansion include:

• Data centers and services are ISO 27001 and SOC2 certified;
• Multi-tier, multi-tenancy throughout its access management services, giving organizations more flexibility by being able to share cloud-based authentication and access management services across business units and departments; and
• Stringent Service Level Agreements across all its data centers with 99.99% service availability.

A Global Data Center Expansion
The launch of the new data centers in the EU is part of Gemalto's expansion of its global delivery footprint for its cloud-based security services. Later this year, Gemalto will launch additional data centers in North America, giving international organizations even more choice over service delivery location, and helping them to meet local regulatory and compliance requirements. 

"Expansion into these data centers clearly reflect the philosophy behind our cloud strategy - to expand our footprint while taking advantage of the latest innovations in cloud service delivery and offering more flexibility to our customers," added Lasnier. "Moreover, our cloud service architecture also allows managed service partners and resellers to partner with us to offer their own branded cloud-based access management services without having to invest in the infrastructure."

When large organizations – complex in structure and deliberate with their decision-making – and startups – rapidly-paced innovators with powerful technologies – sit at the same table, it’s easier to see the (many) differences. The former may employ 50,000 people, while the latter could’ve been founded in a municipality half the size.

Yet, what got them there in the first place is the same shared outcome: long-term value creation. If corporate/startup relationships begin with the exchanging of equity, though, the short-term injection can affect the win/win opportunity.

Capital investment is in the corporate venturing arsenal – participation for 2018 surpassed 20 percent globally for the first time – but it can’t come first. As we’ve learned through Mastercard Start Path, the most effective engagement with startups neither requires nor needs taking equity before working together.

Startups change industries rapidly but the world around them is catching up. Global firms have rethought their culture to be more open to partnership, reshaping possibilities. Amid new roads to growth and scale, these three steps can create value for both parties.

Customized training:

Start Path creates a bespoke path for all of our startups because no two startups are the same. Defining and tracking specific goals allows for a tailored approach to working together that solves real operational challenges for startups. Implementing a hybrid of physical and virtual engagement creates trusting relationships and periodic touchpoints that keep the interactions focused on delivering toward the defined mutual approach.

Testing time:

Leave the pens and the paper at home, stay for the pilots. This is a period of co-creation where learnings from the outside are applied to test in a controlled environment from the inside. Here, we can address the assumptions and break down the unknowns. Proof-of-concept makes way for proof-of-creation.

Three proof points that any pilot should deliver:

• Desirability: Proof that the product is desired by the end user
• Feasibility: Proof that the technology works and is fit for scale
• Commerciality: Analysis to support a compelling business case for deployment at scale

Access:

Organizations need to network just as much as university interns, and connecting startups with a broader network is a fabulous way to collaborate when it accelerates the deployment of breakthrough innovation and, eventually, commercial solutions.

Under these three pillars, the next wave of Start Path companies are off and running.

When Start Path companies flock to Miami next week for the annual Start Path summit, they’ll meet with Mastercard business units, customers and channels to open the right doors for commercial results – long term-value creation.

I’m delighted to welcome our new collaborators to Start Path, a group of 180 cutting-edge organizations that have raised $1.2 billion in capital and are working with the key payments industry players who are shaping the future of commerce:

• Agora Services
• Billpocket
• Extend
• Jaib
• Meeco
• Pay By Group
• Rewire
• Silot
• Simudyne

Start Path leads to a true partnership between large organizations and startups. This allows us to innovate faster and smarter and Start Something Priceless together.

Sageworks, a financial information company that offers lending, credit risk and portfolio risk solutions to banks and credit unions, today announced the release of Agile Bankers – How Community Banks are Addressing Disruption, Risk and Growth.The free eBook provides insights into how executives from institutions ranging in asset size from $320 million to $1.9 billion are tackling various challenges as they steer their banks into the future. 

The eBook, written by research specialist Mary Ellen Biery, features interviews with Sageworks Client Advisory board members, who reveal shared pain points community bankers face, from technology disruption and compliance issues to challenges tied to portfolio and staff growth.  

The eBook outlines:

• How community banks across the country are leveraging technology to streamline daily tasks even as grapple with technology disrupting traditional banking services
• How to tackle growth challenges, such as staffing, and best practices for relationship management 
• How to conquer compliance issues and navigate regulatory burdens.

Community banks play a critical role on Main Street and in the U.S. economy. However, these institutions also face disproportionate challenges compared to large and online-only financial institutions, such as increased regulatory burden and limited spending power. Despite the challenges they face, executives in this eBook express optimism for the future of community banking and shed light onto the ways their institutions have navigated such challenges. 

“It’s critical to have community banks as part of the local ecosystem, but they are facing a perfect storm of competition, regulatory burdens, growth challenges, changing customer views and in some cases, outdated technology,” said Sageworks President Jay Blandford. “This eBook gives the insiders’ view of how some forward-looking institutions are tackling these issues.”

The first section of the eBook outlines how community banks are dealing with disruption, especially as fintech providers expand and grow in popularity. 

The bank executives interviewed for the eBook are:

• Duane Abadie, president and chief credit officer of First Bank & Trust in New Orleans.
• James Anthony, president and chief executive officer of Martha’s Vineyard Bank in Edgartown, Mass.
• Thomas Bugielski, president and chief executive officer of Republic Bank of Chicago. 
• K. John Jones, chief executive officer and a director of First National Bank of Layton in Layton, Utah.
• Karen Makowski, executive vice president and chief risk officer of Chemung Canal Trust Company of Elmira, N.Y.
• Lauri Stewart, president and chief executive officer of Seattle-based Sound Community Bank, subsidiary of Sound Financial Corp.

With greater online competition, community banks must find new ways to develop and enhance customer relationships, and this section provides commentary on how these institutions have leveraged fintechs to become more customer-centric. Following the technology disruption section, bankers provided insights regarding the compliance and regulatory issues that community banks face. Regulation and compliance continues to be a major pain point for community bankers, and this section explains how these bankers have lightened the burden through key technologies. The final section of the eBook discusses how financial institutions are able to steer their banks toward growth by implementing a careful balance of technology and human touch. 

To learn more and download the free eBook, visit Agile Bankers – How Community Banks are Addressing Disruption, Risk and Growth. 

The introduction of the Visa Claims Resolution initiative (aka, VCR) in April 2018 was heralded as a significant development for the payments industry. However, almost six months from its launch, the impact on merchants has been minimal – and many suggest the chargeback process has only become more challenging.

VCR was designed to streamline and simplify the chargeback process, reduce instances of chargeback fraud and standardise the system for processing claims. The changes were flagged to merchants and banks well in advance of their introduction, yet more than one-in-three of the merchants surveyed by The Chargeback Company said they were unaware of VCR.

Of those that were aware of the changes, 38% felt it had made the chargeback and dispute process worse, while 23% said it had made it better.

More than one-third of merchants were unaware that they faced additional fines if they missed the new, shorter deadlines for responding to claims – and nearly 85% who were aware report responding to (and thereby accepting) any valid chargeback dispute. This also led to additional management costs and related inefficiencies.

The Chargeback Company’s study concludes that merchants are managing payment disputes more proactively as a result of Visa’s new penalty and fee schedule. However, seven out of ten merchants report difficulty in adjusting to the reduced time-frames, considering their manual process of compiling cases has not changed despite dramatically shortened time-frames.

This collective feedback suggests that VCR may have impacted merchant attitude towards chargebacks – something for which Visa deserves credit – but it has not introduced efficiency where merchants are concerned. As well as this, the promise to reduce the issuance of chargebacks has been a shortfall.

To improve the efficiency and minimise the sheer quantity of payment disputes, The Chargeback Company recommends implementing Visa’s Merchant Purchase Inquiry (VMPI). This is a function that aims to speed up dispute communication by providing merchants with an opportunity to work with their bank or a licensed facilitator to supply additional data to Visa. Only 13% of merchants surveyed were enrolled.

From the supplementary data and proactive feedback, issuers can offer evidence-backed explanations for unjustified disputes and forego the process of a chargeback altogether. With a low number of merchants relying on the additional tools to manage their disputes, increased education here could prove beneficial.

“VCR is a step in the right direction when it comes to combatting wrongful chargebacks and friendly fraud, but merchants need much more support,” says Monica Eaton-Cardone, CIO and co-founder of The Chargeback Company. “Without support, merchants will be worse off than before the initiative came into play, hit by shorter timeframes and additional fees. The equation isn’t balanced – this is the primary issue.”

There are a number of variables that will affect VCR’s success – the extent to which other card schemes follow Visa's lead being one of them. For now, Visa's biggest challenge is making sure merchants and processors have a clear understanding of what VCR is and how it can protect a merchant's bottom line.

Leading global payments and cloud specialist Renovite Technologies will be in New York later this month to present and discuss the growing importance of Quality Assurance in payments technology in the context of increasing regulatory pressure around new financial products.

Hosted in New York City’s Harvard Club on November 28^th ‘The QA Financial Forum: New York’ is expected to attract major financial firms from around the world. Its objective is to promote information sharing and discourse between heads of quality assurance and platform architecture at financial firms and among key decision-makers and stakeholders in IT investment, including operational risk managers and IT risk managers.

Commenting ahead of the conference Jim Tomaney, chief operating officer at Renovite Technologies, said:

“The pace in demand for new innovations in consumer products is rapidly increasing and along with it, the pressure on businesses to bring these products to market at break-neck speed. It is vital financial services organisations can fully automate the end-to-end testing of payment products and avoid the delays and errors which can occur through manual testing and ad-hoc tools that aren’t necessarily well suited to an organisation’s individual requirement.

“We have developed our testing application Reno-Test using 21-century cloud-native technology and it is capable of testing an enterprise’s entire payments platform. Ultimately, it is a positive consumer experience that counts and that’s what we are here to guarantee. You don’t have to look too far into the headlines to see what can happen when a bank or business suffers an outage because they haven’t tested their system using the right software.”

FIME has been accredited by Mastercard to deliver biometric authentication testing services for fingerprint in line with its new guidelines for mobile device sensors. The testing evaluation program enables mobile, wearable and sensor manufacturers to test the performance and accuracy of mobile fingerprint sensors. This enables financial service providers to easily evaluate the hardware and software integrated into devices and have confidence in the quality of the products that are integrating with their payment solutions.

Goode Intelligence’s second Biometrics for Payments report found that biometrics has become an important tool in the fight against fraud in almost all of the channels that payment is supporting. The report predicts that there will be over 2.6 billion biometric payment users by 2023, driven by desire for more frictionless authentication, fraud reduction, regulation, and standardization.

Mastercard’s program provides dedicated hardware performance testing to scrutinize the quality of solutions’ matching engines. Vendors and service providers can make use of FIME’s consulting, training and testing services to launch reliable mobile payment solutions. 

“Biometrics have taken the payments world by storm in recent years, delivering consumers greater convenience and security,” comments Stephanie El Rhomri, Vice President of Services at FIME. “But in a post-PSD2 and GDPR world, players across mobile and payments are increasingly understanding the importance of performance and quality to ensure customer adoption of new secure authentication solutions. We’re proud to be championing this evaluation program, the first of its kind to be fully ISO-compliant, as we continue to support the ever-expanding role of biometrics in payments.”