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Category: Mobile apps
Will the UK identity framework support decentralised identity?
In our Live 5 for 2021, we said that governance would be a major topic for digital identity this year. Nowhere has this been more true than in the UK, where the government has been diligently working with a wide set of stakeholders to develop its digital identity and attribute trust framework – the rules of road for digital identity in the UK. The work continues but with the publication of the second iteration of the framework I thought it would be helpful to focus on one particular aspect – how might the framework apply to decentralised identity, given that is the direction of travel in the industry.
Request to Pay’s Grand Tour
Earlier this year we were delighted to be part of the Consult Hyperion webinar on Request to Pay. A common thread in post-event conversations that followed was an interest in the parallel developments of the UK and European flavours of Request to Pay and how they might work together. With the launch of the European version on June 15th, we thought it an ideal time to signpost the bigger differences.
Ultra wide band – the 2nd coming?
Every year Consult Hyperion publishes our Live 5. We try to shine a lens on the year ahead and think about what will be impacting our clients. The themes for 2021 are:
Today I want to explore the topic of micro location from the point of view of (mostly) Apple ecosystem, and how developers can leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) to build useful apps. In order to understand that, first we should visit the topic of location in general – how do devices know where they are?
Building SoftPOS – not as easy as you think.
For the third year running, my colleague Gary Munro facilitated a thought-provoking debate around the use of mobile phones and tablets as contactless payment terminals during last week’s virtual Merchant Payments Ecosystem (MPE) conference. For the last three years, Gary and his panellists have tracked the progress of the SoftPOS technology and standards. The three key messages that I took away from this year’s conversation were that:
Chip and PIN? Remember that?
This weekend marks an anniversary. Although Consult Hyperion’s romance with smart cards had started many years before that, it will be fifteen years on Sunday that chip and PIN went live in the UK. I remember St. Valentine’s Day 2006 as if it was yesterday!
Safer Internet Day 2021 – are my children actually safer?
Today marks the 10th anniversary of Safer Internet Day in the UK. Each year Industry, Educators, Regulators, Health & Social Care workers and Parents rally to raise awareness and put into action, plans to tackle findings from significant research on the topic of trust and safety on the internet. This year one of the research pieces talks of the challenge ‘An Internet Young People Can Trust’. As a mum of two school age children, I am sat here wondering if the internet will ever be safe … for them or me.
If I think about life BC (before COVID), my eldest used social media for broadcast communications to her friends. She was guided on the appropriateness of certain apps and our acid test on the content she was posting, was always ‘would you go up to a stranger in the street and give him your name, age, location and a photo of you in a bikini’ … her reaction was always ‘err, no’. My youngest had never been online apart from BBC Bitesize for homework assignments. We’re not online gamers so have never had constant nagging to go online. Additionally, you have to remember the internet (and mobile internet) has been significant in my work world since 1990 so I have a heightened understanding of the pitfalls and have seen many fall foul of their online reputation, tarnishing their in-person reputation.
Are 97% of mobile transactions in Asia fraudulent?
Recently I saw this article suggesting that 97% of mobile transactions in Asia are fraudulent? Can this really be true? I decided to investigate.
The article highlights an excellent report published by Secure-D looking into mobile ad fraud, which it appears is a largely hidden multi-billion dollar enterprise, impacting emerging markets in particular. As you might expect with an enterprise of this size it is multi-faceted and complex. Two of the ways fraudsters are making money are as follows:
- Fake clicks: The internet runs on advertising revenues obtained when a user clicks on an ad in a mobile app or on a web page. Fraudsters have numerous ways to create fake clicks, that look like they’ve come from a real person, and then be paid the associate fee. One way that they do this is by deploying malicious apps to the devices of unsuspecting users often disguised as a legitimate app offering an innocuous service like providing weather information.
- Hidden purchases: Many mobile users in emerging markets are unbanked and use their prepaid mobile airtime to purchase goods or services. Those malicious apps deployed to devices can also then siphon off funds from users without them realising it is happening. They just see their airtime running out more quickly than it otherwise might.
Contact-free and App Clips in Apple’s iOS 14
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.
Is your mobile banking app exposed by someone else’s software?
This post was written in collaboration with Neal Michie, Director, Product Management, Verimatrix.
Banks are facing massive disruption and change from many directions. The rise of app-only banks has made the need for traditional banks to have compelling app services an imperative. Banks have of course been building mobile apps for several years. If not already, they will soon be the most important channel for engaging with and serving customers. However, mobile banking apps will also become the primary focus of hackers, intent on getting access to other people’s information and money.
