Humboldt On Biometrics And Online Fraud Mitigation

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 Adam McDonald, President of Humboldt Merchant Services, had to say.

PYMNTS: What were the biggest trends of 2015?

AM: I’m a big advocate, and have been for the last three or four years, of biometrics — primarily fingerprint technology. I think it’s probably the most poised for user adoption, obviously adoption in any industry but payments is a huge, huge issue.

With Apple having such a large market share in mobile, people are getting used to pushing their finger. The thing about retina scanning, I think, is that it’s super invasive, and I think it’s very prohibitive to user adoption. In certain cases, I think you would see it, but in your day-to-day scenario, you’re not going to be seeing people scanning each other’s eyes.

PYMNTS: What are your predictions for 2016?

AM: For us in the card-not-present world, I think a lot of the EMV will be more toward fraud mitigation. You’ll see a lot of fraud go online, which is one of the big reasons we pushed so hard for the acquisition of our gateway, which is called Argus, at the end of last year. The fraud mitigation tools that are tied into it and the negative databases are going to be imperative for any card-not-present merchant to be able to mitigate the shift in fraud.

PYMNTS: In a perfect world, what does the ideal payment system look like?

AM: I think there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. I think that there’s a great solution for a restaurant, a great solution for a dry cleaner, a great solution for a digital goods, eCommerce merchant — the one common denominator is just the simplification of actually getting a good purchased.

A great example is that one of the barriers to EMV is that you’re hearing a lot of retail merchants talking about how it’s slowing down the time it takes for the transaction — it’s slowing down the time at the point of sale. So the ideal payments infrastructure is as frictionless as possible.