by Isla MacFarlane
All internet banking security seems to do is make it harder for me to access my own money...
I
read recently that the Middle East is set for a new wave of cybercrime.
I feel sorry for any cybercriminal who wants to hack into my internet
bank account – I can barely access it myself. The process seems to
involve cracking more passwords, codes and devices than a James Bond
movie.
First, I have to dig out my ‘customer relationship number’ (which I
have scribbled on a scrap of paper buried at the bottom of my handbag)
and key in my identity as eight soulless digits while wondering why I
can’t just give my name, or a clever user name if they fear duplication –
something I wouldn’t have to dredge my handbag for.
Next, I’m asked for my password, which must be eight characters with
at least two numbers, so my childhood pet or mother’s name – or anything
that I might have a hope of remembering – is out of the question.
Naturally, I end up resetting my password nearly every time I log in. If
that wasn’t bad enough, they insist I change my password on a regular
basis. So if I have managed to formulate a password that I actually
remember, no sooner is it etched into my memory than it’s time to start
the taxing process again.
Then I have to dive back into my handbag to find my ‘secure ID’, a
little box which spews out random codes I need to access my money. The
numbers change every sixty seconds, meaning I have to frantically key in
the code before the countdown is up. The time constraint wouldn’t
matter so much if I could type out the numbers on a keyboard. Instead, I
have to navigate the bank’s ‘virtual’ keyboard, which the bank insists
is more secure despite the fact that anyone looking over my shoulder
will have a much better view of the numbers I’m clicking than they would
if I was typing.
By the time I’ve clicked in the code, which takes twice as long as
using a keyboard, the numbers have almost always changed forcing me back
to square one. It’s as frustrating as fumbling for your keys only to
find that the locks have been changed.
While I appreciate the investment that must go into shoring up
defences against cybercrime, if they spent a fraction of that on
usability and customer experience I wouldn’t have to feel like a
computer hacker every time I try to access my account. If Apple can
invent a device even a self-confessed technophobe like me can operate
without an instruction manual, surely there is an easier way of doing
secure internet banking?
What’s really depressing is that after I’ve finally cracked the
security and accessed my account, the effort hardly seems worth it when I
see the balance… I’m pretty sure that any cybercriminal would feel the
same!
For more blogs form CPI Financial, Visit our website.http://www.cpifinancial.net/blog
by Sarah Owermohle
Portland Communications’ second How Africa Tweets study has come out
right as a massive Twitterstorm rages in South Africa over the Oscar
Pistorius trial.
I’ll
admit, at the risk of sounding like I’ve been anything less than
totally productive these past two weeks, that I have been obsessively
following the Oscar Pistorius murder trial. It wasn’t exactly my plan,
but as all of my Twitter regulars—Sky News’ Alex Crawford
(@AlexCrawfordSky), The Guardian’s David Smith (@SmithinAfrica) and
BBC’s Andrew Harding (@BBCAndrewH)—posted trial updates by the minute,
the conversation quickly consumed my Twitter feed. By the end of day
one, I had my #OscarPistorius page fixed open as I watched the
conversation flow. I wouldn’t miss a thing.
So I was more than a little intrigued when I saw that Portland Communications had released new data on How Africa Tweets last week. Portland’s
last report, collating and analysing tweets from the last three months
of 2011, had been an interesting snapshot of twitter usage on the
continent in the face of the Arab Spring.
The newest study found that in the last quarter of 2013, the top five
most active cities were in South Africa (Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and
Durban) and Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria). Regionally, Nairobi, Kenya was
the most active city in East Africa and the sixth most active on the
continent, with 123,078 geo-tagged tweets in Q4 2013, while Accra, Ghana
was the most active city in West Africa and the eighth most active on
the continent, with 78,575 geo-tagged tweets in Q4 2013.
Geo-tagging means precisely what it sounds like: a tweet is embedded
with the latitude/longitude location of the tweeter. If that sounds a
bit terrifying, it’s because it is; a lot of people don’t use
the geo-tag feature. Seeing as the Portland study was based solely off
of geo-tagged tweets, I began to wonder if we weren’t getting the full
picture: apparently football was talked about more than Mandela, and
Johannesburg’s Orlando Pirates more than any international team. I asked
Nanjira Sambuli, a Nairobi-based mathematician and researcher with iHub, her thoughts on the study.
“Now, globally, less than two per cent of tweets are geo-tagged…it
follows that few Twitter users in Africa activate this feature. It has privacy implications,
for instance, something that frequent users are likely to be aware of,”
Sambuli said. “Geo-tagging easily creates a sampling bias issue.”
Not that geo-tags aren’ valuable, she pointed out, it’s just that they’re not used all that often in Africa.
“Geo-tagging is a useful tool, but highly unreliable, especially as a
primary or sole metric for analysing tweeting activity in any context.
For instance, it was super useful in analysing the Occupy Gezi protests
in Turkey last year, because Twitter users consciously geo-tagged their
tweets; approx. 90 per cent of 2 million tweets generated within the first 24 hours were geo-tagged.
But there’s much more that should go into analysing whether tweeting
activity is based in a location at any given time,” she said.
“I must say, I also find it surprising that in the two reports
released by Portland Communications, none has acknowledged or disclaimed
the shortcomings or limitations of geo-tagging. From an academic
perspective, this is something that should accompany every mention or
citation of their findings,” Sambuli added.
But when I asked Portland account manager Matt Gould
about the geo-tag method, he argued it was in fact the most reliable
assessment: “Using geo-location allows us to be certain about each
tweet’s true location. Some studies use a tweeter’s stated location (in
their bios) but this doesn’t allow any level of certainty since there
are no rules or limits about stating one’s location—an individual can
note a different city, country or even planet if they want.
“While tracking geo-located tweets does not enable us to capture
every single tweet coming out of each city, as many users do not enable
locations services, it allows us to develop an indicative picture of
overall activity,” he said.
Which brings us to event-inspired tweets, like the drama-filled Oscar
Pistorius trial or the harrowing Westgate Mall attack. Could these
tweets give us a window into twitter usage in Africa? While the How Africa Tweets study was limited to the last three months of 2013, it did indicate some twitter behavior on incident-based conversation.
“Major local or regional events will definitely have an impact on the
level of Twitter activity in any given location,” Gould said. “The
death of Nelson Mandela did occur during the period of time we were
tracking and we saw a great amount of related activity. The day of
Mandela’s death [showed] the largest peak in activity across the
continent and his passing was one of the most talked about issues
overall, with hashtags like #MandelaMemorial, #Mandela and
#RIPNelsonMandela appearing across the continent.”
While the Pistorius trial and the Westgate attack fall outside the
scope of Portland’s study, each has proved a window into Twitter
activity in Africa: this
analysis of the Westgate attack by Sambuli herself found that the
incident was first reported by citizens on the scene, mirroring Twitter
use in other disasters such as the Boston Marathon attack. iRevolution
eventually reported more than 740,000 Westgate Mall tweets during the
four-day hostage situation. Tweets were not limited to geo-tags, but
rather hashtags (#Westgate, #Westlands, etc.) and other metrics
(iRevolution’s full regional breakdown is here).
The Pistorius trial, playing out in real time under the hashtags
#OscarPistorius and #OscarTrial, is interesting in another way. The
trial—in an unprecedented decision, the first to be televised in South
Africa—has generated massive debates on the guilt of Pistorius, the
weakness of witnesses, and the ruthlessness of lead defense lawyer Barry
Roux. South Africa-based digital media company Fuseware reported
that there had been a total of 19,809 mentions of Pistorius from 9,213
South Africans on Twitter by the second day of the trial, and that half
of them had been made the first day. The company estimated that there
were more than 100,000 conversations on Twitter by the end of the week,
and we have about a month of trial to go. Fuseware, it appears, also did
not limit themselves to geo-tags.
There is definitely huge interest in the future of Twitter, and
social media in general, in Africa. As smartphones become more
affordable and internet more readily accessible, Twitter usage on the
continent is rising. It’s a matter of time until brands jump in on the
buzz—Portland already found that Adidas, Samsung, and Mangum ice cream
ranked among the top hashtags at the end of 2013.
In the meantime though, we are still scrambling to find an entirely
accurate tool for analysing Twitter use in Africa. However it’s worth
noting that this is an international challenge—while we can all agree
that everyone uses Twitter a lot, it’s a notoriously unruly social media
site, and misleading numbers (or straight-up hoaxes) abound. Gould’s
point about geo-tagging is an entirely valid one, as checking someone’s
true location when analysing tweets is still a pretty big issue.
Nonetheless, geo-tags don’t give the full picture. “In the future, it
would be great if other factors were considered before such findings
are put out and cited widely. There’s an appetite for statistics from
Africa, and even more so on social media use/number of social media
users, but we have a responsibility to apply properly devised
methodologies to surface these,” Sambuli concluded.
For more blogs form CPI Financial, Visit our website.http://www.cpifinancial.net/blog
Teeny tiny business owner Tamara Pitelen is feeling her way blindly
through the process of getting an online payment gateway for her
website… in this blog, she is horrified to discover the fees charged by
the banks… will it bring everything to a crashing halt?
I
feel like such a fool. I really should have known there would be
another truck-sized spanner about to hit me in the head in my ongoing
mission to get an online payment gateway for my website.
Am I surprised? No. Am I bitter? I’m bitterer than a mouthful of coffee grinds laced with lemon juice.
I’ve just been slapped down by the latest obstacle in the story of my
attempt to first open a business bank account and then get a payment
gateway for the website of my very small magazine publishing business. To read the story so far, click here.
So, here’s the latest chapter in the tale. I’ve just had my meeting
with Imran Zaidi, my relationship manager from Mashreq Bank. The idea
was that we would meet up so I could sign and stamp about 12,000
documents (ok, about eight documents) and show Imran the original copies
of items like my trade license, my passport, etc. It should be
mentioned that Imran had traipsed all the way to my offices in Media
City, saving me a trip to his office in Dubai Outlet Zone. Gold star for
that kind of service, Mashreq.
We had met in a café, I had a green tea, Imran had a cappuccino and
things were going fine. That was until I noticed something on an
addendum document that read, ‘One time set-up fee: $2,500’.
“What’s this set-up fee Imran, do I need to pay $2,500?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right…” he said.
“Why is this the first time I’ve ever heard about this fee?”
“Did Hassaan not give you the details in a proposal?”
“Nope.”
Imran gets on the phone to Hassaan and a brief discussion takes place
regarding my not having been told about the fee schedule – apparently
some documents were meant to be sent to me but they weren’t. While Imran
whispered into his mobile, I worked out that $2,500 is just under AED
10,000. And guess what, it turns out that the set-up fee isn’t the only
fee I’d not been told about. Imran gets off the phone and tells me there
is also an annual fee of $2,500 (AED 9,200) as well as a security fee
of $10,000 (AED 37,000), which is refundable but that is a moot point if
you don’t have it in the first place.
I’ll spare you the tears and histrionics that ensued over the next
few minutes as the icy fingers of disappointment gripped me about the
throat and squeezed. Silly me had assumed that taking a three per cent
cut of every transaction would be sufficient payment for the bank’s
efforts, how naïve and innocent that belief seems now. It was going to
cost me about AED 60,000 to get this payment gateway set up – even
though I was not even certain it would generate any revenue.
“Stop everything then Imran,” I said bitterly [and dramatically]. “I
don’t have the money to do this. I’m going to have to forget the whole
thing.” [Sob.]
“No, wait,” Imran said. “I will talk to my compliance department and
put a special case forward that would waive the annual fee and the
security deposit. But the set-up fee is non-negotiable because this is
passed onto us from the credit card agencies…”
So, I may be able to get the gateway for about AED 9,200 that’s if
Imran can get the other fees waived. And that is a monumentally huge
‘IF’, he tells me.
Still, that’s AED 9,200 that I didn’t think I’d need to find. This is
on top of the AED 25,000 I need to pay this week to renew my trade
license. What to do? The outgoings for a shoestring budget start-up seem
never-ending, I’m beginning to see why so many fall at the first few
hurdles. Just FYI, Imran tells me that in general, a small business
should expect to pay the bank a minimum of about AED 15,000 to get an
online payment gateway up and running. After that there is an ongoing
transaction fee of 3.5 per cent (but they will reduce it to three per
cent).
By the end of this meeting, three things are set in motion. First,
Imran has gone off to make the argument to his compliance department
that the Mashreq Bank-generated fees should be waived in my case.
Second, I’m deciding whether I can come up with AED 9,200 assuming the
compliance department feels sorry for me and obliges. Third, I’m back to
square one on the ‘there must be another way’ thinking process.
THREE WEEKS LATER, ‘COME BACK PAYPAL, ALL IS FORGIVEN’
I haven’t heard a word from Imran since the meeting
described above so I’m assuming his compliance department laughed in his
face at the suggestion of waiving fees. So I am back to the start and
still asking the question, ‘how will I take payment from people via my
website?’ It looks like it’s going to have to be our old frenemy Paypal.
Apparently, you can link a Paypal account to a credit card and retrieve
funds that way if you’re in a country like the UAE where you can’t link
it to a bank account. We’ll see. I’m having another meeting with my web
developer next week to discuss. I’ll let you know how that goes.
THREE WEEKS AND ONE DAY LATER
I have to take back what I said about not having heard a word from
Imran since our last meeting. He just called me and surprised me with
the news that the Mashreq compliance department has agreed to waive all
the usual fees for setting up my online payment gateway except the AED
9,200 one. I did not expect that! According to Imran, they have never
done this before for anyone. Before me, the cheapest price for this was
AED 15,000. So, next step is that my developer will test the integration
link (Notice how I write that like I know what it means?). But there is
a twist to this tale... I've just been told about another option,
called Payfort. I'll be looking into that and writing another blog about
it, so stay tuned if this is the kind of thing you're interested in.
For more blogs form CPI Financial, Visit our website.http://www.cpifinancial.net/blog
