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.

Apple Finally Enables Payment Card Acceptance on iPhone

19th April 202219th April 2022by Ian PrinceLeave a comment

Contactless Card Acceptance

Solutions to enable Android phones to be used to accept EMV contactless card payments without requiring additional hardware have been around for a while. We’ve been advising and helping our clients architect, secure, build and certify SoftPOS solutions for the last 5 years. However, this has not been possible on iOS devices, until now. Speculation that Apple was looking to add contactless payment card acceptance support to iPhone grew when they bought Mobeewave for $100MM in 2020. Based on the technology acquired in this purchase, Apple has recently added contactless card acceptance capability by implementing their Proximity Reader framework to iOS 15.4, for what Apple calls Tap to Pay.

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Biometrics on Cards

13th April 202213th April 2022by Ian PrinceLeave a comment

Improving Cardholder Authentication

On-card fingerprint readers have been in development for a few years now, with a number of products now in market from vendors such as Fingerprint Cards, Zwipe, Idemia and G+D.

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So, you want to be a card issuer?

3rd August 20213rd September 2021by Ian PrinceLeave a comment

Card issuing seems to be hot right now. Despite the rise of alternatives to card payments, many Fintech’s appear intent on adding payment cards to their product portfolios. And it is not just the “me too” start-up banks.

For example, some international remittance services are adding payment cards to their offerings. This allows customers to spend the money they receive directly but also means that customers do not withdraw funds immediately upon receipt. This extends the customer relationship adding value to both the customer and the Fintech.

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Live 5 – Micro-Location

4th March 20218th March 2021by Ian PrinceLeave a comment

In our Live 5 for 2021 we raised micro-location as an area of technology where we expect to start seeing significant advances being made. UWB (Ultra Wideband) is just starting to get traction in consumer electronics and we believe that this will trigger innovation in micro-location technology.

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Malware Wolves in Developer Sheep’s Clothing

11th November 202011th November 2020by Ian PrinceLeave a comment

When consumers install software on their devices, they often perform some sort of risk evaluation, even if they don’t consciously realise it. They might consider who provides the software, whether it is from an app-store, what social media says, and whether they have seen any reviews. But what if once a piece of software had been installed, the goalposts moved, and something that was a genuine software tool at the time of installation turned into a piece of malware overnight.

This is what happened to approximately 300,000 active users of Chrome ad blocking extension Nano Adblocker. You see, at the beginning of October, the developer of Nano Adblocker sold it to another developer who promptly deployed malware into it that issued likes to hundreds of Instagram posts without user interaction. There is some suspicion that it may have also been uploading session cookies.

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The Disintermediation of Business Banking

5th November 20205th November 2020by Ian Prince2 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of “attending” the LendIt Fintech – Europe 2020 virtual event. Now, much of the content covered banking services for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), an area that personally I’m not particularly familiar with, but one that is gaining more focus in the news of late. One thing that struck me was the potential disruption of traditional business banking brought about by open banking.

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

22nd September 202022nd September 2020by Ian PrinceLeave 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 2020by Ian PrinceLeave 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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