FIS Global On Fraud And The Consumer’s Psyche

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the future and what their ideal payments system looks like.

Here’s what Chris Burfield, Product Marketing Director, ePayments at FIS Global had to say.

Biggest Trends

“Mobilization of payments is certainly a trend,” said Burfield. “If we look at fraud I think the number of breaches is also a trend. But the more important thing is how fraud has gotten into consumers’ psyche. Look at ApplePay’s launch last year, there is something there that resonated in part due to the consumer sentiment around fraud.” Burfield also added, “the other one I would call out is there has been lots of progress on real-time payments. That’s an exciting trend, something FIS is very actively pursuing and something that will significant impact on change moving forward.”

Preparing for 2016 and beyond

“Unfortunately some of those trends continue with respect to fraud,” says Burfield. “As an industry we’ve got to continue to keep that front and center in the development of payment solutions. And then real-time as well I think. As you do real-time transactions you have less recovery time on these things.”

He goes on to point out opportunities in emerging mobile wallet capabilities, “a lot of focus on wallet is POS, but there are a whole slew of other transactions that create opportunities and we have areas with challenges. Historically ACH has been a compelling payments solution, but also has challenges with negative confirmation and not offering real-time confirmation, so there’s issues there. And I think by moving toward real-time we start to bring some different capabilities so you can have things like P2P. It’s a simple example, but being able to move money in real-time is compelling.”

When asked about EMV and it’s efficacy Burfield comments, “EMV will not be an an end-all-be-all, a panacea. We’ll continue to see challenges. But the question will be: where do we see fraud continue to move? I think we’ll see a natural increase in card not present fraud.”

Ideal Payments Solution

“It should be real-time, definitive and secure,” says Burfield. “Maybe the most important thing from my perspective is that the ideal system is encouraging and embracing innovation.” Burfield continues, “some of the payments systems out there today have evolved for certain reasons to solve certain problems. In some of those situations we end up creating challenges with respect to the economics. So it’s important to make sure the parties who bring value to the transaction are being compensated for that value. Part of what we’ve done with Paynad as a pattern is make sure that institutions get compensated for opening up their accounts to the network.”
Adding a final thought about innovation, Burfield remarks, “we can solve some of the problems with the systems that are out there today, but keeping it open enough that you can have parties come from outside. I think innovations not only going to come from fintech, but from other innovators outside the industry. At the end of the day we need to embrace and encourage that, but within a payment system that ascribes value to all of the parties involved.”