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NewsBriefs

Editor's Note: Following are excerpts from news stories recently posted that those businesses were prone to illegal activities and
under Breaking Industry News on our home page. For links to these and posed a reputational risk to banks. Additional copies of the
other full news stories, please visit www.greensheet.com/breaking- letter were sent to the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal
news.php?flag=previous_breaking_news. Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Uber agrees to FTC privacy guidelines "Ordinarily speaking, law enforcement moves from

Uber Technologies Inc. disclosed Aug. 15, 2017, it will the specific to the general," Boyd wrote. "A bad actor is
cooperate with a proposed consent order by the Federal identified and then gradually the net widens to capture co-
conspirators or a larger criminal enterprise. OCP started
Trade Commission by implementing stricter privacy
guidelines. A court ruling upheld the FTC's proposal by presuming a whole industry guilty until individual
merchants prove their innocence."
for repairing what the commission deemed to be Uber's
egregious privacy policies. FTC Acting Chairman Maureen OCP was launched in 2013 under the Obama Administra-
K. Ohlhausen said Uber had both underplayed employee
access to databases and failed to secure user and driver tion as a joint effort among U.S. regulatory entities, the
most prominent being the DOJ, OCC and Federal Deposit
information. Uber called one of its publicized practices
"Creepy Stalker View," suggesting it was fully aware of its Insurance Corp. In the name of reducing fraud and other
unscrupulous, illegal business practices in several high-
unauthorized and illegal behavior.
risk industries, the initiative used regulatory powers to
Peter Sims, founder and Chief Executive Officer of heighten supervision of banks that do business with third-
Parliament Inc., said he was contacted in October 2014 by party payment processors serving those industries. The
goal was to choke off their flow of money, their lifeblood.
an attendee at an Uber launch party where the company
was streaming celebrity avatars in real time as they ClearSale takes chargeback prevention on the road
took Uber rides in New York City. "After learning this,
I expressed my outrage to her that the company would The Green Sheet has previously reported on payment
use my information and identity to promote its services companies ‒ Electronic Payments Inc., Vantiv Inc. and
without my permission," he later blogged. "She told me to ProPay Inc., for example ‒ that have conducted interactive
calm down, and that it was all a 'cool' event and as if I roadshows to augment the training of ISOs, merchant
should be honored to have been one of the chosen." level salespeople and merchants. Such shows have been
used to introduce new POS systems, demystify EMV
Contactless lifting off implementation and more. On Aug. 24, 2017, ClearSale

In "The payments journey: From point of sale to points of heralded a new roadshow. It took place in Mexico the
commerce – Part 1", The Green Sheet, April 10, 2017, issue week of Aug. 28 and was devised to address fraud and
high chargeback rates in that country.
17:04:01, Dale S. Laszig wrote that the payments industry's
history is "replete with examples of wide-scale migrations, ClearSale, with U.S. offices in Miami, specializes in
from paper to electronic data capture, and from mag-stripe
to contact and contactless EMV (Europay, Mastercard and chargeback prevention, said the Mexican market "has been
a challenge for online merchants, due to a poor reputation
Visa) cards." Only months later, it appears the migration
to contactless form factors is escalating. A new study for fraud. Chargeback rates from the region are 2.8 times
higher than the global average, with decline rates in 2015
from Juniper Research Ltd. predicted 53 percent of global
POS transactions will be contactless within five years, being as much as twice that of the global average," adding
that "fear of fraud can lead some merchants to avoid
compared to 15 percent this year.
transactions with customers whose purchases originate
The United States, which was the last developed economy from Mexico." The company also pointed out that false
to implement EMV, is expected to experience a significant declines can damage a merchant’s reputation, with 32
percent of customers refusing to return to vendors where
increase in contactless payments. In POS & mPOS
Terminals: Vendor Strategies, Positioning & Market Forecasts their purchases were erroneously declined.
2017-2022, Juniper reported that contactless payment New York enacts bold cybersecurity law
adoption in the United States would rise sharply over the
period, from less than 2 percent of transactions this year Security guidelines, initially proposed by the New York
to 34 percent by 2022. State Department of Financial Services (DFS), became law
Aug. 28, 2017. This sparked statewide audits and broad
Cautious relief as Operation Choke Point ends compliance measures among organizations deemed by the
department to be "Covered Entities." These include banks,
An Aug. 16, 2017, letter from U.S. Assistant Attorney other financial institutions and insurance companies,
General Stephen E. Boyd to House Judiciary Chair Bob
Goodlatte marked the end of Operation Choke Point according to the DFS.
(OCP), an anti-crime initiative that put extreme pressure
on banks and payment processors to deny services to select Security analysts see a fundamental shift in the new
regulations, which require companies to treat cyber
high-risk, cash-dependent businesses on the assumption
security as a risk management issue and hold senior
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