Profile

Location

London

Member since

2009

Writes about

Security Payments Regulation & Compliance

Tom's blog archive

2018 (1) 2017 (3) 2016 (3) 2015 (6) 2014 (1)

Tom Hay

Principal Consultant at Payment Systems Europe

Message Posts: 14 Comments: 50

Bio Providing consultancy for merchants, fintechs and payment service providers Career History A payments expert with over thirty years experience in card and account-to-account payments, with a technology and product management background.

Blogs

Banks versus tech giants - it's not all about the technology

29 Oct 2018

Apple, Alibaba, Google and Tencent are all moving into payments. Alibaba is also moving into consumer loans and small business loans. How should banks react to the tech giants muscling into their industry? First it is important to understand the difference between Apple, Google and co, and banks. The name “tech giants” highlights that they tend to ...

The ERPB Highlights the Holes in PSD2

22 Jun 2017

A year ago, the European Retail Payments Board (ERPB) flagged that “In practice, PSD2 and the EBA RTS will not cover all aspects that are relevant for the development of an integrated market of Payment Initiation Services (PIS) in the EU”. In November 2016, they set up a Working Group on Payment Initiation Services “to identify conditions for the ...

PSD2 - The Final RTS: 10 Things You Need To Know

10 Mar 2017

The wait is over. The European Banking Authority (EBA) has recently published its ‘final’ Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and common and secure communication under PSD2. PSD2 and particularly the SCA aspect has the potential to dramatically change not just the payments sector but the wider banking mark...

The Treasury’s view of PSD2: A step in the right direction?

22 Feb 2017

As a European directive, PSD2 has to be transposed into UK law. HM Treasury has recently launched a consultation inviting comment on the proposed legislative changes. The consultation document is written in plain English, and explains some of the issues very clearly. The directive is aimed at “maximum harmonisation”, which means that national la

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Tom is Commenting on

CMA finds Experian/ClearScore merger could hamper competition

The three credit reference agencies in the UK are Experian, Equifax and CallCredit. AFAIK ClearScore is a fintech that presents a pretty UI and advertising on top of Equifax data. I don't see how an Experian takeover would change anything except ClearScore's data source. It certainly wouldn't create a monopoly.

29 Nov 2018 Reply Read article

Visa invests in Klarna

Never mind a banking license and credit cards, Klarna owns Sofort, the 800lb gorilla of the screen-scraping payment initiators. I reckon Visa is buying insurance against PSD2 and instant payments displacing card payments, as predicted in a recent Ovum report. In this sense it's similar to Mastercard's acquisition of VocaLink, though targeting a different link in the value chain.

28 Jun 2017 Reply Read article

PSD2 is fast approaching. Don’t bury your head in the sand

Looking for a "a full pre-packaged PSD2 offering" is rather like the futile quest for El Dorado. The purported solutions we have seen so far offer only a fraction of the required functionality. Some work only for mobile devices; most do not address the requirement to handle corporate payments; consent and data redaction are not addressed; and so on. In any case, the ongoing controversies around the RTS make PSD2 compliance a moving target. It's a racing certainty that any bank that is still 'reflecting' rather than doing will miss the Jan 2018 deadline. There's no 'silver bullet' solution they can plug in to achieve instant compliance.

22 May 2017 Reply Read article

PSD2 and EBA Update: The Good News and The Bad

Ralf, I don't follow your logic regarding free riding. If a company invests in new wires, powerlines, and rail tracks, do you think they should then be forced to allow other companies to use them free of charge? What would be the incentive to build them? That's not the way the market works! Your example of public streets is misleading - streets are funded from the public purse, for the public good. If a private company funds the building of a road from its own pocket, of course it has a right to charge a toll for usage. Regarding security, when I access Internet Banking direct from my browser, the data (including my security credentials) are encrypted end-to-end. When a screen-scraper is used, it introduces a break in encryption between my browser and the bank, presenting a new attack vector for hackers.

22 Feb 2017 Reply Read article