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.
Around the world the number of people using QR code technology is rising exponentially. A rise initially triggered by the global pandemic has continued unabated. In America alone, the first year of the pandemic saw a 25 per cent rise in QR code usage to more than 65m users. That became 75m last year, will be 83m this year, and be touching 100m by 2025.
The average amount being withdrawn from a cash machine per visit had climbed to £80. However, closer reading of the article also showed that the number of visits per month had declined by 40 per cent and the total being withdrawn had fallen by a staggering £100m per day compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
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.
In a zero-trust environment, everyone and everything has to prove who or what it is when making a request of the network. It makes no difference whether that request is coming from outside of the network, or from someone on the inside – or at least someone appearing to be on the inside. Each request needs to be verified, authenticated, and tested before it can be trusted.
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.
Social distancing – it’s phrase that few of us would have used little more than one month ago, but one which has now entered the social lexicon in different countries and different languages all around the world. But as well as changing language and behaviour, the Covid-19 Coronavirus crisis has also changed business and the way we trade.
We are living through unparalleled times. The COVID 19 pandemic is causing worldwide disruption on a scale that few thought possible – stocks and shares in free-fall, restrictions on travel, on socialising, entertainment, on sport. There’s panic buying in the shops and online grocery sales are booming even as retailers struggle to manage the demand.
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.
Think of us as Amazon 1-click meets Braintree for interaction. We rapidly and seamlessly connect any and all systems required in your multichannel consumer journeys. This delivers a brilliant customer experience, with invisible world-class security and PCI Level 1 & PSD2 compliance if payments are needed.
