Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Consumers Not Powerless in the Face of Credit Card Fraud - New York Times

Consumers Not Powerless in the Face of Credit Card Fraud

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/consumers-not-powerless-in-the-face-of-card-fraud.html?emc=edit_my_20140317&nl=your-money&nlid=56381892&ref=your-money-email&_r=1

MARCH 14, 2014
    Photo
    CreditRobert Neubecker
    Your Money

    When you think about the security of your credit and debit cards, consider the facts on the ground.
    Industry representatives readily admit that thieves are often one step ahead of them and that data breaches are a fact of life. One bank went rogue and publicly called out MasterCard and Bank of America for not sharing information and for failing to stem card fraud fast enough in Chicago taxicabs.
    Now a for-profit college, sensing opportunity, has found its own angle.Monroe College is currently pitching a minor in cybersecurity. Its ad on New York City subways features a woman in a white coat holding a card that intersects with beams of light. Perhaps she’ll invent a way to solve the payments industry’s problems.
    Until then, you have to help yourself. Most card companies already have custom alerts and other features that not enough consumers use. Then there’s something that all cards should have but most don’t — an on/off switch accessible from a mobile app that could keep most fraud from happening. Finally, there are the microchip cards that most of the rest of the civilized world uses but that barely exist in the United States so far.
    Photo
    A debit card with a microchip for increased security is used at a Paris restaurant. The chip is common in Europe, but not America. CreditEd Alcock for The New York Times
    Let’s take them in order.
    Alerts and Other Tools
    Whether you’re using a debit or credit card, there are all sorts of ways to limit the damage a thief might do, or at least get a quick warning that one is on the loose.
    Capital One offers a typical list: Customers can turn on text or email alerts that will arrive when their balance goes above or below an amount that the customer sets, when a charge occurs above or below a certain amount, when any charge occurs at all, or if a transaction doesn’t go through because there isn’t enough money in the checking account.
    Citibank can ping you if you’re within a set distance from your credit limit. Chase will text you if its systems detect an unusual charge and let you reject it on the spot. When I logged into American Express’s website recently, I found that I could get an alert whenever someone gets a cash advance using the card (something I never do).
    There is no reason not to set at least a few alerts, even if they may only warn you about theft after it has occurred. Some banks, like Bank of America andCitibank, will generate a one-time-use card number for online shopping. That way, you can cross sketchy websites (or sketchy employees at legitimate sites) off your list of things to worry about. Other institutions, like Capital One, don’t offer this service because so few people end up using it.
    Committed debit card users may want to consider the two-account approach that a reader mentioned in the online comments about last week’s column. The strategy here is to use one checking account for everyday spending with a debit card and a separate checking account for recurring payments. Destroy the debit card for the second account, and you won’t have to worry about a thief stealing the card, draining the account and causing your mortgage or other payments to come up short.
    The On/Off Switch
    If everyone turned their debit or credit cards on before each charge and then off again before returning the plastic to the wallet, it would be a lot harder for thieves to do their work.
    This technology actually exists. A company called Malauzai Software built an on/off switch after one of its bank customers sought a solution to the amount of time its representatives were spending on the phone with people whose debit cards had gone missing. It wanted the customers to be able to turn the cards off temporarily via their mobile banking app until they found them again or declared them lost and asked for a replacement.
    Malauzai obliged, but it soon discovered that fraud-wary customers were turning the cards on and off before and after every charge. “The fraud prevention thing was gravy on top of the mashed potatoes,” said Robb Gaynor, Malauzai’s co-founder and chief product officer. “It was unexpected.”
    Now 70 to 80 institutions, all smaller banks or credit unions, have adopted Malauzai’s on/off switch. Capital One has built its own for debit cards, as have USAA and Simple, which was acquired by BBVA last month. Of customers who are active on mobile banking apps and patronize a bank that uses Malauzai’s switch, 3 to 5 percent of them flip it at least once each month. Recurring charges for things like mobile phone bills get a code that allows them to go through even when a customer has turned the card off. A company called TSYS has its own new on/off offering for banks that can geo-fence transactions, keeping any from going through unless they’re relatively close to a user’s mobile phone.
    Ellen Richey, Visa’s chief legal officer, expressed a bit of skepticism about the on/off switch. The right malware could muck it up, and users may forget that their cards are off and get annoyed at the cash register when things aren’t working. “One thing we have found is that consumers are remarkably impatient with anything that gets between them and making a payment,” she said.
    Continue reading the main story

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    Perhaps, but why not let consumers decide whether they mind that friction? So far, Chase, American Express, Citibank and Bank of America have no plans to do so. If enough of you demand it, however, perhaps they’ll see the light. This is what happened with the now ubiquitous tool that lets you deposit checks by taking a picture of them with your phone and zapping them to the bank.
    Chip Cards
    The United States is such a fraud-friendly country in part because we still use old-fashioned magnetic stripes on the back of our cards. This makes it relatively easy for thieves to make counterfeit ones.
    At long last, retailers and banks and the companies that process their payments are preparing to begin to possibly get their acts together on this front. Over the next 18 months, more debit and credit card issuers will issue plastic with a microchip inside that will transmit a unique code each time you use it in person. Presumably, thieves won’t be able to counterfeit that sort of thing easily, at least for a while.
    Then, on Oct. 1, 2015, assuming there aren’t any extensions, most retailers that don’t have terminals to read the chip cards yet will be responsible for certain types of fraud if it occurs. If retailers do have the terminals but a bank hasn’t gotten around to giving a consumer a chip-enabled card, the bank will pay for the fraud as a penalty for lagging the retailers. It’s an elaborate game of chicken, fitting for an industry where the major playersspent years embroiled in a lawsuit.
    Most people will be dipping these new cards in the terminals instead of swiping them, and some banks may eventually make you enter a PIN instead of signing for a purchase. As long as you don’t lose your card or have the actual plastic stolen, the sort of fraud that went on with Target should be a lot harder to pull off.

    That said, the thieves will then immediately migrate online, since many people will still be typing numbers into websites the old-fashioned way for the foreseeable future. There, the bad guys will find a more welcoming environment, at least until everyone involved with card payments agrees on a technology to thwart the scofflaws there, too. A process called tokenization may become the security standard, or perhaps you’ll be inputting codes you receive via text message, similar to the way you might be now if you have activated two-step verification for Gmail.
    Ms. Richey of Visa says she believes that the various industry players will be quick to act online as well. After all, if they do nothing, the rate of online fraud may rise at the same rate that in-person card fraud falls thanks to all those microchips. “It’s so compelling that it will fuel the merchant and bank players’ willingness to proceed,” she said. “Otherwise, they won’t get the benefit of the investments they’ve made in chip cards.”

    That’s a lot of ifs, in an industry that has waited an awfully long time to fix its fraud problems while inconveniencing millions of customers. Let’s hope it happens as they say it will. Until it does, set some alerts and pester your bank to give you all of the technological options that ought to be available right now.

    Monday, March 17, 2014

    A debate on emerging market turbulence - Financial Times

    A debate on emerging market turbulence

    http://blogs.ft.com/gavyndavies/2014/03/16/a-debate-on-emerging-market-turbulence/

    Financial turbulence continues to surround the emerging markets, raising the question whether this now morphing into a genuine EM crisis, of the type seen in previous eras of Fed tightening, including the early 1980s, and 1994-98. If so, how will it progress?
    I have asked three distinguished international economists to debate this with me. They are Maurice Obstfeld (University of California, Berkeley), Alan M. Taylor(UC, Davis) and Dominic Wilson (Co-Head of Global Economics, Goldman Sachs). Each has produced leading edge research on this topic in recent years.
    The entire debate is attached here, and I would encourage everyone interested in the subject to read it in full. However, since the text turned out to be fairly lengthy, I would like to offer here a summary of the main points which emerged.
    Please contribute to any aspect of the debate in the comments section below.
    Sudden Stop or Credit Crunch?
    I have previously argued that the current EM crisis is likely to be characterised by a domestic credit crunch in many economies, rather than a “sudden stop” in capital inflows, similar to that which occurred in the 1990s. The panel had some sympathy with this proposition, but argued that it was too simplistic.
    Everyone agreed that most of the EMs are far better placed to withstand capital outflows than they were in the 1990s. DW and MO placed particular importance on the flexibility of exchange rates, replacing the fixed rate regimes of the 1990s. Along with credible inflation targeting, this should allow adjustments in real exchange rates without crises and implosions in market confidence.
    AMT emphasised the structural advances in the EMs since the 1990s, saying “it is hard to overstate what a remarkable achievement it was” for the EMs to have survived the 2008 financial crash virtually unscathed. However, he warned that the scale of likely Fed tightening in this cycle may be unusually large, and he believed that the much greater weight of the EMs in the global economy might cause adverse feedback loops with the developed markets, which the DM central banks might be slow to recognise.
    There was a clear recognition from the panel that there has been a very worrying build up in leverage and domestic credit in the EMs since 2008, and that this could cause major disruptions if local currency interest rates have to rise, and panic-driven capital outflows occur. AMT presented data which showed large rises in domestic leverage in China, South Africa, Turkey, some Baltic countries, Ukraine, Colombia, Brazil and India – a familiar cast list.
    MO said that in these circumstances it would be difficult to separate a sudden stop from a domestic capital crunch, since the symptoms may be rather similar. DW said that “these may not be sudden stops in the classical sense, but their broader implications are not necessarily much different”.
    There was considerable concern about the possible balance sheet mismatches that might be revealed in such circumstances, since previous crises have always uncovered problems in unexpected places. Thus, while DW argued that many EMs are better placed than they were a decade or two ago, we should “make that judgment with a good dose of humility”.
    So my attempt to draw a neat distinction between these different types of problem was seen as only partially valid.
    Hidden External Debt Problems
    I asked about the recent BIS paper which pointed to previously hidden external debt, and greater linkages between EM and DM interest rates. This has been worrying investors – did it imply that the underlying dangers are greater than we had recognised until now? The panel did not regard the new data as a game changer, but did emphasise the great uncertainties involved.
    MO said that he remembered “sitting in an IMF lunch about 10 years ago, thinking hard about ‘What will cause the next crisis?’ We were basically at sea…we could spin scenarios but lacked the detailed information about financial linkages to know if any of our stories were plausible…No-one at the table suggested US sub prime lending.” He did however predict that “the real threat, as in every past big financial crisis, is leverage”, adding that many corporate sector carry trades could have been left unhedged, which might pose a major problem.
    Optimism for Many EMs
    There was a lot of optimism that many EMs would navigate the Fed’s exit well, because their policy responses would be appropriate. But there was concern about whether withdrawals of liquidity would put pressure on the available “lender of last resort” facilities. AMT pointed out that, although these facilities would this time be in domestic currencies, and therefore more readily available, “the reserve war chests sit on public balance sheets, while many of the incipient problems would lie on private balance sheets, so getting the backstops to where they might be needed in an emergency could present an interesting political economy problem”.
    Both MO and DW wanted the developed central banks to offer new swap facilities to the EMs in order to prevent “self fulfilling losses of confidence” and currency runs, but no-one thought these swap lines were very likely to be implemented.
    The “Correct” Policy Response
    I asked whether the “correct” policy response by EMs to the developing situation should be more like an IMF-type package involving fiscal and monetary tightening, and structural reform (“Fischer style”), or a World Bank-type package involving liquidity support from the DMs (“Stiglitz-style”). The panel’s response was that the correct policy mix needed to vary according to circumstances, but there was clearly some sympathy with Stiglitz in arguing that tighter demand policy (fiscal or monetary) may not be appropriate this time.
    Everyone emphasised that political responses and institutions would be crucial in separating the wheat from the chaff, with India and Indonesia receiving some praise. (Such praise was notably missing for Turkey, Brazil and Russia.)
    China
    AMT summed up the panel’s view very well when he said that China’s domestic leverage was a serious problem “but China has so much command/control that maybe they could “brute force” their way through with interventions, reserves etc.”DW added that it will “remain a difficult balancing act between discouraging risky lending practices without prompting a more rapid credit disruption” and concluded that “the task of rebalancing the economy is likely to be a long one”.
    The panel did not see recent Chinese exchange rate policy changes as the start of prolonged currency weakness, which they thought would be a serious problem for other EMs if it did occur. MO warned that Chinese capital controls are “proving increasingly porous”.
    Summary
    I summarised the panel’s views as follows:
    Without making any specific investment recommendations[1], I would conclude from the debate that it is too early to get back into EM assets, though there would probably be some exceptions, in countries where the policy response appears to be best calibrated to the problems faced. The panel seems to think that China will engage in a very prolonged credit work-out, without major acute crises, while some other EMs might face crises, even though their external balance sheet problems seem much better than in the 1990s. That seems to be a difficult environment in which to make money from general long exposures to EM asset classes.
    This summary does not do justice to the full text of the debate. A reminder: it is available here. Please join in below.

    Sunday, March 16, 2014

    5 Signs You’re Overqualified For Your Job - TIME

    5 Signs You’re Overqualified For Your Job

    http://business.time.com/2014/02/10/5-signs-youre-overqualified-for-your-job/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29




    Career path job search
    Peter Dazeley / Getty Images

    Are you reading this at work right now? Did you hop online because the stuff on your desk is mindless busy work and what’s waiting in your to-do folder are boring tasks you could do in your sleep? In other words, are you overqualified for your job? 
    If you think you are, you have plenty of company: Recruiting software company Jobvite finds that 36% of respondents in a recent survey of more than 700 workers think they’re overqualified for their current jobs, and about two-thirds of those are looking for a new job they think better befits their skills.
    Are all these people really overqualified? Some undoubtedly are; the sluggish labor market has forced a lot of people looking for work to take lower-level positions just so they’ll have a job. Jobvite says young adults (who have been dogged by persistently higher unemployment) as well as higher-earning and better-educated people are more likely to think they’re overqualified.
    And yet, there’s something disingenuous about the notion that more than a third of the American workforce is frittering away its talents. “The idea that you’re an expert in something just because you’ve tried it may contribute to people’s mistaken belief that they’re overqualified for certain jobs even when they aren’t,” says Vinda Rao, senior marketing manager for recruiting software companyBullhorn.
    Career experts say the following signs are indicators that you actually are overqualified, as opposed to just having an inflated sense of your skills.
    You look for more work to do. If you regularly finish your work and go ask your boss what else you can do, or find something that needs doing but is not technically in your job description and do it anyway, you might be overqualified, says Dan Finnigan, Jobvite’s president and CEO. “If there’s some sign that your boss doesn’t care or need for you to do more, no ideas for you on what more you can do… this means you’ve already done above and beyond what the job requires,” he says.
    You’re always bored. “Common signs of being overqualified are being bored, feeling you’re not being stretched, challenged or engaged in your work, but they could also be signs that you’re in the wrong job,” says career coach Jo Casey. Try to figure out why you’re bored. “If you can do 100% of the work with your eyes closed and one hand tied behind your back, you’re probably overqualified,” Casey says. On the other hand, if you just don’t like doing the work or find it dull, the job might be a bad fit, but you’re probably not overqualified.
    You know more than your boss. “If you’re being managed by people who know less than you do about your department’s function and responsibilities, you’re overqualified,” Rao says. “If you’re generating results above and beyond what’s expected for someone in your job description to the point that people turn to you instead of your boss for counsel, expertise, and guidance, you’re probably overqualified.”
    Your performance consistently beats your peers’. “In a job where it’s easy to measure how well you’re doing and you’re outperforming everyone else in your peer group on the same objective measures — you’re routinely driving most sales, producing most leads in marketing, resolving most issues in customer service team — you could be genuinely overqualified,” Finnigan says.
    You’re not learning anything new. “You should be hired for a role because you have the potential to do well in it, not because you already know everything you could know about it,” Rao says. “If you require zero training or guidance to do your job extremely well from the get-go, you’re overqualified for it.” Also, if you have much more experience than the job description requires, you could be overqualified, but Rao cautions not to think that education is the same or better than experience. “Just because you have an MBA and your boss doesn’t by no means indicates that you could do his or her job better than they can,” she says.


    Read more: 5 Signs You’re Overqualified For Your Job | TIME.com http://business.time.com/2014/02/10/5-signs-youre-overqualified-for-your-job/#ixzz2wBW09WOg

    Saturday, March 15, 2014

    3 Sentences That Can Basically Destroy You - TIME

    3 Sentences That Can Basically Destroy You

    http://time.com/10335/3-sentences-that-can-basically-destroy-you/

    Feb. 27, 2014
        
    Paul Bradbury—Getty Images/OJO Images

    When these utterances start to become commonplace around the office, it just might be the beginning of the end.



    This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published at Inc.com.

    If you hear any of these three sentences at work more than once or twice, you can be certain that your company is heading down a dead-end path:
    1. “We’ve always done it this way.”
    If there’s anything true in the business world, it’s that what worked in the past isn’t going to work in the future. Clinging to what’s “tried and true” leads to pursuing wooden-headed strategies long after it’s clear that those strategies aren’t working.
    A perfect example of this is Microsoft’s belief in the concept of “Windows Everywhere.” The company keeps trying to launch tablets and phones with Windows on them, even thoughthe market has repeatedly made it clear that nobody wants the darn things.
    In smaller companies, “we’ve always done it this way” manifests itself in an unwillingness to build process and structure as the company grows. A freewheeling approach to doing business works inside startups but is toxic inside a larger firm.
    The Cure: “What worked in the past won’t work in the future.”
    2. “But that can’t be true!”
    Human beings have an innate tendency towards what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” This consists of sorting incoming information as being true/untrue and relevant/irrelevant based on how well that data fits with previously-held opinions.
    Here’s an example from my own experience. Back in the 1980s, I gave a presentation to the C-level executives in a minicomputer firm which showed that PC sales were growing exponentially while minicomputer sales were flat. Even though the data came from SEC filings, the executives simply refused to believe that the data was true.
    Similarly, entrepreneurs often believe so strongly in their company and product that they miss trends that are changing their industry and making their “vision” no longer valid.
    The Cure: “Let’s not throw good money after bad.”
    3. “We’ll make it happen… somehow.”
    While there’s value in thinking positively, expecting something miraculous to happen sets you up to fail. Success in business is about assessing reality and taking appropriate action. It’s not about waiting for the magic fairy of profitability to fly in the window.
    This type of wishful thinking results, for instance, in sales forecasts that crutch on winning huge amounts of business in the last two weeks of the fourth quarter. Which ain’t gonna happen.
    Similarly, it turns up in implementations plans that walk backwards from an unrealistic release date. Healthcare.gov is a perfect example, but I’ve seen the same thing in small organizations, when managers grossly underestimate the amount of time and work it takes to create a truly great product.
    The Cure: “Don’t hope and pray. Plan then act.”

    Friday, March 14, 2014

    Samsung’s Secret Weapon Isn’t the Galaxy S5 - TIME

    Samsung’s Secret Weapon Isn’t the Galaxy S5

    http://business.time.com/2014/02/26/samsung-gear-fit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

    It's this innovative wrist band
    03 Gear_Fit_Orange_04
    Samsung
    Samsung’s upcoming high-end smartphone, the Galaxy S5, was supposed to be the company’s marquee announcement at this week’s Mobile World Congress, but another new device ended up stealing the show. Samsung’s new fitness-focused smartwatch, the Gear Fit, may be one of the first wearable gadgets people are actually excited to use.
    Samsung more or less struck out with its first smartwatch last fall, the Galaxy Gear, which people complained was cumbersome and expensive at $299.99. While the company is offering improved iterations of the device with its Gear 2 and Gear Neo, the Gear Fit will have a narrower purpose as a fitness band targeted at health nuts instead of gadget geeks. With a curved 1.84-inch color screen, the Gear Fit should be sleeker and cheaper than its bulkier cousins. While lacking the bevy of apps available on the main Galaxy Gear line, the Gear Fit will still be able to display email and text notifications when synched up with a smartphone and even control a phone’s music. The device also has a heart rate monitor and can sync up with a health app on the Galaxy S5 phone. The Gear Fit’s simplicity could ultimately be its advantage as it tries to straddle the line between full-featured smartwatches and fitness bands like the Fitbit.
    With so many watches, Samsung is obviously very bullish on the wearables market. That’s for good reason. Research firm Juniper estimates that 13 million wearable smart devices were sold in 2013, and that number will balloon to 130 million by 2018, creating a $19 billion industry. To claim dominance in this market Samsung will have to contend with startups like Pebble, whose smartwatch generated $10 million on Kickstarter, as well as tech giants like Sony. And of course, rumors persist that Apple will enter the wearables sector with an iWatch all its own.


    Read more: Samsung Gear Fit Smartwatch Impresses | TIME.com http://business.time.com/2014/02/26/samsung-gear-fit/#ixzz2vwdCKCx6

    Wednesday, March 12, 2014

    5 Ways to Not Get Rejected on LinkedIn - TIME

    5 Ways to Not Get Rejected on LinkedIn

    http://time.com/12131/5-ways-to-not-get-rejected-on-linkedin/



    By now, most of the Internet has heard about (and commented on) the bizarreresponse a self-professed “passionate advocate” for people looking for work gave a young job-seeker who had the nerve to contact her on LinkedIn.
    “Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky,” Kelly Blazek wrote, blasting what she called Diana Mekota’s “sense of entitlement” and noting that the “green” 26-year-old job-seeker “has nothing to offer me.”
    While it’s stunning in its nastiness as well as its stupidity (apparently it never occurred to Blazek, who bragged about her “960+… top-tier marketing connections,” that Mekota might share her tirade with the entire Internet), there’s a lesson for the rest of us here.
    No, you’ll probably never receiving a scathing reply that goes viral in response to a LinkedIn request — you’ll just be ignored. If you’re looking for a job, you can’t afford to shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to cultivating your LinkedIn network: Recruiting software company Jobvite found in a recent survey that 94% of recruiters use the site to search for candidates. So, here’s what career experts say you should do to get potential connections to hit “reply” instead of “delete.”
    Keep it short. “Be conscientious of their time,” says Jobvite CMO Kimberley Kasper. “If you’re going to send an email for advice, don’t send 20 paragraphs. Be quick and to the point. The more succinct you are, the more likely the person is to respond.”
    Play up mutual connections. If you’re looking for a job and you have a good sense of what title would be responsible for hiring someone in your position, do an advanced search for that title within a 50-mile radius, advises social media expert Patrick O’Malley. “The ones that show up at the top are second-level connections,” he says, which means you have a point of common ground. “Use the name of the common connection in your subject line and you’re more likely to get the attention of that person,” O’Malley says.
    Don’t ask for a job. “No job seeker should ever reach out to a connection for the first time for the purpose of asking for a job. That comes after the relationship is established,” Lauren Milligan, CEO of resume and job coaching company ResuMAYDAY. What do you say instead? “The truth is that I connect and engage with people much quicker when they tell me they read an article in which I was quoted, or that I had recently helped one of their associates with a job search dilemma,” Milligan says. “If nothing else, tell me what jumped out at you in my LinkedIn profile.”
    Make yourself useful. “Follow them on LinkedIn to see the status updates they post,” O’Malley says. “If they ever ask a question or they’re particularly interested in something, see if you can find the solution to their problem.” Send them the answer or some useful resources in a connection request, he says. “Now, all of a sudden, they look at you as a valuable resource.” Again, don’t fish for a job, but O’Malley says it’s OK to say something like, “I’d like to connect with you in case you’re ever looking for someone with my skills in the future.”
    Don’t drag out the exchange. “Understand that if you’re a job seeker and asking for help, the person may respond maybe once or twice and will not go back and forth 10 different times and respond to the question several times over,” Kasper says. “Know when enough is enough.”