Billed as “the only conference in the U.S. designed exclusively for payments professionals,” BAI Payments Connect offers summits on Payments Innovation, Payments Fraud, Payments Strategy and Payments Operations. Early sessions were focused on common themes in the marketplace including:
• Data breaches – Everyone is talking about the recent retail breaches that have hit the headlines (and even a few less high profile breaches) and trying to figure out what can be done to avoid these types of events in the future. While fraud monitoring is part of the post event process, it’s not the panacea for securing the vulnerable servers and systems which get compromised. EMV is also being discussed more openly and appears to have new life as the industry wakes up to breaches in this market.
• Real-time payments – Lagging behind many of its global counterparts, the US payments infrastructure is mired in legacy systems and processes. There is limited consensus around how to move to a real-time environment but everyone agrees something needs to change. (stay tuned for Wednesday, March 12).
• Authentication – Dual-factor authentication has had its time in the sun, but the fraudsters have figured it out. The industry needs more creative ways (multi-factor authentication and biometrics) to deliver high-tech, low touch ways of validating customer credentials.
• Big data – Financial institutions are sitting on tons of customer account and transactional data. While everyone is throwing around the term “big data” most haven’t figured out how to manage the information that is generated or use it to their best advantage. The good news is, many want to understand it better.
The Expo Hall on the first day was alive with members of the payments and fraud communities talking honestly about solutions and approaches and sharing ideas on business and innovation. The themes mentioned above certainly were part of the conversations at the ACI booth.
ACI’s Mike Braatz, SVP & Product Line Manager, Payments Risk Management and Dan Heimann, Solutions Consultant will be speaking this week on Big Data and EMV & Fraud, respectively. There are several days remaining in the event, but overall I’d say things are looking UP for the payments industry at BAI Payments 2014.
Payments hub 
