Originally appeared on VerdictFinancial

By: Theresa Jameson, Senior Analyst, Consumer Payments

February 3, 2016

FinovateEurope 2o16: Introducing Theresa Jameson

Theresa is a Senior Analyst in the Consumer Payments team. Her specialisms center on emerging mobile payment technologies – such as NFC, digital wallets, and mobile point-of-sale. She has also written extensively on wider payment trends and opportunities at both the regional and country level.

• Which areas of financial services are you most interested in and why?

Getting the right balance between security and convenience continues to be a major sticking point across financial services. The increased levels of innovation and interconnectivity in banking and payments have resulted in an ever-expanding range of transactional possibilities. While great for commerce, such developments have left the payments system especially vulnerable to cyber-criminals.

With one-click and one-touch payments set to become the norm, there is an increased need for stakeholders across the entire payments ecosystem to frequently take stock of their critical assets and invest in smarter, more dynamic means of fraud prevention.

• Which area of financial services will see the greatest collaboration with fintech in 2016 and why?

There is a concerted push across the industry to do away with static passwords, and to a slightly lesser extent PINs. 2015 saw a number of companies (many of which are FIDO Alliance members) experimenting with a range of new customer authentication technologies. This will continue throughout 2016, with biometric-based authentication solutions likely to be the most widely sought after and implemented. The technology currently offers the most compelling solution to lax consumer practices surrounding personal information security.

• Which demo are you particularly looking forward to and why?

I’m looking forward to seeing Passport – an urban mobility platform that specializes in helping cities improve their transportation options, from trip planning to transit tracking and mobile ticketing.

There is a lot of buzz surrounding “smart cities” at the moment, with London recently joining the likes of Burgas, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Milan, and Warsaw in a €25m project to trial smart city systems across Europe. Intelligent transport systems, such as that offered by Passport, will certainly play a big part in bringing this concept to life.