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Nice article, TY for pointing it out @AlexP.

@PaulP: Sorry but Wal-Mart hasn't exactly had a great track record in heralding new technologies - at least not in the last 10 years. Three years ago, I'd pointed out in my personal blog post Will Wal-Mart Succeed With EMV Where It Failed With RFID? that Wal-Mart hadn't achieved much success with RFID. I'm now inclined to believe that its EMV pioneering efforts are unlikely to bear fruit.

I just left a comment on this Forrester blog post wondering why US regulators don't impose tighter security on ecommerce transactions. After reading this article, I think I've found the answer. But, as I'd commented on this Finextra post, I think the Fed has got this one right. For the first time, I'm actually seeing figures for fraud loss as a percentage of revenues / GDV, and they surely don't warrant the huge investment in EMV, especially since even magstripe transactions in the USA are authorized online. 

As you rightly point out, many contracts are signed digitally. However, there's more than just inertia to explain why adoption for e-signed contracts is not anywhere close to 100%. In the case of paper-based contracts, both parties to the contract can easily verify authenticity of a contract by spotting or not spotting wet-ink signature. With e-contracts, due to expired SSL keys or other technical reasons, I've received many of them with the marking "signature invalid". I'm never sure how many of them will survive a dispute, if and when one arises! 

There are at least two challenges of mining messages from the entire universe of social media networks: (1) Mind-boggling volume (2) Lack of structure that makes accurate sentiment analysis all but impossible. That explains why there's renewed interest in tools that focus exclusively on Twitter messages and deliver adequate throughput at high accuracy levels.

Most buildings are designed to withstand either an earthquake or a hurricane but not both at the same time. Likewise, I'd think that an FD&P system designed for either the card being compromised or the phone getting lost but not both at the same time, is good enough! I agree that there are risks around using a mobile phone in this context. But in this day and age of using mobile phones for actually making payments, I guess most cardholders will feel safe enough about using them for responding to fraud alerts. 2-way SMS Alerts can be generated only after the transaction is authorized - so there are really no technical issues around holding the transaction. When I'd written "block a fraudulent transaction" in my post, I meant that the transaction will not be settled even though it has been authorized. But, that's a matter of detail since it makes no difference to a cardholder who has effectively been insulated from a fraudulent transaction.

Guards from Switzerland. Now, a cards processor from Switzerland. Maybe it's time the EU accepted that 'what happens in Vatican stays in Vatican'! 

Agreed but when they're combined with 2-way SMS Alerts of the type I'd described in this Finextra post, FD&P systems can go a long way from their present approach, which is largely to "throw the baby out with the bath water". I also think that half the challenge with lowering false-positives arises out of poor problem definitionL Even in this day and age of online shopping, we keep hearing flawed examples of fraud like "John Doe was in City A, his card was charged in City B". Isn't it high time that all concerned stakeholders came to terms with how Card-Not-Present transactions work? 

Many articles on B2B eInvoicing would make one believe that that buyers are just waiting to make payments but are delayed in doing so only because of the inefficiencies caused by paper invoices submitted by suppliers. Kudos for pointing out that "...no efficiency (gains) can be achieved by moving from manual to electronic". With their reliance on passwords, incompatibility with multilevel payment authorization procedures followed by most businesses, and so on, it's debatable whether eInvoices even make the end-to-end procure-to-pay process more efficient.

With the repealing of the "no surcharge" rule post Frank-Dodd-Durbin Amendment, US retailers are permitted to levy surcharge for accepting credit card payments. According to recent news reports, some of them are actually planning to do so. This will likely result in increased use of cash for retail payments even in an economy like the USA that has traditionally seen widespread use of credit cards.

In India, banks and / or retailers are also partially to blame for potentially boosting the use of cash by steadily lowering the redemption value of credit card rewards. Just to cite my personal experience, five years ago, 1000 reward points from a leading bank used to get me a gift voucher of close to INR 700 from a leading retailer. Today, the same 1000 points from the same bank gets me only INR 100 from the same retailer. In the past, just for the sake of convenience, I used to pay by credit card even when the merchant levied a 1.5-2% surcharge. Today, with a near 7X drop in redemption value, I strictly pay by cash whenever a merchant levies surcharge for credit card payments.