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This is where the terrorists get the upper hand. Everyone in the IT or finance industries is so terrified of the reputational damage from a hit like this that no one is talking about what happened or what they could have done differently to have avoided the infection.

Maybe they were stupid and they left themselves open to the attack but maybe the attackers had a clever new vector that we are all open to. We are certainly not going to be any better prepared after reading this article

It's interesting that what we currently have now is called a "four party model". Clearly this represents the card holder, issuer, acquirer and merchant. What about the card schemes? Surely, they are a party to the transaction. They certainly take a cut of the transaction fees. Or the processors? It's way too technical and expensive to integrate with the card schemes directly so there must be separate entities (internal or external) to allow a financial institution to connect.

Then there are the Payment Service Providers (PSPs) who provide the interfaces for the merchants, the AI developers who provide the systems to check for fraud, the PCI auditors who check that all the other parties are looking after the card details properly, etc, etc, etc...

It's no wonder the transaction fees are so high.

I guess it would irritate me less if the service provided by the card schemes was better. Provide decent interfaces so that processors and PSPs weren't required. Provide decent security so the fraud systems and PCI DSS auditors weren't required. But they don't.

What's needed is a new and better type of payment network. This would take courage, vision and some fairly deep pockets. If you know anyone like that I would be very keen to talk to them.

Thank you both for taking the time to comment on my article. I think the terminology I chose was making me unclear. Perhaps if I define my terms it will make more sense.

A "prepaid platform" is one where the card is synonomous with the account. There appear to be many such systems in use. I fully accept that you can use a pre-paid card as an access point for an account and, if you're using an account platform, such a system would provide all the features described above and allow induction of mortgages, loans and credit as part of a continuous development. Within my narrow definition of a pre-paid card platform that would be impossible.

An "account management platform" then, is one which separates people, from accounts, from access mechanisms for those accounts. It's "core banking lite" if you will. But they will run your entire financial instituion from accounting to customer service. And the prices for such systems are much lower than you might imagine.