A working group set up by seven central banks and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has laid out a set of ground rules for the successful issuance of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)... More
Countries with digitised and innovative economies are more likely to be developing central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects while those with a larger informal economy are tending to focus on creating retail CBDCs, a working paper published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reports... More
The World Economic Forum has released a Policy-Maker Toolkit for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), designed “to help central banks evaluate, design and potentially deploy CBDC”... More
Public transportation users in Hong Kong can now use the NFC functionality in their Android or iOS device to top up their Octopus transit card, view their transaction history, check their balance and collect fare subsidies... More
iPhone users will soon be able to read a full array of ISO 7816 contactless smartcards and tags, including passports, transit and access cards, Apple has revealed... More
The NFC Forum has released a new candidate specification that makes it easy for mobile payments services based on QR codes to add NFC functionality, giving “payment service providers and consumers the opportunity to take advantage of the simple and secure NFC-based payment solutions already in use worldwide.”... More
Visa and payments hardware specialist Planeta Informatica have come up with an easy way to add contactless payments at public transit turnstiles... More
PARTNER NEWS: HID Global is increasing investment in its NFC-based Trusted Tag brand protection service and expanding its network of solution providers around the world... More
Introducing Asylo: an open-source framework for confidential computing — Google — “Asylo is an open-source framework and SDK for developing applications that run in trusted execution environments (TEEs)… Previously, developing and running applications in a TEE required specialized knowledge and tools. In addition, implementations have been tied to specific hardware environments. Asylo makes TEEs much more broadly accessible to the developer community, across a range of hardware — both on-premises and in the cloud.”
Native support for iris scanners is finally coming to Android — XDA Developers — “The inclusion of a HAL interface will standardize how the Android framework will communicate with iris scanners… The inclusion of the base iris feature in Android will allow for apps to detect if the device has an iris scanner in place… The inclusion of the iris framework is what will actually allow for third-party apps to utilize the iris scanner for authentication.”
PARTNER NEWS: 2018 will see the emergence of omnichannel tokenization, a wealth of new payment use-cases such as connected cars, and the rise of ‘merchant pay’ — retailer issued mobile wallets — according to Rambus... More
An on-device deep neural network for face detection — Apple — “Apple started using deep learning for face detection in iOS 10. With the release of the Vision framework, developers can now use this technology and many other computer vision algorithms in their apps. We faced significant challenges in developing the framework so that we could preserve user privacy and run efficiently on-device. This article discusses these challenges and describes the face detection algorithm.”
EMVCo launches EMV secure remote commerce technical framework — EMVCo — “EMV SRC will address the complexities and potential vulnerabilities within the remote payments environment by defining a consistent approach to enable the secure transmission and interaction of payment card data among participants. This helps reduce exposure to data compromise and simplify merchant support of these solutions.”
Facebook joins the Visa Digital Enablement Program — Visa — “Visa today announced that Facebook has joined the Visa Digital Enablement Program (VDEP), which offers a commercial framework to make it easier for partners to access Visa’s token services and other digital capabilities globally. Facebook will use the Visa Token Service to help accelerate the availability of secure, payment-enabled services through its digital properties.”
Nacha’s API Standardization Industry Group names first five APIs to develop to support payments industry advancement — Nacha — “The API Standardization Industry Group, formally created in spring 2017, is working to further efforts to standardize the use of APIs in the US financial services industry by creating an ‘API playbook’ or standards framework. In support of that effort, during its most recent meeting, the API Standardization Industry Group named the first five APIs — from a larger list of 16 — that it will develop to support payments industry advancement.”
Payments standards body EMVCo has updated its Payment Tokenisation Technical Framework to introduce the new roles of ‘token programme’ and ‘token user’, refine the roles of ‘token service provider’ and ‘token requestor’ and detail “their interrelationships within the global payments environment.”... More
Payments standards body EMVCo has added a specification for QR code payments in merchant-presented mode, following on from a spec for QR code payments in consumer-presented mode that it released in mid-July... More
Members of the general public who sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program can now download a pre-release edition of iOS 11, the latest version of Apple’s operating system for iPhone and iPad which brings with it support for NFC tag reading... More
The EU Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) is calling on the European Commission to define a policy framework ensuring minimal requirements for the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices along with the development of mandatory staged requirements for security and privacy to give stakeholders a “level playing field” in implementing trust into connected devices and IoT systems. More
New cloud framework for mobile biometrics — The Stack — “Researchers from the IEEE have proposed a high-performance cluster cloud framework to help manage the mountains of data associated with mobile biometric authentication… the team found that using a cloud-based biometric authentication framework, or BAMCloud, helped to achieve network speed performance of over eight times more than alternate methods.”
