PYMNTS – Financial Treason & Crime

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. Continue reading “Article: AWS Head of Payments: Fraud, Credit Decisioning Drive Move To The Cloud”

05/03/202105/03/2021

Article: The Evolving Face Of The Fight Against Fraud

Article - Media, Publications

The Evolving Face Of The Fight Against Fraud

PYMNTS, 03 May 2021

Fighting fraudsters is a problematic realm in the digital era because fraud stubbornly refuses to be a static target.

Instead, digital fraud is an ever-evolving and improving field of endeavor that is always readying for its next evolution. It looks for its next entry point and adopts the latest technology or methodology to make getting the job done — and making off with ill-gotten data or funds — easier to do from the inside and harder to detect from the outside. Continue reading “Article: The Evolving Face Of The Fight Against Fraud”

04/13/202104/13/2021

Article: The Number One Threat To Global Finance? Cyber Attacks

Article - Media, Publications

The Number One Threat To Global Finance? Cyber Attacks

PYMNTS, 13 April 2021

Cyberattacks are the greatest threat to the world’s financial system, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in an interview with CBS News this week. Speaking to “60 Minutes” on Sunday (April 11), Powell said the risks posed by cybercriminals are greater than the lending and liquidity troubles that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

“There are scenarios in which a large financial institution would lose the ability to track the payments that it’s making, where you would have a part of the financial system come to a halt, or perhaps even a broad part,” he said. “And so, we spend so much time and energy and money guarding against these things. There are cyberattacks every day on all major institutions now. That’s a big part of the threat picture in today’s world.” Continue reading “Article: The Number One Threat To Global Finance? Cyber Attacks”