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Interesting article. Only yesterday, I came across a very useful perspective about the difference in drivers for online advertising on search (e.g. Google Search) versus social networks (e.g. Facebook). According to this viewpoint, search is more relevant for food, housing, employment and other things at the bottom of Maslow's famous pyramid of human wants and needs whereas social network is more applicable for esteem, recognition and other things on the upper layers of the pyramid. While only time can tell how well this predicts relative market share of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, this perspective did sound quite logical at first glance. 

According to BillGuard, it keeps its service free by making money from banks that offer its advanced card protection services to their (i.e. banks') customers. Banks could invest in implementing realtime, 2-way SMS alerts for all / selective user-defined credit card transactions as an alternative / additional way of solving this problem, as I'd pointed out in my two recent Finextra blog posts:

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5772

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=5801

Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence weighs heavily in favor of the opinion expressed by anonymous Finextra Member's comments. Although I belong to the minority, it appears that an overwhelming majority of over 90% of people don't check their credit card statements, at least not regularly or thoroughly enough to spot fake charges. Technology can help, though: A more practical alternative, at least for US residents, is a website like BillGuard.com, to whose CEO, btw, I should give credit for the above statistics. 

@Finextra M & John D: Thank you for your comments.

@Finextra M: With vested interest egging them on, we can be sure that banks will go the distance to make this product work perfectly (like BANK2 in my example already seems to be doing)!

@John D: From your comments, it appears that SMS alerts have not become the norm even for checking account, let alone credit card, transactions. (I always thought only the latter was new). If so, it's definitely high time they did. Many banks in India, including the BANK2 cited in my post, have been providing SMS alerts for checking account transactions for over 4-5 years, including condition based ones that you've described. Most of these products, including the one from BANK2, are free-of-cost. I also remember one of my UK bank accounts launching such a product around 2-3 years ago, albeit for a nominal fee.          

Certainly a "cool app", one that will help banks put one more tick in their 'social media strategy' box. However, by adding fuzzy check-in data sourced from social networks to already fuzzy fraud detection algorithms, won't the "false positive" rate shoot up? Realtime 2-way SMS alerts at the point of sale might mitigate this risk more reliably.    

Goes to show that the channel journey is not so unidirectional after all and how all predictions of the death of the branch are so out of touch with ground reality. I recently gave up on mobile payments when friction jumped up severely after 2FA was made mandatory. Lately, the number of hoops I have to jump to make an ePayment is almost pushing me over the brink to go back to the convenience of checks. Not that I look forward to the day, but greater security risks impacting Internet Banking could well multiply friction by way of mitigating solutions so much that I go back to branches some day.

Algorithmic trading is generally used for proprietary trading. Where the securities firm is executing buy and sell orders on behalf of customers - in a business that constitutes a majority of trading flows today - I am not sure how this will pan out: Will robots talk to human beings on the other end of the phone? Or, is there a similar prediction that robots will take over from humans at pension funds, municipalities and other investing firms ('clients')? 

I wouldn't bet my last dollar on that - historically, there seems to be a strong preference for addressing symptoms rather than eliminating root causes. 

As a provider of a business card QR code solution, we find that the use of QR codes by advertisers is on the rise sharply but their adoption by consumers is still quite weak. Like @Finextra Member, we also notice that the need for downloading and installing a QR Code Reader App on mobile phones is a major barrier for adoption. We've seen adoption improve when the QR code clearly describes what to expect by scanning it as well as links to landing pages, special offers and discount coupons rather than to the homepage of websites, most of whose URLs can be typed in relatively easily into a mobile browser. 

One of the largest cyberfrauds in the USA - the so-called Onwuhara HELOC Fraud - was apparently solved after a massive investigation that was launched when the fraudsters had unwittingly plied their trade on one Robert "Duke" Short, a former U.S. Treasury agent and Treasury Department's national chief of investigations. Reporting on the story, this FORTUNE article commented, "He was ... the wrong man to hit".

Hopefully, these skimmers might similarly realize that Jenny Durkan "was the wrong woman to hit".

It's so ironical that these fraudsters steal someone's identity but don't really "get" who that somone is!