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While AI has brought about many advantages in the way we do business, one repercussion has been the expanded attack surface that has given bad actors a new landscape for perpetrating fraud.  One of the primary areas has been the utilization of AI and machine learning to create highly realistic deepfakes – something that appears real and genuine but is in fact a forgery. This includes generated images, videos and audio of documents and people that are used to trick ordinary people and the systems they rely on.

There are several characteristics that deepfakes depend on including realism and manipulation and numerous evolving advanced techniques such as Generative AI models.  All of this is advancing at record speed, thus making this a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

For at least 15 years, vendors and analysts have been heralding the death of legacy systems, arguing they are end-of-life and no longer fit for purpose. Financial institutions (FIs) were told to migrate before it was too late; otherwise, their businesses would become obsolete due to the shiny new, modern technology cores their competitors would adopt.

Yet, this still hasn’t happened. Instead, we have become an industry of integrators, partnerships, and external hubs of complex spaghetti systems with multiple stakeholders that rely on payment orchestration layers and other integration wrappers. The rise of fintechs, multiple stakeholders, and niche players has also led to an unhealthily obsessed with front-ends, with a complete disregard for the core systems that drive it all, as FIs cater to consumer demands for immediacy at the expense of everything else.

In our latest white paper with Consult Hyperion, ‘Escaping the legacy mindset: How to approach modernising your payments ecosystem’, we take a step back to reevaluate the long-term. We examine the payments system architectures that FIs, banks and processors utilise today, highlighting their benefits, disadvantages and where they should sit in your tech stack. This is a must-read for any C-level executive or payments professional seeking to break free of legacy thinking and strive to build a future-proof ecosystem.

Cryptographic HSM infrastructure is a costly although critical part of any payment system. Until recently it has been necessary for payments providers to manage their own Payment HSMs – involving both exacting physical security requirements and scarce cryptographic security expertise. These constraints have made it difficult, if not impossible, to migrate payment applications to the cloud.In response, the HSM industry has developed a number of Cloud Payment HSM offerings. These include ‘bare metal’ offerings which provide secure hosting but leave the management of the devices to the customer. Other ‘Payment Cryptography as a Service’ offerings provide more fully managed multi-tenant services.

A survey of more than 3,000 adults in China, the United States and the United Kingdom found that while three-quarters of them had heard of the metaverse, only 15% said they could explain the concept of the metaverse to another person (and half of them were probably wrong). Those same people, when asked about their main concerns about this metaverse that they didn’t understand, put children’s privacy first and highlighted a number of other data protection, privacy and safety issues.
Those answers are a challenge to us in two ways: First, how can we explain what the metaverse is and secondly how can we give organisations and individuals confidence in it, as a place to do business by making both privacy and security part of the infrastructure?

A good place to begin is to ask what exactly the metaverse is.

In this paper we consider the issues that face many regulated and high value services in finding an optimal way to check the identity of customers. These issues affect financial services, insurance, car rental, online gambling and more besides. The paper explains why current identity checks often fail and shows how through alternative data sources and emerging digital identity solutions will help address these pain points – both improving the customer experience and reducing fraud.

The last 10 years have seen a technology shift in fare collection system architecture, predominantly in North America, although this trend has been accelerating in other regions. This shift has seen significant growth in the number of transit agencies procuring ticketing systems that are multi-agency, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Shared Platform solutions moving away from tailored systems built specifically for the agency. One of the claimed benefits of moving to a Shared Platform approach is the cost savings available for the agency.

In this White Paper, Consult Hyperion looked at eight transit agencies of varying sizes in the United States that have recently undergone procurement of a new fare collection system, in order to review the costs and assess the potential cost savings for agencies from following a Shared Platform approach over the traditional Bespoke Design-Build.

This paper explores how technological developments will enable more secure remote electronic voting systems, and specifically mobile voting systems to be built.

Payments platforms sit at the core of a financial institution’s business; a financial institution’s ability to compete by offering new products and services is determined by the flexibility and extensibility of its payments platform.

Digital identity is an area of strategic importance to many organisations. More people than ever are connected through multiple devices to the Internet. Higher value services, such as banking and healthcare, are being delivered digitally.

Digital commerce has seen significant growth over the last decade and continues to expand as more businesses create opportunities to interact with their customers in a digital channel.

Across the globe, populations are migrating to cities, resulting in congestion and increased pollution. Overall we are travelling a lot less than we did 10 or 20 years ago, but the travel we are undertaking is mostly within cities.

PSD2 has been dogged by delays for multiple reasons but the original rationale – to improve competition and innovation – remains tantalisingly out of reach. To move beyond the first stage – compliance – to the second stage – innovation – we need to learn the lessons of existing payment schemes to determine what works and what doesn’t.