Prime Time for Real-Time: Why COVID-19 Will Drive More Global Payments Innovation

ACI recently presented the findings of its global payments report, Prime Time for Real-Time, during a webinar moderated by Finextra’s Head of Research Gary Wright. Katrin Boettger talked to the panellists — Craig Ramsey, head of real-time payments at ACI; Ruth Fornell, executive vice president within ACI’s retail payments group; and Leo Lipis, CEO at Lipis Advisors — about the new study, and why the COVID-19 pandemic might be a further catalyst for the worldwide adoption of real-time payments.

How Central Infrastructures Provide a Foundation for Real-Time Growth

Almost the world over, societies have been steadily trending away from cash over the last decade – a process that has been rapidly accelerated in recent months as the COVID-19 pandemic has restricted movement and social contact.

No Margin for Error: Acquirers Must Now Master the Art of Reinvention [Q&A]

The digital transformation of banking and growing competition within the industry is rapidly changing the world of global acquirers. Long gone are the days when an acquirer’s primary role was simply to facilitate an acceptance ecosystem for credit card payments. As part of its new “Prime Time for Real-Time” report, ACI recently published No Margin for Error, an eBook looking at the changes — and challenges — facing acquirers. I spoke to Ruth Fornell, our executive vice president – consumer payments, about the key insights, why acquirers are being forced to rethink their business models and what the future may hold.

Billing and Payments in 2020: Ten Best Practices to Drive Digital Adoption and Engagement, Help Customers and Reduce Your Costs

In today’s changing times, both consumers and billers are experiencing more stress in managing bills and payments. Consumers may need to make payment arrangements or adjust how they pay their bills if they no longer can pay in person. Meanwhile, billers are scrambling to adjust to taking calls and receiving payments remotely and securely. ACI Worldwide has focused on meeting changing billing and payment needs since 1975, and we’ve compiled a list of best practices to help billers help their customers manage their bills and payments.

The EMV Deadline Has Been Extended for U.S. Fuel Merchants – Now What?

U.S. fuel stations were originally supposed to be EMV-compliant by October 2017, but due to complications and costs at the time, the deadline for EMV at the pump was extended for three years – and it has now been pushed out further to April 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital Payments: A Creature Comfort in the Era of COVID-19

Humans have an impressive ability to adapt – and have quickly done so in terms of their spending behaviors and choice of payment methods in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns forced many to consider cash alternatives to make payments, driving a huge surge in demand for digital payment services. And in some European countries, demand has risen as much as 81 percent.

Why Human Nature Presents a Challenge for Acquirers

It’s one of the great paradoxes of human behavior: people are predictably unpredictable. We work in irrational ways, hearts win out over heads and the unexpected can rapidly become the norm. Try as we might, predicting the emergence of any new trend is difficult – particularly in unpredictable times – and this is just as true in the world of payments as it is elsewhere.

Taking a Holistic View of ISO 20022 Migration and Payments Modernization in the Pacific

Today’s payments modernization efforts, most notably real-time payments, not only work to satisfy changing consumer preferences and behaviors, they also serve to future-proof national economies throughout the world. But for real-time payments to deliver maximum value, consumers and financial institutions must be able to exchange meaningful and actionable information — hence the development of ISO 20022, a standard for electronic data interchange that facilitates the fast, standardized and secure exchange of financial messages across borders.

Merchant Fraud in the Age of COVID-19: We Need to Prepare Ourselves for a “Tidal Wave” of Attacks

With millions of consumers around the world self-quarantining at home, online shopping for goods, services and entertainment has become the new normal for many. A recent analysis of our own data has shown that average transaction volumes in the retail sector in March rose 74 percent compared to the same period last year.

2020 Fraud Predictions: What to Expect with the Rapidly Evolving Payment Landscape in Latin America

Read this blog post in Portuguese   |   Read this blog post in Spanish The payment industry in Latin America is undergoing diverse change across several segments as the population in the region are increasingly banked and begin their use of electronic payments. Though cash is still the dominant form of payment across the region, governments have driven electronic payments forward through regulation. This has ensured that card payment acceptance and growth has been rising steadily, digital banks have appeared across different countries, and ecommerce has increased significantly.

How ISO 20022 Represents Both a Challenge and an Opportunity for Southeast Asia’s Payments Landscape

Governments across Southeast Asia (SEA) are increasingly recognizing the vital role that payments play in the engines of their economies, which has resulted in a number of payments modernization initiatives such as those in Vietnam and Malaysia (PayNet). Yet there is one particular area in which SEA’s financial institutions might still be lagging behind their global counterparts: the adoption of ISO 20022, which has become the global standard for high-value payments and immediate payments (IP) when it comes to cross-border payments.

Are Chargebacks Making a Comeback for U.S. Fuel Merchants?

With the planned EMV implementation date looming for U.S. fuel merchants, we’ll be spending some time ahead of the deadline looking at the fraud issues affecting fuel merchants and how these might change through the final quarter of this year.