Payments will be backed by a customer’s credit or debit card, the company said.

CVS Pay is currently available in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware; a nationwide rollout at all 9,600 stores is expected to kick off later this year.

CVS doesn’t support Apple Pay or other NFC-based payment technologies, and its use of barcodes for payments is reminiscent of the way Starbucks customers pay for coffee. Working with the barcode technology was a faster way for CVS to bring forward technology for more convenient in-store payments, analysts said.

Other retailers have created in-store payments through their own apps. Walmart created Walmart Pay in December to allow payments through mobile device QR codes that can be read at checkout registers.

“There’s nothing really innovative here with CVS Pay,” said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan on Friday. “They are pretty much following the trend. It’s just mobile commerce with a credit card attached. It’s no big deal to put a credit card in a wallet.”

At one point, CVS was working with Walmart and dozens of other major retailers in the Merchant Customer Exchange, which was designed to process mobile payments electronically through bank accounts and not credit cards to cut out the card processing cost that merchants paid to banks. But MCX ended its pilot of its mobile app, CurrentC, in June. Analysts have predicted the concept will not continue.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/cvs-debuts-cvs-pay.html

The service is available in six countries and among a limited range of banks, though in recent weeks Apple has added four banks to its sole Singapore partner American Express; Australia and New Zealand Banking Group in Australia; and Canada’s five big banks.

Apple Pay usage totaled $10.9 billion last year, the vast majority of that in the United States. That is less than the annual volume of transactions in Kenya, a mobile payments pioneer, according to research firm Timetric.

And its global turnover is a drop in the bucket in China, where Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent dominate the world’s biggest mobile payments market – with an estimated $1 trillion worth of mobile transactions last year, according to iResearch data.

Anecdotal evidence from Britain, China and Australia suggests Apple Pay is popular with core Apple followers, but the quality of service, and interest in it, varies significantly.

To use Apple Pay, consumers tap their iPhone over payment terminals to buy coffee, train tickets and other services. It can be also used at vending machines that accept contactless payments.

Apple Pay transactions were a fraction of the $84.5 billion in iPhone sales for the six months to March, which accounted for two-thirds of Apple’s total revenue.

Apple has leveraged its huge U.S. user base to push Pay, but has met resistance in Australia, Britain and Canada where banks are building their own products.

“Payments in general is such a complicated system with so many incumbent providers that revolutionary change like this was not going to happen very quickly,” said Joshua Gilbert, an analyst at First Annapolis Consulting.

The upshot: Apple has rolled out Pay in a dribble, adding countries and partners where it can – Hong Kong is expected to be added next – resulting in an uneven banking landscape with users and retail staff not always sure what will work and how.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/apple-pay-struggling-to-gain-traction-outside-u-s.html

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)’s chief executive, Gottfried Leibbrandt, told a financial services conference in Brussels that SWIFT will launch a five-point plan later this week.

Banks send payment instructions to one another via SWIFT messages. In February, thieves hacked into the SWIFT system of the Bangladesh central bank, sending messages to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York allowing them to steal $81 million.

The attack follows a similar but little-noticed theft from Banco del Austro in Ecuador last year that netted thieves more than $12 million, and a previously undisclosed attack on Vietnam’s Tien Phong Bank that was not successful.

The crimes have dented the banking industry’s faith in SWIFT, a Belgium-based co-operative owned by its users.

The Bangladesh Bank hack was a “watershed event for the banking industry”, Leibbrandt said.

“There will be a before and an after Bangladesh. The Bangladesh fraud is not an isolated incident … this is a big deal. And it gets to the heart of banking.”

SWIFT wants banks to “drastically” improve information sharing, to toughen up security procedures around SWIFT and to increase their use of software that could spot fraudulent payments.

SWIFT will also provide tighter guidelines that auditors and regulators can use to assess whether banks’ SWIFT security procedures are good enough.

Leibbrandt again defended SWIFT’s role, saying the hacks happened primarily because of failures at users. “Many of the less protected banks are in countries were skills are really scarce,” he said, pointing the finger at providers of services to banks.

“We will have to create an ecosystem of providers and partners, for example by introducing certification requirements for third-party providers,” he said.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/uncategorized/swift-to-implement-new-security-program-after-recent-hacking.html

The embedded Web server in the Cisco Cable Modem with Digital Voice models DPC2203 and EPC2203 contains a buffer overflow vulnerability that can be exploited remotely without authentication.  Apparently all you need to do is send a crafted HTTP requests to the Web server and you could see some arbitrary code execution.

Cisco said that its customers should contact their service providers to ensure that the software version installed on their devices includes the patch for this issue.

The Web-based administration interfaces of the Cisco DPC3941 Wireless Residential Gateway with Digital Voice and Cisco DPC3939B Wireless Residential Voice Gateway are affected by a vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure. An unauthenticated, remote attacker could exploit the flaw by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to an affected device in order to obtain sensitive information from it.

The Cisco Model DPQ3925 8×4 DOCSIS 3.0 Wireless Residential Gateway with EDVA is affected by a separate vulnerability, also triggered by malicious HTTP requests, that could lead to a denial-of-service attack.

Hackers have been hitting modems, routers and other gateway devices, hard lately – especially those distributed by ISPs to their customers. By compromising such devices, attackers can snoop on, hijack or disrupt network traffic or can attack other devices inside local networks.

Courtesy-Fud

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research said that Quantum computing is “stupendously exciting right now.”

Apparently it is Microsoft Research’s largest area of investment and Lee is pretty certain it is on the verge of some major scientific achievements.

“There’s just hope and optimism those scientific achievements will lead to practical outcomes. It’s hard to know when and where,” Lee said.

This is the first we have heard about Redmond’s quantum ambitions for a while. In 2014 the company revealed its “Station Q” group located on the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus, which has focused on quantum computing since its establishment a decade ago.

We sort of assumed that Microsoft would not get much work done on Quantum states because faced with a choice most cats would rather die in a box rather than listen to Steve Ballmer. But we guess with a more cat friendly CEO it is moving ahead.

Lee said that he has explained quantum computing research to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella by comparing it with speech processing. In that field, Microsoft researchers worked “so hard for a decade with no practical improvement,” he said. Then deep learning brought about considerable leaps forward in speech recognition and Microsoft was in on the ground floor.

“With quantum, we’ve made just gigantic advancements making semiconductor interfacing, allowing semiconductor materials to operate as though they were superconducting. What that means is the possibility of semiconductors that can operate at extremely high clock rates with very, very little or no heat dissipation. It’s just really spectacular.”

Courtesy-Fud

JP Rangaswami, who joined Deutsche Bank in January as its first-ever chief data officer, said better and cheaper metadata was allowing the bank to analyze previously inaccessible information.

“We are able to see patterns that we could not see beforehand, allowing us to gain insights we couldn’t gain before,” Rangaswami told Reuters in an interview.

Upgrading the technical infrastructure Deutsche Bank needs to get the most out of this data is a priority for Chief Executive John Cryan. He is trying to improve the performance of Germany’s biggest bank, which is struggling to adapt to the tougher climate for banks since the financial crisis.

Cryan, who unveiled a big overhaul at Deutsche on Oct. 29, said at the time that imposing standards on Deutsche’s IT infrastructure was key to improving controls and reducing overheads.

The CEO said in the October presentation that IT design had occurred in silos with the application of little or no common standards. “Our systems are disjointed, cumbersome and far too often just plain incompatible.”

An annual global survey of more than 200 senior bankers published last week by banking software firm Temenos found that “IT Modernization” was now top priority, displacing earlier investment objectives such as regulation and customer friendly mobile apps. IT modernization ranked only fourth among major priorities in the survey last year.

The shift toward technology as a priority shows the extent of the challenge facing banks to modernize infrastructure to analyze internal customer data and try to fend off competition from new financial technology companies.

Rangaswami, who was chief scientist at Silicon Valley marketing software giant Salesforce from 2010 until 2014, said the data would allow Deutsche to tailor services to customers’ needs and to identify bottlenecks and regional implications faster and solve problems more quickly.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/deutsche-bank-taking-a-deeper-dive-into-big-data.html