e-commerce drama in Europe
The likes of Amazon, Worldpay and Stripe are voicing increasing worries that e-tailers are blissfully unaware of the Second Payment Services Directive (aka PSD2) that will come into force across the EU from THIS September.
The rules are being put in place to reduce the incidence of fraud and will apply to most transactions over EUR30 which will require a Strong Customer Authentication (or SCA) to proceed otherwise they will fail.
Given that Amazon’s famous 1-click checkout process will be covered by this, you can bet that there are loads of smaller companies out there who will suffer a loss of transactions as a result.
Interestingly, a survey conducted by analysts at 451 Research and Stripe shows that fewer than half of businesses who responded expect to be ready by the deadline.
I think that PSD2 is to 2019 what GDPR was to 2018 in that it’s another piece of European legislation that is going to catch companies unawares!
New developments for Apple
The other thing I wanted to talk about today was Apple.
There were some interesting changes outlined at Apple’s WorldWide Developers’ Conference in San Jose as the company said that iTunes, which started the digital music revolution, is to be replaced by updated Music, TV and Podcast apps.
On the hardware front, there was a definite de-emphasis of the iPhone in favour of its Watch, Mac and iPads as they were respectively decoupled from the iPhone as a common central device.
Developers were encouraged to think “outside” the iPhone for the future as the company continues its efforts to make up for the maturing of handset growth with other business areas that have been relatively peripheral up until now.
The process won’t happen overnight, but I think that Apple is going in the right direction!
