Author: Ian Prince

Ian Prince, Principal Consultant, is a payment technology professional with over 20 years of experience in creating payment solutions, much of this in credit card issuance. Since 2015, Ian has worked on a variety of payments initiatives including writing EMV payment specifications, working on mobile payments solutions, evaluating regulatory compliance, evaluating the use of Biometrics and analysing payment options for a transit system. Ian was previously at Capital One, where he supported the bank’s migration of their payment card portfolios in the UK, Canada and the USA from magnetic stripe to EMV smartcards. As the Technical Architect for all three migrations, he has a detailed understanding of the core processes within a payment card issuer, the capabilities of the platforms that support them, and the effort required to implement changes.

Contact-free and App Clips in Apple’s iOS 14

22nd September 202022nd September 2020 by Ian Prince Leave a comment

The Use of Contact-free is Accelerating

At Consult Hyperion, we have already seen the pandemic accelerate the adoption of contact-free payments in the face to face environment as customers have become wary of catching COVID by touching shared devices, such as self-service terminals and PIN pads. The use of personal devices for payments is hardly new but the attraction of an in-app/in-store version of mobile payments, whereby the consumer uses an app on their own device to interact with the retailer or service provider and pay for services, has just increased dramatically. Solutions for parking (RingGo) and for restaurants (like the Wahaca app, powered by Judopay) were already demonstrating the benefits of such an approach for customers and businesses before COVID struck.

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The tension in facial recognition

27th August 202029th August 2020 by Ian Prince Leave a comment

The rise of facial recognition technology and the erosion of privacy

In the 2002 movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character has his eyes surgically replaced so he can avoid being identified by the all-pervasive retina scanning system that the state uses to track people… and of course, uses to show targeted ads to people. This is a rather dystopian view of the broad application of biometrics technology. However, judging by a lawsuit targeting Macy’s for their use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology in their stores, it seems that staying anonymous in the bricks and mortar world is becoming a little more like the movie. Whilst you may not require surgery, you may soon require something akin to glasses and a fake beard to avoid being tracked. The issue here is that Clearview AI has been scraping images from publicly viewable sources on the web for a while, enabling them to create a database of facial biometrics against which to match captured facial images. Amongst the sources of this data are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Vimeo, with some of these companies having sent cease and desist letters to Clearview AI for breach of their terms of service. The aim it seems is for Clearview AI to create a one-to-many facial recognition solution that can identify an individual from only an image of their face from anyone who is in a photo or video on the web. Based on a report on Buzzfeed, they were working with over 2000 companies as of February 2020, and they are probably not alone, so perhaps we should be concerned.

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