Back in February of this year, when the threat of COVID was becoming a global cause for concern, we posed the question on this site about whether 2020 would be the year of the QR code.
There’s a counter on the homepage of the GSMA’s website which tells you that today, there are some 5.1 billion unique mobile subscribers in the world. Elsewhere in its pages you can see that there are now more than one billion registered mobile money accounts – that’s one in five of the world’s mobile subscribers.
This month’s Wired magazine has refreshed its opinion of the QR code from marketing gimmick to everyday essential.
Payments consultancy CMSPI believes the looming deadline in Europe for retailers to comply with the regulations around Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for online sales could cause further damage to an industry already suffering from the effects of severely reduced in-store footfall.
The modern mobile industry is only a little over 30 years old – the mobile money market barely a decade. Yet the power of that mobile device to change habits and revolutionise the way we live is both breathtaking and undiminished. The GSMA released a report this month that showed there are now more than one billion mobile money accounts active in the world.
It’s an unwritten rule of a successful technology – someone, somewhere, will try to corrupt it for their own purposes. QR code technology is closing in on 30 years of usage, but the Covid-19 pandemic has turned the technology from niche markets to mainstream consumer use and that inevitably attracts interest from the fraudsters.
All across the world, businesses that rely on getting people through the door – be it restaurants, theatres, art galleries, or hotels – have been keeping their doors closed during lockdown. And while retail outlets could try to keep the revenue flowing by pushing their online sales even harder, for others that option either did not exist or could not be expected to get even close to bridging the gap.
But you definitely can (SCA) with Onescan
The European Banking Authority (EBA) has published a new opinion on the Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) regulations scheduled to come into force this September. In a view that has caught many by surprise, the EBA says that those approaches that simply rely on One Time Passcodes (OTPs) sent by SMS do not actually comply with the new rules.
