Maintaining consumer confidence in electronic payment mechanisms

Credit card fraud is already a significant factor inhibiting consumer confidence in e-commerce. As more advanced payment systems become common, what legal and technological mechanisms are required to ensure that fraud does not do long-term damage to consumers' willingness to use electronic payment mechanisms

The Value of Information Provision at Iowa Feeder Cattle Auctions

Controlling a variety of feeder cattle characteristics, and market and sale conditions, we estimate that certified vaccinations claims along with at least 30 days weaning claims bring in a premium of $6.13/cwt, which is nearly two times of that for similar uncertified claims, compared to no vaccinations and weaning claims at all in Iowa feeder cattle auctions. This indicates that the third-party certification is supported in the market as a tool to signal quality in terms of vaccinations and weaning claims towards preconditioning.Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Point, Click, Fire: An Investigation of Illegal Online Gun Sales

The internet revolution created extraordinary opportunities for commerce to be conducted at the click of a mouse. Instant access to almost unlimited choices and to vast communities of buyers and sellers is a principal asset of e-commerce. This feature, however, can also pose unique challenges for law enforcement. Over the last 15 years, a significant share of the firearms trade in the United States has moved online. The precise volume of online sales is largely unknown -- and, under current law, unknowable, because many of these transactions create no record that would allow them to be counted.Every day, firearms transactions are conducted on thousands of websites among largely anonymous actors. Criminal buyers who once had to purchase in person can now prowl hundreds of thousands of listings to find unscrupulous sellers. Negotiations can be conducted from the discreet remove of a phone call or an email exchange. Federally licensed firearms dealers are required to conduct background checks on all buyers to prevent sales to felons, the mentally ill, domestic abusers and other prohibited purchasers.4 These screenings are required whether the sale is made on Main Street or over the internet.But unlicensed "private sellers" -- those who are not "in the business" of selling firearms -- do not have to conduct background checks.5 These sales -- which take place in many venues, including gun shows and, increasingly, on the internet -- account for about 40 percent of U.S. sales, and fuel the black market for illegal guns.6 And they leave no electronic or paper trail behind them

A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING MUTIPLE TRASACTIONS FOR A SINGLE PAYMENT

Present disclosure provides a system and method for providing multiple transactions by tapping multiple cards consecutively on a Point of Sale (PoS) device (104) for a single payment. The system may include a PoS device (104) and a network server (109). The PoS device (104) receives merchant input for a payment. The merchant (102) input includes total transaction amount and payment split input into the PoS device (104). The payment split input indicates the total number of customers who desire to divide the total transaction amount within themselves. The PoS device (104) splits the total amount by the number input by the merchant (102). The PoS device (104) then receives payment card information related to each of the at least two customers (105, 106) based on the split calculation. After receiving all the payment card details, the PoS device (104) sends the card details to the network server (109) for authorisation. The network server (109) sends authorization requests related to each of the at least two customers (105, 106) to a respective acquirer entity via the communication network (108). Upon receiving authorization responses from the network server (109), the PoS device (104) generates a single receipt to the merchant including the multiple payment transactions details related to each of the at least two customers (105, 106). This reduces the idling time on the PoS device (104). Thereby, a quicker and efficient payment process may be achieved

Fighting Poverty, Profitably: Transforming the Economics of Payments to Build Sustainable, Inclusive Financial Systems

The Gates Foundation's Financial Services for the Poor program (FSP) believes that effective financial services are paramount in the fight against poverty. Nonetheless, today more than 2 billion people live outside the formal financial sector. Increasing their access to high quality, affordable financial services will accelerate the well-being of households, communities, and economies in the developing world. One of the most promising ways to deliver these financial services to the poor -- profitably and at scale -- is by using digital payment platforms.These are the conclusions we have reached as the result of extensive research in pursuit of one of the Foundation's primary missions: to give the world's poorest people the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty.FSP conducted this research because we believe that there is a gap in the fact base and understanding of how payment systems can extend digital services to low income consumers in developing markets. This is a complex topic, with fragmented information and a high degree of country-by-country variability. A complete view across the entire payment system has been missing, limiting how system providers, policy makers, and regulators (groups we refer to collectively as financial inclusion stakeholders) evaluate decisions and take actions. With a holistic view of the payment system, we believe that interventions can have higher impact, and stakeholders can better understand and address the ripple effects that changes to one part of the system can have. In this report, we focus on the economics of payment systems to understand how they can be transformed to serve poor people in a way that is profitable and sustainable in aggregate

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

ANTICIPATED AMOUNT VERIFICATION

The present disclosure provides a system and a method for verifying an anticipated amount of a digital financial transaction. The disclosure proposes including a request for an anticipated amount verification (AAV) associated with the transaction, while forwarding a transaction request from a merchant to an issuer via an acquirer and a payment processing platform. Thereafter, the issuer generates an AAV response indicating whether the transaction is eligible for the anticipated amount. Further, the issuer communicates the AAV response to the merchant, via the payment processing platform and the acquirer. Based on the AAV response the merchant determines whether the transaction is eligible for the anticipated amount. Said AAV allows to avoid any potential declining of the transaction by the issuer due to non-sufficient fund (NSF) or any other related issues. Therefore, the present disclosure allows to increase approval rates of transactions authorization by reducing NSFs or any other issues