Tuesday, December 20, 2022
In Part 2, The Green Sheet shares expert insights and recommended strategies for optimizing commerce in the year ahead. Following are interview highlights.
Sanjay Gupta, head of the biller segment at ACI Worldwide, expects to see continuing adoption of real-time payments and alternative payment methods around the world in 2023, which he indicated will make identity management a critical necessity.
“Today’s consumers expect to pay with just a few taps—whether they use the Apple Wallet, NFC capability on their mobile device to tap and pay at the point of sale or to view and pay their bill within the same Apple Wallet,” he said. “Speed and convenience are important, however, as faster payments become mainstream, billers need to make sure funds received in or going out are moving to the right destinations, especially when sending outbound payments to consumers and businesses.”
Noting that people are still the weakest link in any defense, Gupta warned that fraudsters use social engineering and sophisticated phishing messages to infiltrate secure environments. Text message social engineering (or smishing) is becoming popular, he added, because people are not as security-conscious with text messaging. Recent high-profile hacks were due to simple social engineering, and with improvements in messages and delivery methods, he expects to see more of this trend in 2023.
Devin Redmond, CEO and co-founder of Theta Lake, emphasized the need to monitor communications, particularly at a time of increased regulatory scrutiny across all workplace communication channels. Organizations that fail to do this risk penalties and costly fines, he stated.
“The over $2 billion in fines imposed on U.S. banks for failing to capture chat communications are the thin end of the wedge for regulatory focus,” he said. “Firms from all sectors and all geographies should be prepared for regulatory scrutiny of their ability to capture, monitor, retain and retrieve all relevant communications.”
Redmond further noted the United Kingdom Information Commissioner's call for a review into the U.K. government's use of private messaging apps, as well as the reported U.S. federal agency scrutiny of private equity and asset management firms indicate there’s no slowing down of investigations into record-keeping failures.
With continuing regulatory scrutiny on communications, Redmond proposed that senior executives may face ever-escalating fines for compliance failures and lack of secure, unified workplace communications.
“Firms themselves have already taken actions ranging from demotions, loss of bonuses or exiting of individuals,” he said. “And that loss of bonuses includes board members voluntarily foregoing some of their variable pay in acknowledgement of the recordkeeping failings.”
More than $2 billion in fines has already been imposed on non-compliant organizations, Redmond added, which makes future liability for senior individuals entirely possible. This underscores the need for organizations to move from simply enabling hybrid modern workplaces to implementing robust compliance and security across all communications. 
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