The Good, The Bad, The Outsourced ATM

Outsourcing is great, until it isn’t. There are benefits to keeping your ATM platform in-house, and benefits to outsourcing it. Many times I hear colleagues state that outsourcing has worked “wonderfully” on their leased or proprietarily-owned ATMs, because it “reduced headaches”, cut down on staff resources, and reduced internal work on initiatives such as ADA

Payments, ATMs, Cards: Five Things I Know I Don’t Know…Sorta

[Originally published on LinkedIn November 4th, 2014] 1. ‘Will EMV at ATMs be ‘ready’ in the United States before the liability deadlines?’ Maybe. The domestic liability shifts (remember that the liability shift for inter-regional Maestro ATM transactions actually went into effect on April 19, 2014) for MasterCard are scheduled for October 2016. Visa’s liability shift

I’m No Apple Chearleader…but MCX Can Take a Hike

[Originally published on LinkedIn on October 30th, 2014] As someone working in the FI industry, it’s definitely been a busy few years, and a hurricane two months. Within the span of 14 days the Home Depot breach erupted, I was in DC for the Mobile & ATM 2014 Summit, ApplePay was announced, I presented PCI-DSS/ATM/PTS

Digital Education: Learning to Fly or Jump, Before You’re at 30k Feet

It’s been less than six months since Walmart in our area flipped the switch for EMV credit cards, and so far I am unimpressed with how they’ve handled it: [WM Cashier] “That’ll be $xx ma’am/sir, go ahead and swipe your card.” [Customer does so] [WM Cashier sees the ‘alert’ on terminal screen and franticly grabs

Rapid Payments Changes, But To Where?

The old saying goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The band YES [I know….I just dated myself] famously sang, “Change changing places.” Another anonymous intellectual once said, “The only thing we can count on is change.” Flying home from a long two weeks of work travel and wondering to myself

Payments Future: Dealing With a Growing Threat

Bouncing from one conference to another the past week, first in DC and then in San Antonio…and I am still reading through my notes, and reminiscing about all the buzz around payments at the 2014 ATM&Mobile Summit, as well as the 2014 TAG National Conference with Diebold. If you get to go next year, I

Durbin…the myth of lower costs to consumers continues, and still we wait

Since the original smoldering of the 2008/2009 financial implosion gave fuel to the Dodd-Frank movement, the whispers of a grand attack on processing interchange were heard, and culminated in the infamous Durbin Amendment. A short sighted, reactionary, and fear mongering attack propelled by bad data, a sense of ‘financial unfairness’, angst towards the financial sector,