In article <20200726104908.gb31...@rafa.eu.org> you write: >I live in Poland. Yes, I have heard that American banking industry is now a >bit "backwards" when it comes to technology. It is probably due to fact that >it developed in this form for many years, and so there is quite a big >resistance against introducing any changes.
Partly that but mostly it's that there are over 4,000 banks in the US (down from 12,000 in 1990) with a long tail of unsophisticated small banks and it is hard to get them all to change anything, which is why we still mail each other paper cheques to pay many of our bills. The government is building a real-time payment service called FedNow which with luck will be running in 2024. >Ever heard of BLIK? https://blikmobile.pl/en/ I'm not a fan of smartphones >and in fact I don't have one at all, but I understand that this is a >completely new service that - to my knowledge - operates currently only in >Poland. We have a variety of phone payment apps. Venmo and Square are popular for person-to-person payments, Google Pay and Apple Pay for payments in stores. They work because there are only two lsrage credit/debit payment networks (Visa, Mastercard) and one bank payment network called ACH, so the payment apps use those. Returning to e-mail, most of the mail that our banks send is in fact sent by a handful of back end service bureaus. My medium sized local bank's notices come from Jack Henry Associates and my large bank's (HSBC) come from Fiserv. This makes it a lot harder to get authentication right. Their mail security is comically bad, e.g., mail saying there's a dubious charge on your HSBC credit card with two buttons to push if it's real or fake. The links go to Fiserv. I know it's real because I know Fiserv is their service bureau, but it just screams PHISH! PHISH! PHISH! I've talked to HSBC security people I've met at conferences who sigh and tell me that their American colleagues are not good listeners. R's, John _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
