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NEWS The next big thing? Writer Hannah Prevett
Although open source payments have been touted as one to watch for some time now, they have yet to break through to the mainstream. But, asks Hannah Prevett, is this an idea whose time has come?
there,” he asks.
announced in a blog post that it had rolled out Kill Bill, an open source payments platform, in 2014, many assumed it would mark the beginning of a slew of implementations. Surely other e-commerce companies, banks and merchants would also want to glean the performance benefits of using open source components in payments and potentially save money in the process? However, other examples of large- scale roll-outs have remained thin on the ground.
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Simon Burrows, a Director in PwC’s FinTech and payments division, says that open source payments as a concept hasn’t yet been widely embraced by the payments community. There are several reasons for the scepticism, he says. Top of mind for many CIOs is security. “How do you know it’s secure? If I were building a payment system using open source, cybersecurity would be one of my main concerns. How do you know people haven’t built backdoors into the software to siphon off funds into their own account? Or Russian hackers aren’t monitoring what’s going on to see if there are any government related flows
hen e-commerce giant, Groupon,
The payments industry’s cautious approach to security is certainly an obstacle for new open source players trying to break into the market, says Matt Simester, Director of cards and payments at the The Payments Consultancy. They need to understand the culture and attitude to risk to really get under the skin of potential clients, he explains. “The banks in particular have a reputation for being highly secure and a lot of the suppliers of software or billings and payments integration just don’t understand the sensitivity and the slow speed which a bank will go through the security protocols of working with a third party. It just takes time and that might be underestimated, regardless of the ease or the sophistication of the solution that’s being offered.”
There needs to be a strong incentive for High Street retailers and banks to strongly consider the case for open source in payments, says Burrows. “Do you want to use open source technology that may not be secure, may not be supported or if it is supported there may not be any guarantee about how quickly it will be supported? You could send off an email and not get a reply for a week.” The benefit of selecting a large, established vendor is peace of mind, as the old maxim of ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ rings loudly in IT directors’ ears.
“If you’re a big corporate, you need software that you can trust immediately, that’s well supported and well documented; you’re not exposing yourself by implementing it. The last thing you want is to build something for it to fall over and you to get sacked
www.ibsintelligence.com © IBS Intelligence 2016
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