Patent No. 8229853. 2012.
Real-time fraud prevention.
This patented system stops fraudulent credit and debit card purchases before they happen. The locations of the purchases must match what you have indicated in your travel itineraries, and if they don’t, the system will recognize that something’s up and stop the transaction before you fund someone’s extravagant designer-handbag shopping spree.
We’re heading for a world with more smartphones than bank accounts – Quartz
Bank accounts are out, smartphones are in. In 2011, some 2.5 billion people in the world were “unbanked” (pdf), as the lingo goes, according to the World Bank. By 2016, more people will have bank accounts, but in regions like the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, even more will have smartphones, research and consulting firm Analysys Mason predicts in a report today.
10 Companies Chasing Innovations That Really Matter | Wired.com
In much of the developing world, credit and debit cards have never caught on, since the telecom networks needed to support their use doesn’t exist. In those same places, however, mobile phone use has exploded. In a phenomenon known as “leapfrogging,” the wires needed to power traditional card-based transactions might never get installed, since everyone will just use their phones instead.
In Kenya, mobile operator Safaricom has developed M-PESA, a way to transfer money and make microloans using text messages — no bank account required. Unlike in, say, the U.S., mobile payments have taken off in Kenya thanks to M-PESA, with millions of users. The company is working on rolling out the service to other countries where a lack of financial and technological infrastructure could cease to be a barrier to joining the 21st-century economy.
Photo: Sipa via AP Images
Crowdfunding Clean Energy - NYTimes.com
In January, a company called Mosaic, made a splash in the renewable energy world when it introduced a crowd-funding platform that makes it possible for small, non-accredited investors to earn interest financing clean energy projects. When Mosaic posted its first four investments online – solar projects offering 4.5 percent returns to investors who could participate with loans as small as $25 — the company’s co-founder, Billy Parish, thought it would take a month to raise the $313,000 required. Within 24 hours, 435 people had invested and the projects were sold out. The company had spent just $1,000 on marketing. All told, Mosaic has raised $1.1 million for a dozen solar projects to date. Now it is connecting with other solar developers to identify new projects for financing. More than 10,000 people have already signed on and are standing by to invest.
I recently read an excellent article, 2012: The Year in Payments - A Look Back At The News And The Noise In Payments by Karen Webster, CEO of Market Platform Dynamics and founder of PYMNTS.com. In the article, Webster reviews some of the major developments in digital payments over the last year, and gives her opinion of what is likely to happen in 2013 and beyond. Beyond her detailed reviews and predictions, the article is a very well written overview of the evolution toward a digital money economy, including the major advances already underway as well as the huge challenges that still lie ahead.
For several years now I’ve been convinced that the development of a global digital money ecosystem is among the most exciting and important societal challenges in the coming decades. It’s right up there, in my opinion, with other technology-based transformational innovations, including electricity, the telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet and World Wide Web.
Where are we in digital payments? Webster believes that 2012 will be viewed in the payments history books as a very good year. “Payments innovation fueled by the IP-enablement of devices used by consumers and merchants to interact drove payments innovation into high gear. Players large and small flooded the market with new applications, new business models, and new approaches to transforming the shopping experience.”
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Forget The Register: Stores Use Mobile To Make Sales On The Spot : All Tech Considered : NPR
A Nordstrom salesperson shows a customer an online selection of shoes on an in-store iPad. Like some other retailers, Nordstrom is using mobile devices to make on-the-spot sales and check companywide product inventory instantly.
How 3 Big Enterprises Are Building Their Own Internal iPad Apps
The heavy influx of iPads into large enterprise organizations is posing new kinds of challenges for IT departments, particiularly around developing and distributing corporate apps. At the annual Gartner Catalyst conference this week in San Diego, top companies like Genentech, Eli Lily and Northern Trust Bank shared some of the secrets behind their impressive app portfoliios.
How do you grow your internal mobile app portfolio to 112 different apps over time? Paul Lanzi, the mobile apps team manager for Genetech/Roche, likes to give his apps cute names, such as “Peeps” for the corporate personnel directory and “Kudos” for employee rewards.
A social lending service, SoFi, brings together students and alumni who are interested in providing loans. Via Mashable
IBM reports that the company is putting Watson to work: “Watson’s cognitive capabilities were designed to take on the real-world challenges of Big Data across a range of industries. From the outset, the aim was to put Watson to work first in healthcare and finance. Both industries confront deluges of unstructured data every day, and both industries have a compelling need to act on information quickly… While the Jeopardy! challenge demonstrated Watson’s ability to provide a single correct answer with confidence, IBM envisions the underlying technology moving toward a broader range of applications and industries to provide evidence-based decision support over large volumes of variable content.”
It continues, “Watson’s goal is to consider not simply queries but entire problem scenarios, to engage interactively to improve the accuracy of its answers and to present explanations that support its output. While healthcare is the first industry Watson has been put to use in, the technology will be adapted and made scalable for other domains such as tech support and contact centers. Watson’s architecture will be advanced to handle real-world challenges found in several business domains, where it will undergo training and a continuous learning process, enabling it to bring value to the enterprise while continuing to get smarter over time.”
Using LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings increases revenue generated by bank branches even when they offer the same products and services, according to a new study co-authored by University of Notre Dame management professors Edward Conlon and Ante Glavas.
Manish Parashar
Professor of electrical and computer engineering
Rutgers University
For years, universities have worked with businesses to produce joint research and educational programs. But these days there’s a new imperative: we must create collaborations aimed at producing economic development and jobs. At Rutgers, we see these sorts of public-private partnerships not only as a tremendous opportunity for our students and faculty, but as critical resource for New Jersey.
Rutgers announced just such and effort today at a small celebration on the university’s Busch Campus in Piscataway. We’re working with IBM to create a new high-performance computing center, Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2), focused on the application of “Big Data” analytics in life sciences, finance, and other industries. The goal is to improve the economic competitiveness of New Jersey’s public and private research institutions.
The centerpiece is a IBM Blue Gene®/P supercomputer that we’ve named “Excalibur,” playing off our sports mascot, the Scarlet Knight. In addition to gaining access to the hardware and an impressive array of software and technical support, Rutgers faculty members and graduate students and technical people from New Jersey companies will be able to work with IBM scientists and engineers on joint research projects.
IBM has unveiled three packages of services and software to help organizations analyze their data for profit and improved efficiency.
The signature solutions, as IBM calls these offerings, go beyond generic analysis software to address three different specific tasks: detecting financial fraud, predicting consumer behavior and estimating financial risk.
Category: Businesses
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Visit kiva.org/free To Microlend $1 Million of Reid Hoffman’s Money | TechCrunch
Today you can help someone escape poverty by trying out microlending platform Kiva, and it won’t cost you a dime. Go to kiva.org/free where Reid Hoffman has put up $1 million of his money to let 40,000 people give $25 microloans to help those in need start farms and general stores that can support their families. The Kiva Free Trials program hopes to introduce people to the positive impact of microfinance philanthropy, and get them to lend their own money next time.
It was only a few weeks ago that we covered CivilisedMoney’s crowdsourced banking services, and recently we came across a new effort that brings a similar concept into the realm of credit cards. Earlier this month Barclaycard US introduced the Barclaycard Ring MasterCard, billed as “the first social credit card to be designed and built through the power of community crowdsourcing.” READ MORE…
via springwise:
