Interest in enterprise blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has grown significantly in the past few years, with at least 115 DLT startups now employing more than two thousand people and many large corporations and public sector institutions focusing on DLT, says the first Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), supported by VISA and professional services firm Ernst and Young (EY).

The Berlin Group, a-European payments interoperability coalition of banks and payment processors, is pushing a single standard for API access to bank accounts to comply with new regulations on freeing up customer data under PSD2.

US fintech giant First Data is strengthening its e-commerce hand through the acquisition of Atlanta-based Acculynk. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The move gives First Data access to Acculynk’s PaySecure debit routing technology, which allows merchants to process online debit payments through the most cost-effective available network.

Despite the wave of costly data breaches over the last few years, nearly half of global firms that accept plastic are still failing to meet Payment Cards Industry (PCI) security standards, according to a report from Verizon.

Official figures of aggregated data published by technical body EMVCo show that by the end of 2016, the number of EMV® payment cards in global circulation had increased by 1.3 billion in the previous 12 months to a total of 6.1 billion.

The results of a research by CC Associates, Consorzio BANCOMAT® and SIA carried out amongst 25 domestic card schemes from 5 continents on today’s challenges and opportunities.

According to the 2017 Debit Issuer Study, commissioned by PULSE, one of the nation’s leading debit/ATM networks, U.S. financial institutions substantially increased issuance of chip debit cards in 2016 and experienced reduced fraud losses.

Payment professionals are well aware of the benefits of payment technologies now entering the marketplace, but concerns about cost and compatibility may delay their implementation, according to Managing Payment Technology Innovation, a study conducted by Capital One and the NAPCP, the professional association of the commercial card and payment industry.
Based on a survey of 136 payment professionals from 21 sectors, the study revealed that payment professionals appreciate the heightened security, streamlined operations, enhanced analytics, lower costs, and, in some cases, additional revenue to be gained from these technologies. However, survey respondents identified three major barriers to implementation: insufficient information to make an informed cost-benefit analysis; insufficient leadership commitment; and lack of knowledge about sophisticated and cutting-edge payment technologies such as blockchain and tokenization.

The European Banking Authority is to relax proposed rules on a requirement for strong customer authentication for all payments under EUR10, after being on the receiving end of a volley of complaints from industry participants who claimed that the mandate would lead to more declined transactions and abandoned purchases at the checkout.

Card fraud has increased 19% year on year, according to The Nilson Report, accounting for losses of around$21.8 billion, in 2015. France has seen an 8.9% increase in card fraud and the USA, which has the largest fraud/loss ratio, currently accounts for 47.3% of the world’s payment card fraud losses.

As the US finally made the switch to EMV chip cards, last year saw e-commerce fraud rates jump by 33%, according to data from Experian.
In late 2015 the US finally followed much of the rest of the world when Visa and other card schemes switched the liability for fraud-related losses to retailers that have not upgraded their hardware for EMV.

IBM has struck a deal with Visa which will give all of Big Blue's Watson IoT platform customers access to the card giant's payment services, potentially turning billions of cars, fridges, sneakers and other connected devices into points of sale.