The new solution from OpenText and Mastercard aims to increase the speed, compliance and security for business information, payments and financing in the automotive supply chain. It is designed to facilitate integrated payments and to enhance the management of vendor master data, enabling suppliers to better manage risk for trade finance, accelerate cash flow for outstanding invoices and secure financial transactions with enhanced digital identity.

The integrated OpenText and Mastercard offering will also provide OpenText Business Network customers the ability to access spot financing through the Mastercard Track™ B2B global trade enablement platform. It will leverage the OpenText Supplier Portal (formerly Covisint Supplier Portal), the OpenText Identity Portal and the OpenText IoT Platform, integrated with Mastercard's financial partners.

“Digitizing and simplifying supply chain related finance processes can ease global trading operations across industries and unlock opportunities for suppliers at every level to do business with enterprise buyers more efficiently,” said Claire Thompson, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Partnerships at Mastercard. “We are excited OpenText is partnering with Mastercard to integrate our digital platforms together to allow companies to quickly identify and vet business relationships and make the end-to-end payments process even simpler.”

“High performance supply chains build agility and flexibility into production and fulfillment,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, OpenText CEO & CTO. “This calls for the digitization of processes across the network. OpenText is pleased to partner with Mastercard to help automotive enterprises transform finance related information flows, eliminate friction in the trading process and conduct mutually beneficial transactions with the right suppliers at the right time to meet and exceed production goals.”

OpenText and Mastercard will provide a single user interface which links users to supplier portal functionality and to Mastercard Track, with a secure, permissioned repository of more than 210 million registered entities worldwide. Buyers and sellers maintain and exchange key information related to their businesses and Mastercard Track provides monitoring on sanctions, credit and other business standards. This eases supplier selection, compliance and risk management; enhancing the comprehensive up-to-date supplier profiles in the OpenText Supplier Portal. Expanded supplier portal capabilities such as parts and services management and IoT contextual telemetry help auto companies avoid supply chain disruptions by identifying vendors with available parts to fill production gaps.

OpenText Supplier Portal is part of OpenText Business Network which connects to 92 percent of Automotive News 2019 Top 100 Suppliers. The global connectivity offered by OpenText will provide Mastercard with more robust digital authentication and authorization services to manage access and business identities for Mastercard Track users.

To distribute and promote Settle in the Croatian market, Auka has signed an exclusive partnership with Sberbank Croatia.

Csaba Soós, CEO of Sberbank Croatia, comments: “Sberbank's key strategic objective is to offer market services based on digital technology and with this business cooperation we are proving our commitment to that goal. I am very excited about our cooperation with the Norwegian fintech company Auka. Our goal is to offer new mobile payment technology and to improve mobile user experience with managing money in the easy way.”

Settle removes the inconvenience of cash transactions and lengthy bank account numbers. Users can pay and receive money instantly with their phone. Users can also send money from their debit and credit cards as well as from their bank account to any mobile phone number. The received money is instantly available on the user’s Settle Account and it can also flow directly into the user’s bank account. Settle is the best way for private individuals as well as for companies to manage their finances and to grow their business.

Daniel Døderlein, CEO and Founder of Auka, is thrilled to bring this Nordic award-winning solution to the Croatian market: “We are excited for the whole Croatian population , who can now choose to digitize their money. We have changed the way people pay and get paid in our home market, now it's time to share the benefits with the rest of the world, starting right here in Croatia.”

“In the Nordics and in Asia, the adoption of payment tools like Settle has been significant. Mobile payments is a completely new way for people and business to pay and get paid, and companies use the tool to build and grow their business. It’s extremely powerful and it will change the payment landscape in Croatia.”

With Settle, there are no transaction fees for sending and receiving money to and from Croatian users. All transactions are safe and secure, backed by the EU-wide financial services license held by Auka which is subject to EU regulation as an e-money institution. The core platform is built by Auka from the ground up, and has securely powered some of the most successful bank solutions since 2010, running 100 percent in Google Cloud.

“We understand the importance of security for our customers. Auka is a regulated financial institution, and we guarantee that users’ electronic money is safe and completely secure” says Døderlein.

Settle is operated with local support and marketing provided through Settle Croatia, a local legal entity ensuring that a majority of the revenue from Settle in Croatia is used to create local jobs and to return value to the local business community.

Whilst this launch phase is aimed at consumers making P2P (person to person) transactions, the vision for Settle is to also become a business solution, enabling merchants to send and receive payments with their customers. They can do so without relying on point-of-sale terminals and card terminals, lowering costs and enabling quicker adoption, specifically for smaller and independent merchants such as cafes and restaurants.

“We will launch merchant functionality in Croatia in the coming months, empowering consumers to pay for a product or service quickly by using the QR codes or the NFC functionality, and enabling merchants to easily take payments.” says Døderlein.

Settle is compatible for all users in Croatia, regardless of the bank or type of card. The app is also platform agnostic, meaning it works with Apple and Android devices and is available on iOS (on Apple App Store) and Android (on Google Play Store).

Launched in Germany and Austria in January 2015, N26 began as a current account with a Mastercard. It now operates as a fully-featured bank, serving 3.5 million customers in 24 European markets.

In the US it will operate through a partnership with FDIC-insured Axos Bank and offer customers a Visa debit card.

In February the startup scored a $300 million capital injection, giving it a war chest to back its US assault, where it hopes to win over customers with the promise to help them take control of their finances through a slick, easy-to-use app.

“The US launch is a major milestone for N26 to change banking globally and reach more than 50 million customers in the coming years,” says Valentin Stalf, co-founder and CEO, N26.

"We know that millions of people around the world and particularly in the US are still paying hidden and exorbitant fees and are frustrated by poor banking experiences. N26 will radically change the way Americans bank as it has done for so many people throughout Europe."

N26 is not the only European digital challenger making a move on the American market; London-based Monzo is also planning to start opening accounts this summer.

About a year ago I read news that researchers have devises how to make how we walk protect private information opens up an interesting use of biometric data. (https://techxplore.com/news/2018-08-artificial-neural-network-framework-gait.html)

The solution described in the article describes how a personal device with motion sensors are capable of securing communications for personal health sensors and data they generate.

The process seems to have some interesting side use cases that require both secure communication and end user identification.  This process appears to deliver a solution capable of doing this without the need for the end user to provide information to validate their identity.  The other interesting feature of using a ‘fuzzy algorithm’ should mean that the communication key protecting the data should change for each session.  This potentially could provide a suitable level of protection from replay attacks where a recorded session of movements could be identified and blocked from authorising the session.   

Coupled to this the ETSI standards for attribute-based encryption can help further secure these transactions over untrusted networks and protect the device ID protecting the communications. (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/22/etsi_cryptobased_standards/)

This could provide new and interesting approaches to consumer authentication.  The vision is to create a consumer verification processes based on physical characteristics of how a person moves could provide authentication data more easily than remembering and entering a password or PIN.

These developments appear to provide two of the three factors of multifactor authentication. Something you have a mobile phone / application issues to an individual. Something you are which is the general movement of the body monitored and checked by a central system.  This then just leaves something known between the parties. 

This sparked of a memory of a presentation by Royal College of Art students in 2009 about the future of money and finance that covered some interesting ideas.  One of which is if money is dematerialised fully why can it not be passed between people with physical actions.  The idea if I remember correctly was to throw and catch value between two people.  This at the time made me think about individuals using gestures as the biometric authentication.  I investigated the capabilities of the mobile devices in 2009 but the Gyrosops were not accurate enough.  In the 10 years since with the development of Virtual Reality hardware  now appear capable of collecting enough data about movement to make this feasible.

Could a specific gesture known by the individual and the trusted party be used to authorise an action?  Probably but this seems over kill with the rise on on-device biometrics for use cases such as authorising payments. 

A gesture could be useful when the mobile user has not provided enough passive Gait based biometric data to secure the transaction.  For example, when travelling on a train or sitting at work buying stuff online.. 

I foresee a transaction flow where the user receives notification that a biometric check is needed to their phone toauthorise a transaction.  The movement unique to a user, the biometric is captured coupled with a second passive biometric ‘ the gait’ which is used to protect the authenticating biometric and transaction data over the current standard communication protection techniques.

The advantage of this type of protection is that over time that fuzzy logic algorithms accuracy will improve as more data is collected and processed to further increase the value of the protection offered.

Both the gait and gesture-based security technology provide personal data protection in ways that could be acceptable to general public.  It appears to offer a solution that is easily accessed most of the population as all the individual needs to do is perform a repeated movement a with compliant mobile device.

The potential for this is clear and potentially be both disruptive and complementary to existing authentication methods.  It could displace some use cases as it happens in the background and enhance others by providing additional protection for authentication data over insecure networks. Provides a way to both protect data over open networks – provides a way to derive a secure key and provide a degree of authentication.

In this type of solution, the biometric data can be held by either reliant party or by an identity provider.  This means it offers either a simplified the technical and commercial models for adoption for organisations capable validating and verifying the user.  For other organisations it could be used using a federated ID service where the reliant party uses a 3rd party to validate the credentials presented.

This could be the future with the continued developments in augmented reality one can see the possibility of adding a simple gesture to make the payment for the goods.  Just a thought but was it not a gesture that people made at physical auctions – back in the day!.

https://www.shopify.com/retail/how-these-retailers-are-using-augmented-reality-to-enhance-the-customer-experience

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