The following is a transcript of the episode
Ryan McEndarfer, Editor of PaymentsJournal
Welcome to the PaymentsJournal podcast. I’m your host Ryan Mac. On today’s episode we’re going to be talking about protecting account-based payments in the real world, and to help me with this conversation I have Dave Worthington, the VP of Payments at Rambus. David, welcome to the podcast.
Dave Worthington, VP Payments at Rambus
Ryan, pleasure to be here.
Ryan McEndarfer, Editor of PaymentsJournal
Excellent. Now to get things started, why don’t you give our audience a little bit of an introduction about Rambus?
Dave Worthington, VP Payments at Rambus
Yes, certainly. So, Rambus is a U.S. Nasdaq-coded company that came from a background in intellectual property, mainly securing things related to memory and serial buses going back far enough, and basically innovations all around making things better for most of the household names you know in terms of mobile handsets, PCs, and a number of other devices. The underlying the intellectual property that we license into them helps things work faster and more securely. Over the years we’ve moved out from just doing the very technical and intellectual property development into areas more related to actual security core services around those which now take us into the securing of the IoT space. And over the last few years, Rambus acquired some companies that make up the Rambus security division, which includes payments and ticketing, which in their own right have quite long-running heritages, which do lots of things around securing mobile payments, EMV cards, and ticketing–smart ticketing in various forms. So it’s a split between things in the data center and on the hardware level and then securing stuff out at the mobile edge, which is all of the applications of things around like payments and ticketing.
Ryan McEndarfer, Editor of PaymentsJournal
Excellent. Thank you very much for that. Now let’s dive into talking about the subject of fraud here. So how is fraud impacting account-based payments?
Dave Worthington, VP Payments at Rambus
Yeah. Well probably first clarifying in terms of the scope of the account-based payments: So effectively you’re looking at anything where it’s an account to another bank’s account transfer, and that can be anything from the large-value bank-to-bank transfers and corporate-related activities, payroll billing – credit card bills, for example, are charged to accounts – and any other form of interbank payment or transfer, whether you’re moving money between your accounts and different banks, paying small fees to other people, or even just transferring stuff to pay your children at college.
Secondly, there are number of fraud scenarios, but basically they boil down to substituting account numbers, so inserting an alternate false account number into the payroll, or into the biller direct debit list, or even the bank account system itself. And some of these have been for very significant published amounts, so certainly at larger end of the scale, highly published incidents in terms of frauds in the Bangladesh, Mexico markets. But for a lot of markets they’re just a normal part of this happens occasionally. On the second side in terms of that, you’ve also got the basically more the cunning fraud, where somehow somebody manages to get you to unwittingly change the number you’re paying to and then a while later you realize you haven’t paid the right person. Fake requests to pay to all sorts of consumers, which because it seems to have come through the right channel which you’ve reply to. And some quite complex business email compromises that have large corporates paying out significant fees to suppliers or even in terms of what they thought were taxes and then they disappear into somebody else’s account and the ...