The Tragedy of Fragmented Expertise: Why Your Fintech Will Fail

And Why Your CTO Probably Won’t See It Coming

Your payment engineers and compliance lawyers are having the same conversation on repeat, and neither understands what the other is saying. Three meetings later, nothing's shipped and you're bleeding money on coordination. This isn't a communication problem, it's structural: payment scheme expertise cannot exist in silos. You need someone who reads regulations and designs compliant auth flows. These people are rare but if you can't hire one, you'll watch specialists talk past each other while velocity collapses and regulators circle. Read on for how to mitigate the damage when integrated expertise isn't an option.

KYC-Integrated Payments: Verifying Identity Without Exposing Data

Every time you show your ID to buy alcohol or prove you're a resident for a discount, you're revealing private info that the merchant to answer their simple yes/no question. Here's a thought: your bank already has this information through KYC processes. What if your payment device could simply confirm these facts during the payment itself without exposing any of your personal details?

The Hidden Complexities of Converting Between SMS and DMS Payment Flows

Converting from Single Message Systems (SMS) to Dual Message Systems (DMS) and back seems deceptively simple, but let's dive in to discover what terrors lie hiding in wait below the calm surface.

Understanding Single vs Dual Message Systems in Payment Processing

Let's look into what exactly the various messages and steps are in payment processsing, and how they differ between Single vs Dual Message Systems as well as the differences between payment networks (e.g., mobile payments vs card networks).

When Non-Personal Data Becomes Personal: A GDPR Deep Dive

You cannot determine the Personally Identifiable Information classification of data (per GDPR) by looking at the data alone. In fact, non-PII data can become PII when provided to third parties which naturally has significant compliance consequences.

PSD2: Dynamic Linking of Pre-Generated Authentication Code

The regulatory language around dynamic linking of authentication codes in remote payments seems to imply that the authentication code must be generated in response to payment creation, but a Q&A clarifies that the authentication code may be created at any stage before the final authorization of the payment transaction by the user.

PSD2: POS Consumer Scans are Still Remote

Whenever a payment is initiated via consumer scan, such as a mobile app scanning a QR code, the payment is considered "remote" according to PSD2 even when the consumer is physically at the merchant's location which is considered a "card present" context for card payments. As a result, certain regulatory considerations come into play, such as dynamic linkin of authorization codes.