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.
Regardless of Brexit, or the speed of adoption of PSD2, or the success of the challenger banks, or indeed the involvement of third parties, our Onescan solution provides the basis for consumers, retailers, and all the other players in the payments field to securely and speedily authorise transactions.
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.
Industry standards are a good thing – there’s very little argument against their existence or their purpose. They help markets to coalesce around some best practices, and they can help deliver economies of scale as well as drive actual market scale. But if you sense a ‘but’ coming along in this train of thought, you would be at least partly right.
