AWS Head of Payments: Fraud, Credit Decisioning Drive Move To The Cloud
PYMNTS, 15 June 2021
In an interview with PYMNTS, Mark Smith, head of payments for financial services at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said that “COVID has changed the conversation we’ve been having with payment customers, and it’s accelerated the trends we’ve been seeing over the past few years.”
Much of that changing conversation has to do with a pivot in consumer behavior, he said, which has spurred AWS’ own customers to migrate to cloud applications. “We all recognize that payments transactions are ‘bursty,’” Smith told PYMNTS. “We see a lot of this during the holidays and with seasonal shifts. But we weren’t ready for this kind of panic-buying, all done online.” One reason is to enhance card processing, as firms on the merchant processing side — which are focused on eCommerce — need to scale up and down as necessary based on those aforementioned shifts in consumer behavior, and as more transactions move online.
AWS, in another tailwind accelerating enterprises to the cloud, has encountered concerns from clients about preventing fraudsters from capitalizing on volume trends toward card-not-present transactions, he said.
The cloud is also helping to transform credit decisioning amid some of the financial hardships wrought by the pandemic. Many of the ways that AWS customers are using data to lend and to make credit decisions must adapt to the fact that pandemic-related financial hardships might not be a clear indicator of future creditworthiness
