Just a decade ago, most of us couldn’t fathom leaving home without a wallet or purse. Yet, digital wallets are making this a reality for millions of consumers worldwide, with 60% of eCommerce transactions projected to be done through digital wallets by 2026. But how do digital wallets impact merchants? And what role does CPoI ® play in this new landscape? Digital wallets have gained significant popularity over the past decade, offering a convenient way to pay with something we almost never leave the house with – our phones. They are particularly favoured by the younger Gen Z and Millennial generations, who prefer not to carry a physical card at all and have their wallets linked to their bank accounts and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) accounts. With most retailers accepting wallet payments both in-store and online and as the tech savvy Generations Alpha and Beta come of age, digital wallets adoption is only going to increase.   So how does CPoI ® fit in with digital wallets, and why should consumers and merchants care?   Merchants do not significantly benefit from wallet payments The biggest thing for merchants is that digital wallet payments made online are card-not-present, the same as online payments made by entering card details.  While digital wallets can improve the user’s payment experience by removing some of the friction, for all intents and purposes there is no difference to the merchant. And in the case of some digital wallets that operate their own payment schemes, there may even be additional fees the merchant has to pay on top of the usual transaction processing fees. Merchants do significantly benefit from CPoI® Regardless of whether the consumer is entering their card details or using a digital wallet, CPoI® enables card present payments to be made over the internet. The liability for card present payments sits with the card issuer, which means in the highly unlikely event of a card present transaction being fraudulent, the merchant does not have to refund the cardholder. This responsibility lies with the issuer. Conversely, the liability for traditional card-not-present payments made over the internet by entering card details or via a digital wallet sits with the merchant. This means that if a transaction is deemed fraudulent, the merchant not only must refund the consumer, but they are also out of pocket for the goods or service that will have been delivered. The other benefit of CPoI® is that there is no need for anti-fraud software because the likelihood of a fraudulent card present transaction is incredibly low. Therefore, if you don’t have anti-fraud software, you don’t have false positives . And false positives are ten times more costly to merchants than online payment fraud. Digital wallet security is not impenetrable Digital wallets add a layer of security with biometrics, making it harder for unauthorized users to gain access. However, as with all technology, it’s important for consumers to stay aware of its limitations and take steps to protect their personal information. Fingerprints can be copied and cloned.  Facial recognition can be fooled with deepfake technology and 3D masks.  Iris scans can be tricked using high-quality photos or contact lenses.  In 2015 the US Office of Personnel Management was breached and the personal data of over 21.5 million people, including 5.6 million fingerprints was exposed.   The attackers could have used the stolen data for any number of crimes, including identity theft.  Biometric information is linked to a person’s physical body, so it is permanent. Unlike a PIN, it cannot be changed. Therefore, while digital wallets with biometric security have a degree of security, they can be used fraudulently.   Chip and PIN offer the highest degree of security For consumers, there is no safer way to pay than with Chip (card) and PIN. I cover this in a previous blog  so I’ll just recap here:   The digital certificate in the chips means they cannot be cloned, and unless someone figures out how to read minds, the PIN cannot be stolen. This is what makes Chip and PIN the most enduring and safest way to pay.  We’ve been trusting it for more than two decades and it hasn’t failed us yet. Digital wallets + CPoI ® As digital wallets become more ubiquitous, it's important to understand their benefits and limitations. While they offer unparalleled convenience for consumers, digital wallets still lack the security of card-present transactions like Chip and PIN. And for merchants, adopting CPoI ® could provide the best of both worlds—security, fraud protection, and a smoother payment experience. Reach out to our team if you’d like to know more.

There are a range of industry sectors such as online gaming, gambling, adult entertainment, cryptocurrency, travel and ticketing that are deemed  high-risk  by schemes, financial institutions and payments processors.    But “high-risk” doesn’t necessarily refer to the nature of the business itself. It often has more to do with the financial and regulatory exposure associated with the industry. These sectors are more prone to fraud, chargebacks, or sudden regulatory shifts, making them tougher propositions for traditional payments infrastructure.   What gets a business flagged as high risk? Here are some common factors that can put a business into the high-risk category:  Historical trends: If your business model or industry has historically seen a high level of chargebacks.  Fraud potential:   Selling goods that are easy to resell and therefore pose a higher risk of fraud, such as electronics.  Industry volatility: If fraud and chargebacks are trending up across a sector, businesses in that industry may all inherit that high-risk label.  Regulatory grey areas:   Highly regulated or legally ambiguous sectors are more vulnerable to sudden rule changes.  New or unproven businesses:   If your business is new or in an emerging category, you may be viewed as untested.  High transaction value:   Bigger-ticket items carry greater exposure for chargebacks.  Subscription models:  Recurring billing, especially following free trials, can lead to spikes in chargebacks.  Businesses in high-risk sectors also pay much higher Merchant Services Fees (MSF) – in some cases up to 45%.  And it’s not just industries—some countries are also considered high-risk due to elevated levels of online payment fraud, prompting many global retailers to avoid selling into those markets altogether.  A flawed online payments process If you’ve been following my other articles , you’ll know that the root cause of many of these issues is the very foundation of online payments: card-not-present (CNP) transactions. They inherently leave too much room for fraud and chargebacks.  Two decades ago, the introduction of Chip and PIN revolutionised in-store payments. Thanks to encrypted chips and secure PIN entry, fraud rates for physical retailers plummeted, and remain extremely low today. But fraud didn’t disappear–it simply shifted into online channels.    When ecommerce started to ramp up, instead of replicating the in-store (card-present) process online, fraud-mitigating workarounds such as tokenisation were put into place to protect the Primary Account Number (PAN). Ironically, Chip and PIN doesn’t even require tokenisation–the data is encrypted and never stored.  Had we adopted the same, secure approach for online payments from the beginning, many of the issues around high-risk businesses and fraud exposure wouldn’t exist today.  CPoI® will fix this This brings me to Card Present over Internet– CPoI ®. The world’s first technology that enables card-present payments in online channels.    In short, it’s the way online payments should  have been right from the start.    With CPoI, high-risk online payments will be a thing of the past.  There will be no need to protect the PAN because the transaction is secure by design.  Tokenisation will become obsolete, like fax machines.   And “high-risk” businesses can choose to only accept card-present transactions, thus moving them out of high-risk and away from exorbitantly high MSFs.   And while CPoI ®  is ground-breaking, it’s actually not new. It is tried and testing technology that we’ve been using for decades. Just in a new channel.   Simple. Secure. Scalable. That’s CPoI ® . And it’s exactly what online payments have been missing.  Reach out  to the team today about CPoI ® .

USK, WALES: An historic milestone will be achieved today, Thursday 13th March, where payment executives from around the globe have gathered to witness the world’s first online card-present payment. This groundbreaking advancement brings tap and PIN—the globally familiar, simple, and universally trusted way to pay—into the online world for the first time, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of payment technologies. Known as 'Card-Present over Internet' (CPoI®), this innovative payment solution, developed by Welsh company Burbank , enables merchants to securely process card-present transactions in online channels. “With CPoI®, we are aligning in-store and digital payments. Our goal is to transform e-commerce by significantly reducing fraud and eliminating false positives—issues that have long plagued online sellers”, said Burbank CEO, Justin Pike. “CPoI® will open up internet purchases to all ages and give consumers the highest level of protection when shopping online, whilst revolutionising online commerce for merchants by mitigating fraud, setting a new standard for secure online transactions”, he adds. Currently, online merchants face over $40 billion annually in fraud and chargebacks, which is when a cardholder disputes a transaction and the merchant is obligated to provide a refund. Payment fraud is growing an enormous 69% per year, and chargebacks at 52%. Mr Pike expands, “With CPoI®, online shoppers simply tap their payment card against their own mobile device and securely enter their PIN to complete payment, just as they do in-store. The physical card and PIN confirm the true cardholder’s identity, therefore significantly reducing the opportunity for fraud”. Beyond fraud prevention, CPoI® addresses an even costlier problem for online businesses: false positives, where legitimate transactions are incorrectly flagged as fraud by anti-fraud systems, giving merchants a considerable revenue boost. “These erroneous actions cost merchants $443 billion per year, with 65% of blocked transactions being false positives. Worse still, 41% of affected customers never return to the retailer. With CPoI® enabling card-present payments online, merchants no longer need anti-fraud technology, effectively eliminating false positives and improving the customer experience, whilst costing the merchant nothing to deploy”, says Mr Pike. Online retailers may experience other benefits with CPoI® as it removes barriers to online shopping by enabling consumers to pay online the same way they do in-store. Great news for consumers wary of entering and storing card details online, or who may struggle with convoluted online checkout experiences. By making online payments as seamless and secure as in-store transactions, CPoI® has the potential to drive greater consumer confidence, increase conversion rates, and enhance the overall online shopping experience. As the retail landscape continues to evolve, this breakthrough technology paves the way for a future where fraud is minimised, false positives are eliminated, and shopping online is more accessible than ever. With this historic milestone, Burbank is setting a new global standard for secure and frictionless online commerce.

Burbank has today announced a major strategic partnership with global payments technology provider Transactility (creators of jPOS) to accelerate the adoption of Card Present over Internet (CPoI®) across the banking sector. The partnership will make CPoI® globally available to banks and PSPs, including many of the world’s top financial institutions and fintechs. The agreement will empower financial institutions and payment providers to better serve their merchant customers by making secure, fraud-resistant payment technology quickly and easily accessible globally.  CPoI® enables card-present payments to be accepted in digital environments, tackling a critical challenge in modern payments: reducing fraud and chargebacks and eliminating false positives without compromising the customer experience. With these benefits, merchants can expect to see revenue increases of up to 7%. Furthermore, transitioning card-not-present businesses to the gold standard of card-present transactions will support greater confidence for businesses and consumers across the entire payments chain. “CPoI® is now within reach for nearly every major financial institution in the world,” said Justin Pike , Founder and CEO of Burbank. “This partnership with jPOS marks a major step forward in our mission to help financial institutions, payment providers and merchants access secure, reliable, and revenue-driving technology without the complexity. What makes CPoI® so powerful is that it delivers genuine innovation using the systems and processes banks already have in place. There’s no need for consumer re-education or infrastructure changes. It’s a simple, secure, and scalable way to enable the security of card-present payments in digital channels.” Alejandro Revilla at Transactility, added: “We’re excited that jPOS customers around the world can now seamlessly activate CPoI® through this new partnership with Burbank. Through this partnership, jPOS customers will gain access to CPoI® integration capabilities, enabling financial institutions and merchants to adopt the technology efficiently - and it gives merchants and financial institutions the confidence they need to eliminate fraud and grow faster.”

CARDIFF, WALES: Burbank , a pioneer in next-generation payments technology, has announced its GBP 5 million Series Seed financing to support the launch of its ground-breaking payments platform, Card Present over Internet (CPoI®). The funding round was led by Mouro Capital with participation from Anthemis (supported by Foxe Capital) , Portfolio Ventures and others. These funds will accelerate the global scalability of Burbank's platform. CPoI® redefines two-factor authentication by enabling Card Present Payments (CPP) in online channels. When shopping online, consumers can simply tap their card to their mobile device and securely enter their PIN. Until now, online payments were Card Not Present (CNP) transactions, which have high, and increasing levels of fraud, chargebacks, and false positives. In addition to Burbank’s platform eliminating these challenges faced by online merchants, CPoI® also removes barriers to online shopping by enabling consumers to pay online the same way they do in-store in. Great news for those wary of entering and storing card details online, or who may struggle with convoluted online checkout experiences.   Additionally, Burbank has developed an innovative SoftPOS product and an issuer toolkit. Justin Pike , founder and CEO of Burbank, said, “We are extremely excited to bring this evolution in payments to the world. The payments experience should be the same for everyone, regardless of channel. In-store we pay tap and PIN, which is globally trusted and familiar, and now we’re enabling the same process in online channels. Simple, secure, and scalable. The way it should be.” Manuel Silva Martinez , General Partner at Mouro Capital, explained the investment, stating, “I’m thrilled to support Justin and his team of payments experts. Burbank offers a simple, seamless integration through a single while-label SDK, which securely integrates into existing technology stacks, and supports multiple schemes on iOS and Android. It’s what the market needs.” Ruth Foxe Blader , General Partner at Foxe Capital, added, “CPoI® is the first protocol that legally shifts liability away from the merchant. It’s a massively scalable approach, with global demand.” Burbank’s advanced platform offers unparalleled convenience and robust security, empowering consumer-facing businesses to innovate in customer experience and unlock new revenue opportunities. By combining ease of use with cutting-edge security, Burbank’s technology supports businesses in delivering exceptional and innovative customer interactions that fuel growth and set new standards in the market.

A key topic of conversation lately is the significant consumption of energy used by AI systems and how it has become a significant emitter of CO2. Where a regular Google search uses around 0.3 watt-hours, a single ChatGPT query uses 2.9 watt-hours and training AI models uses about the same amount of power in a year as 130 homes. In short, AI uses a lot of power. And it’s only going to increase. In fact, according to Morgan Stanley , power demand from generative AI is expected to grow by an average of 70% annually by 2027, primarily driven by the expansion of data centres. This is as much power as Spain used in 2022! Furthermore, Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently looked at various AI models to estimate the energy cost required to train them and published their staggering findings. In short, the carbon footprint of training a single large natural language processing (NLP) model is over 272,000 kg of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing. But it’s not just our carbon footprint we need to be aware of when it comes to AI’s impact on the environment. According to the Center for Secure Water (C4SW), the rapid growth of AI is having a significant and serious impact on the world’s water supply . “The data centers required to run large AI models consume vast amounts of power. This significant energy consumption generates large amounts of heat, which in turn requires cooling systems to prevent server overheating. Most common cooling methods (e.g., cooling towers) depend on substantial quantities of clean, fresh water.” There are an estimated 11,000 data centres in the world, each using anywhere between 68,000 and 2.1 million litres of water per day. A large datacentre in the US uses about the same amount of water per day as 4,200 people. And to put this into context, of all the water on earth, only 3% is fresh and 2.5% is locked away in glaciers and polar ice caps, leaving only 0.5% of Earth’s water available to meet our needs. AI integration into payments means a significant energy spike Until recently, payments had not been a drain on energy resources. Traditional card-present terminals are simple to operate and primarily perform basic functions such as reading card data, verifying transactions, and printing receipts, all of which have very low energy demands. But… the acceleration of online purchases, increasing levels of online payment fraud and the subsequent adoption of fraud-mitigating AI systems means payments are now adding to the drain on energy resources. This is largely due to the use of AI. The AI-driven systems used by online merchants for fraud detection operate in a continuous analytical cadence, looking at transaction data using complex machine learning models. This high-frequency, high-volume data processing requires powerful servers and extensive computational resources. And data centres optimised for AI workloads consume vast amounts of electricity – a recent article reported that AI data centres could be consuming 25% of electricity in the US by 2030. The proliferation of AI in payments With the rate of payments fraud increasing year-on-year, the average online retailer now uses up to five AI systems to analyse a range of data to assess the probability of each transaction being fraudulent. This requires a high degree of accuracy, which means more sophisticated algorithms, extensive testing, and constant evolution and fine-tuning of AI models. And all this demands additional computational power – and therefore energy. This additional strain on energy isn’t going away anytime soon, which is why there is study upon study that talk about ways organisations can reduce the amount of energy AI is consuming. Now, for most industries, this is extremely relevant, and important. Because AI has become integral to how they operate and is here to stay. Indeed, Google has just signed the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small reactors in order to support AI technologies with clean energy sources whilst reliably meeting electricity demands with carbon-free energy, around the clock. Now, for payments, there is actually a far simpler, much more energy efficient option – simply, don’t use AI. You’re probably thinking to yourself that this is crazy given the statement I just made about how integral and useful AI has become. But for payments fraud, there actually is technology that solves the problem at its root – it’s called CPoI ® . Solving fraud I have written a number of articles about how AI is costing merchants more than fraud , and the fact that AI is responsible for false positives , which is a massive issue that merchants may not actually be aware of. So, if you’ve already read these articles, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. If you haven’t, here’s a quick summary: While AI enhances fraud detection, it also increases the risk of false positives, which is when legitimate transactions are incorrectly flagged as fraudulent, and therefore blocked. The pressing matter here, is that there’s data from the global payments experts such as Mastercard that suggests the AI is actually blocking a significant amount of legitimate transactions by incorrectly identifying them as fraudulent. And it’s costing merchants $443 billion per year. Burbank’s CPoI®, or Card Present over Internet, is a groundbreaking technology that turns consumer devices into a one-time payment terminal. During the checkout process the customer simply taps their card against their own device and securely enters their PIN, thus creating a card present transaction over the internet.  This offers a range of benefits including significantly less fraud and therefore liability shift (away from the merchant), lower processing fees, and a much faster, easier customer experience. But the best part about CPoI® is that there are zero false positives.  So, if we remove the opportunity for fraud with online payments by changing the majority of them to card-present, then we reduce the need for fraud detecting AI systems, we reduce the impact online payments have on the environment, and we’re doing our part towards helping the world achieve Net Zero. A pretty big win all around if you ask me. So, if you want to know more about CPoI®, reach out to the Burbank team today for a chat and a demo.

When I talk about Burbank’s CPoI ® , one of the questions I am sometimes asked, is Will consumers tap their cards on their phones?     If you think about CPoI® with respect to any new technology, of course there will be a period of settling in; where the innovators and early adopters jump all over it, the more cautious folks watch for a bit before they get on board, and the laggards bring up the rear. The thing that will speed this process up, however, is that the process of CPoI® (Tap and PIN) is not ‘new’. Only the channel is new. Contactless payments have been around since the early 2000s and consumers are as familiar and comfortable with paying this way as they are breathing. In fact, most consumers prefer contactless for its speed and convenience. And even more, they prefer making contactless payments using their mobile phone . So, it’s not a stretch too far to think that if consumers are already au fait with contactless and using their phones to make payments, then the next logical step is using their own device as a payment terminal – tapping their card against their phone.    Don’t just take my word for it, though. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer and innovator of the 1-click checkout also thinks so because it has just started using Visa’s Tap to Pay solution. Now, the team at Amazon would not mess with their incredibly good checkout experience if they thought consumers wouldn’t be ok with it.   But if that’s not enough to satisfy you, let’s go a little deeper into why I think consumers will be happy to tap their phones.  We are more attached to our phones than pretty much anything else The use of smartphones today is virtually limitless – banking, personal assistants, music players, TV and movie hubs, fitness programmes …. Phones can perform an ECG, take temperature, measure atmospheric pressure, navigate anywhere in the world, calculate, suggest, photograph, purchase ….    We are comfortable accessing our banking information on our phones. We are comfortable having private and personal conversations using our phones. We are comfortable storing and sharing our photographs on our phones. We are comfortable loading digital versions of our payment cards onto our phones and making payments with them. All the things in our lives that we want to keep safe and private, we do on our phones.       What I’m getting at here, is that there is an immense amount of trust placed in these devices that we have within arm’s reach almost 100% of the time.  We live in a world of hackers and viruses In December 2013, Target experienced a significant data breach of the credit card details of around 70 million customers. This severely impacted its reputation and the trust customers had. This story isn’t unique. There are nefarious people all around the world constantly attempting to find system vulnerabilities to access credit card information for illegal gains. And these stories make the headlines, which is why there is a tangible sense of unease among consumers when providing card numbers online. Particularly with older generations who did not grow up with the internet and are incredibly wary of technology.    And so, there’s a dichotomy between the growing desire to shop online and the fear of providing credit card details, which underscores the conflict between consumers' pursuit of convenience and their concerns over digital security.  In 2020 Mastercard published a global study about ‘Credential on File’, which looked at the willingness of consumers to have their credit card details stored by online merchants, as well as their concerns – of which 72% agreed or strongly agreed they are concerned about someone stealing their saved card details. One could safely assume that this sentiment has increased as the rate of online payments fraud has accelerated since the report was written.    1 + 1 + 1 = CPoI® If you put all these factors together, you get a pretty compelling case for CPoI® adoption: Consumers love and trust contactless payments Consumers love and trust their phones Consumers have concerns about entering their payment card details online amid a growing landscape of online fraud Overlay these factors with the way people expect to move through the world these days – quickly and seamlessly, and you have the perfect storm for CPoI® – an enabler of the safest and fastest way to pay online, using a process we already know and love, on our own devices.   In my opinion, you don’t get much better than that.    So, if you’re nodding your head to all this and thinking you need to get CPoI® into your online payments experience, perhaps it’s time to give the team at Burbank a shout . We’ll be more than happy to show you a demo of CPoI® in action so you can see for yourself how quick, easy, and safe online payments can be.

Dynamic (or surge) pricing is the automated adjustment of prices according to fluctuations in demand. Typically, the price is increased as demand goes up. Dynamic pricing has been the norm in industries such as travel, accommodation, and ride sharing for some time, and more recently has become a key revenue optimisation tool in sectors such e-commerce, energy, and entertainment.   If you’ve been following my latest articles , you’ll know just how big the global challenge of false positives  has become. And, how false positives are only going to get worse as the use of fraud mitigation AI systems become more deeply integrated into the online payments experience.  So, what does dynamic pricing and false positive have to do with each other? In short, they are the recipe for an absolute disaster of a customer experience. I’ll use an example of buying air travel to explain… False positives are a CX nightmare for the travel sector Booking air travel online can take hours. Searching for flights across multiple booking platforms, comparing fares, aligning times and dates with accommodation - it’s not a 5-minute process. In fact, according to TravelPerk , the average traveller spends over 5-hours consuming online travel content to seek inspiration and plan their trip.   Just imagine you have spent hours online creating the perfect itinerary. All your flights are in your cart, you have the perfect dates, you’re happy with the fare, and you’re all set to pay and confirm your trip. You get to the checkout, enter your card details, and the booking platform rejects your payment. And not because you have insufficient funds – it’s been rejected because the AI the booking platform uses isn’t certain enough that it’s actually you making the booking.  Now, in this scenario, you have two choices – you can get on the phone or a chat bot, wait for some untold length of time to speak to a human and work through the payment. Or, you can go to another booking platform, complete your search and find the flights all over again, and see if they’ll accept your money.  I would hedge my bets that most people would take option two. Now heavily invested in this process, most people just want to get their holiday booked. The issue here is that the person already has their flights in a cart with another booking platform. The airline(s) know this – but what they don’t know is that the same person is now booking yet another itinerary. So, it looks like a surge in demand for these flights. And of course, the cost of the fares is going to increase. The would-be traveller is now having to pay MORE for the same itinerary they just tried, and failed, to book. Through no fault of their own.  Neither scenario is a positive experience. Hours wasted. Much frustration. And undoubtedly, you’re going to tell everyone you know what a terrible experience you had. And all because the AI incorrectly deduced that this was a fraudulent transaction, when in fact it was not. Sizing the problem I’ll go out on a limb here and say that fraud combatting AI could be more of a hindrance than a help in this type of scenario. We know that false positives are caused by AI incorrectly identifying a legitimate transaction as fraudulent, and that this is ten times more costly than online payments fraud, not to mention the significant reputational damage this would cause for the booking platform. With around 80% of consumers booking their travel online and a global travel sector worth $667.55 billion in 2023, this is not a small issue.   The solution is in the way we pay Having just written a page or so on a pretty big problem, I am happy to say that there is a solution to this. And it’s brilliantly simple. Change the way we pay online.  Fraud, false positives, and the terrible customer experience scenario I just outlined could all be solved or significantly minimised if we made online payments more failsafe. I’ll break it down: Online payments are ‘card-not-present’ transactions. That is, there is no categoric way to confirm the person typing in the card details is the card holder. Fraud combatting AI only exists because the rate of card-not-present fraud is increasing exponentially. False positives only exist because the fraud combatting AI often mislabels legitimate transactions. You know where none of these problems exist? In-store, where payments by card are called ‘card present’ because there is  a categoric way to prove the person presenting the card is the cardholder. It’s called a PIN.  So, if we can make online payments card-present payments by having the consumer enter their PIN as part of the online payment process, then we have no need for fraud combatting AI, which means there will be no false positives, far less fraud, and the terrible CX scenario becomes a thing of the past.  Yes, you are right in thinking this sounds too simple. Where’s the catch?  The short answer is that there is no catch outside of having the technology to enable card present payments over the internet. And until recently, it didn’t exist. But it does now. And it’s ready to go.   Card Present over Internet (CPoI®) Burbank’s CPoI® enables tap and PIN payments over the internet using the consumer’s device. The process is fast, simple, and secure. Tap and PIN is the globally familiar, simple, and universally trusted way to pay. But better yet, there are zero false positives, less chargebacks, lower processing fees, and simpler payments infrastructure. It is, simply, the best way to pay online.   If you’re interested in talking to us more about CPoI® and how it can revolutionise your online payments process, reach out  to the Burbank team today.

Any merchant who sells online knows about payments fraud and chargebacks. This is a significant global issue costing over $40 billion a year and is only possible because the way we pay online isn’t bulletproof.    In-store, we pay with a physical card and, depending on the size of transaction – a PIN. Card and PIN has been around for a couple of decades and has proven - without a shadow of doubt - to be the safest way to pay. No matter the sophistication of a fraudster, they cannot read minds to obtain someone’s PIN.   Online however, there is no PIN. And there is no physical card. There’s only the information contained on the card, which anybody can enter. There is no categoric way to prove that the person entering the card details online is in fact the card holder. And this is why there are $40 billion in fraudulent online transactions taking place every year.   To combat this issue, the average online retailer uses up to five AI systems to analyse a range of data to assess the probability of each transaction being fraudulent. The AI looks at things like:   location of the device the customer is using  the purchase history of the buyer, for example if the buyer has already purchased a similar item recently  whether the item being purchased is in line with the buyer’s normal purchase profile  volume and frequency  and so on ….  The payment process looks something like this:  If the AI deems that the transaction is likely to be fraudulent, it will not allow the sale to proceed. And the merchant will receive a comprehensive report detailing all the ‘fraudulent’ transactions that have been stopped.     You might wonder why I say ‘fraudulent’ .  That’s because there’s a very high chance that the majority of the transactions AI deems as fraudulent (and therefore blocks), are not fraudulent at all. This is called a false positive.       Now here’s the big question – how would a merchant know how many of the transactions the AI is stopping are in fact legitimate? The short answer is, they don’t know. In fact, I would say most merchants have no idea they are missing out on a staggeringly high volume of legitimate transactions that have been deemed as fraudulent. How do I know this? Well, a recent article by Mastercard   reports that false positives are responsible for $443 billion in lost revenue each year.  This is more than 10 times the cost of chargebacks Now, while lost revenue is a substantial cost, there are indeed other problems that false positives bring:  Diminished customer relationships: There’s nothing like being declined a transaction to erode the trust and goodwill of a legitimate customer.  Reputational damage: Word of mouth spreads quickly and no doubt any customer who has had a transaction declined is going to talk about it.   Time and resources: Time spent manually reviewing transactions that have been deemed fraudulent. The greater the number of transactions deemed fraudulent, the more time and resource required to analyse the information. Not to mention the significant time spent using that data to make decisions.   Overcoming the false positives challenge A quick internet search will give you resource upon resource on how to combat false positives, and there will be a myriad of (time consuming) recommendations to minimise the risk and impact to a merchant’s business. But these steps and measures all work within the current landscape. That is, they don’t get to the source of the issue, which as I talked about right at the beginning of this article, is the fact that the way we pay online, is fallible.   I think you’d be hard pressed in your internet search to find a false positives workaround that actually addresses the root cause of the problem. The answer, of course, is not to throw more brain power or fraud combatting AI at it. Surely it is to pay online as we pay instore.  Quite simply, to make card present payments possible over the internet. Reliable and trusted Tap and PIN.  The good news is that this is already possible, with Burbank’s groundbreaking technology and it’s called CPoI ® , (Card Present over Internet).     CPoI® turns consumer devices into the merchant terminal so they can facilitate card-present payments over the internet. During the checkout process the customer simply taps their card against their own device, and securely enters their PIN, creating a card present transaction.  This offers a range of benefits including liability shift (away from the merchant), lower processing fees, and a significantly easier customer experience. But the best part, is that there are zero false positives with CPoI®, which in turn significantly increases merchant revenue.  And therefore, less reliance on fraud detecting AI systems.  Let’s face it. Online payments were ripe for disruption. Merchants cannot keep increasing tools and technology for combatting fraud, nor can they continue to wear the cost of false positives. It simply is not sustainable. And now with CPoI®, they don’t have to.       If you’re interested in hearing more or seeing a demo of CPoI®, reach out   to the Burbank team.

Yes, you read the headline correctly. AI is indeed causing online merchants to lose more money than fraud. Ten times more, to be exact. What makes this statement even more unbelievable is that many of the AI systems online merchants use are designed to mitigate fraud.  To best explain, we need to look backwards… A brief history of payments, and fraud Fraud has always been an issue. As soon as some form of currency was introduced into society, people looked for ways to illegally gain a financial advantage.  It wasn’t so long ago that cash was the main currency. And it didn’t take much for clever forgers to increase the sophistication of their illegal copies so that they were readily accepted, which created a significant issue for anyone dealing in cash.  So, the banks devised an excellent workaround – cards. The reliance on cards increased exponentially as the level of technical proficiency needed to clone them was significantly higher than forging notes. However, with just a magnetic stripe and signature in the way of the fraudsters, they overcame this hurdle too.  Enter Chip and PIN.  The digital certificate in the chips means they cannot be cloned, and unless someone figures out how to read minds, the PIN cannot be stolen. And this is what makes Chip and PIN the most enduring and safest way to pay, ever.  Now, in the digital age where customer experience is key, and everything needs to be as frictionless as possible, Contactless payments entered the equation. This game-changing technology has sped up the payment process, making in-store checkouts faster and easier. In the UK, the initial limit for contactless transactions was £10, then raised to £30 and subsequently £50.  During Covid the Contactless limit was raised to £100 to support a more hygienic process. But of course, this also increased the amount that stolen cards could purchase. So, a safety limit is in place whereby a PIN is required every 3 taps or £150 – the cardholder is required to input the card and enter a PIN to safeguard against fraud.  And of course, we now also have digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay to further improve the payments process, which are purely Contactless transactions with a biometric component, such as face ID or fingerprint.   The endless cycle of fraud Einstein’s 1st Law of Thermodynamics says that “ Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another".  It’s the same with fraud – it never goes away, it just changes to another form, as evidenced in the above history.  Chip and PIN has significantly reduced the advent of fraud for in-store/in-person payments because cloning a card is impossible. And so, fraud has now mostly moved online, where payments are deemed by banks as ‘card not present’. These transactions come with much higher merchant fees because it’s so much easier to complete fraudulent transactions. And it’s a significant global issue. Let’s take a moment to look at some sobering figures: The cost of chargebacks (which is when a consumer disputes that an online purchase was made on their card and the merchant has to refund the money even though the goods have been sent) to merchants is currently $40 billion globally. The cost of false positives (which is when fraud detection software deems that an online transaction is fraudulent and blocks it, when in fact the purchaser is legitimate) is $443 billion in lost sales per year.  The average online merchant uses (and pays for) five fraud detection tools to reduce the risk of fraud. And judging by the figures above, the AI isn’t doing that good a job… or perhaps too good a job, if you see it that way. Either way, it’s stopping legitimate transactions too.  So, here’s the question. If Chip and PIN has done such a good job of combatting fraud in-store (and who ever heard of an in-store false positive?!), then why don’t we use it online? Seems like a very simple answer to a very big problem. The solution: Bringing the terminal back to the consumer, but in a new way Everyone has a phone. And there are excellent payments solutions out there that turn phones into payment terminals to help merchants accept payments anywhere – on a street, at events, at someone’s home. Literally anywhere. So, if merchant’s phones can be turned into secure payment terminals, then surely we can turn anyone’s phone into a payment terminal? The answer is, we can. Or at least, we  at Burbank, can. Because we’ve developed a way to turn consumer devices into terminals that can accept card-present payments over the Internet (CPoI®). And card-present payments make fraud very difficult in any channel – in person and  online . Here’s how it works: Burbank’s CPoI® turns the customer’s device into a payment terminal. Merchants only need a card-present agreement. At checkout, the customer taps their card against their own device and securely enters their PIN to complete payment. Just as they do in-person / in-store. These transactions use Burbank’s unique patent-pending technology and existing payment messages to offer merchants and consumers the safest way to pay online . The fascinating thing about all this, is that while technology can (and does) improve so many aspects of our lives by making things more accessible, faster, and easier, sometimes it also makes things more complex, harder, and in the case of payments, riskier.  The irony is not lost on me that the solution to 100% eliminating false positives and significantly reducing chargebacks is to go back a step and use technology that has been around for twenty years – the trusty, proven, familiar, and universal Chip and PIN. Often the pendulum swings too far in one direction and has to right itself to get the balance back in order. And that’s exactly where we’ve landed with Burbank’s CPoI®. By bringing the terminal to the customer in any channel, we’ve enabled the same, safe, simple, and secure payment process for anyone, anywhere.   And the even better news is that it’s ready to go! If you’re interested in hearing more about CPoI®, reach out to the Burbank team .