The application of pre-paid cash card for consumers

What is Pre-paid Cash Card?
It is a card that has monetary value preloaded which is a limit that a consumer can use so one can have budget over his spending by loading reasonable amount of money onto the card. The value in the card will reduce each time the consumer uses it and the consumer can reload the card anytime.

Examples of pre-paid cash card
Touch 'n Go is a prepaid cash card in Malaysia. It can be used to pay toll fares at highways, for major public transports, selected parking sites, and so on. Consumer can reload the card at ATM, train stations, toll plazas, etc with the range from RM20 to RM500. Touch 'n Go makes it convenient and efficient for consumers to pay for low value but high frequency transactions. Touch 'n Go can also be used in selected retail outlets like Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, 7-Eleven, Carefour, etc.


Octopus card is prepaid cash card used in Hong Kong. It is primarily used to pay public transport fares for convenience. The application of Octopus card is extended for purchases in retail outlets. Consumers can also access to buildings and schools and identify themselves by using this card. It has made their daily life easier.

Benefits of pre-paid cash card
- Convenient
- Efficient
- Safer than cash
- Avoid from bringing small change
- Prevent from long queue

Wikipedia links for:
- Touch 'n Go
- Octopus Card

Mobile payment system in Malaysia: Its potentials and consumers' adoption strategies

Nowadays, most of the people are using mobile payment. What is mobile payment? It is basically a point-of-sale payment made through a mobile device, such as a cellular telephone, a smartphone, or a personal digital assistant (PDA). Mobile payment also referred to as mobile web payment or WAP billing.By using mobile payment, a person with a wireless device could pay for items in a store or settle a restaurant bill without interacting with any staff member, it can also be used to purchase any number of digital or hard goods, such as music, videos, ringtones, games, wallpapers, books, magazines, tickets and other hard goods. Examples of mobile payment are mobile ticketing, mobile banking and much more.

Potentials of mobile payment

• Improved user convenience
  Mobile payment provides a more convenient way to pay for their bills, just by a few clicks on mobile device, the user may be able to make payment through their mobile. Instead of make payment by going to the particular place, as the mobile payment is operating 24 hours everyday, the user can make payment at anytime, anywhere they want, they can even make payment either at home or their office. Thus, this can eliminates the hassle to queue up just to pay for the bills and therefore can save user’s time.
  
  
• Security, privacy and trust
  Mobile payment ensures private and secure transmissions. By using mobile payment, the personal details and payment history of the user are protected. Moreover, users account is protected from hacker or terrorists because the users need to key in passwords in order to login to their account.
  
  
• Simplicity
  User does not need to go through sophisticated steps in order to make payment by their mobile device. They just have to activate their telephones by logging into websites. After registering their mobile telephone numbers, they can enjoy the services, after registering it, there just a few clicks and they are able to make payment through their mobile device.
  

Consumers’ Adoption strategies

Most common mobile payment system used is mobile banking; most busy working adults usually use mobile banking to pay for their bills, such as electricity bill and water bill. Besides, they also use mobile banking to make transaction and pay for their credit card debts, by doing so; they can save their time because they don’t need to queue up at the bank.

Credit Card debts: Cause and Prevention

Are you a credit card holder?
First of all, before we talk in depth about credit card debts we should know what credit card is. Credit card is a system of payment named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system in which the issuer lends money to the consumer or the user to be paid later to the merchant. A credit card allows the consumer to 'revolve' their balance, at the cost of having interest charged. Most credit cards are issued by local banks or credit unions, and are the same shape and size, as specified by the ISO 7810 standard.


Credit card holder is the holder of the card used to make a purchase or payment or the consumer of the card. It cannot be ignored that credit really bring convenient to the consumer but at the same time it also comes along with the hidden problems that might be easily overlook by the card holder especially debts. Credit card debt is an example of unsecured consumer debt accessed through credit cards. So, to be a smart consumer of credit card, you should always keep track to the transactions that you made by using credit card in order not to be in debts.


Why credit card debts??
It was reported that there is increasingly growth of bankruptcies which majority caused by unmanageable credit card debts. Debt results when a client of a credit card company purchases an item or service through the card system. Debt accumulates and increases via interest and penalties when the consumer does not pay the company for the money he or she has spent.


Cause: Missing Payments or Late Payments. The fastest way to get into credit difficulties is by not repaying the minimum payment required or only makes the minimum payment of the charges of your credit card. Even worse, cardholder will be forced to go bankrupt. The results of not paying the debt on time are that the banks, credit card companies, or other financial institutions is a late payment penalty will be charged and reporting of the late payment to credit rating agencies which will affect the user’s credit rating. Additionally, the late payment penalty itself will increase the amount of debt the consumer has.
Prevention: Set up a Direct Debit for the minimum amount and pay off the debts as much as possible of the remaining balance to keep it low.

Cause: Spend, Spend, and Spend. In fact, please do not, do not and do not do this! Making payment or spending money on credit card is borrowing money from the banks or the credit card companies. It is a debt and consumers must repay it at some point of time. In other words, you are spending your own future money! Sometimes consumers might be not realize about that and obtain a purchase which actually cannot afford by them. Thus, it is easily make themselves in debts when they are not noticed that they are spending out of their financial ability.
Prevention: Use the card to obtain a purchase that you can afford provided you can pay off the cost over time or spend by using a debit card. Only spend what you can afford!

Cause: The End of the Honeymoon. It is commonly for nowadays credit card companies offer credit cardholder with 0% interest rate in order to attract more consumers to apply for a card. But, every special offer must come to an end. The credit card companies will transfer from 0% balance to low introductory interest rates. When the special rate ends, the interest rates will shoot up, and a small debt can grow rapidly, particularly if only the minimum repayments are being made.
Prevention: There is no point in being loyal to a card that has outlived its special rate, you can just pay off the outstanding balance and get a new card with a lower rate for your purchases. Try to make a note of the expiry date of all special deals to make sure that all transactions go through before interest becomes due.

Cause: Holding Bunches of Card. It is advised that not to hold more than 8 cards at any one time as this will adversely affect credit ratings. Besides, when you have more than 1 credit card on hand, you will be easily overspend your money and get yourself in trouble with huge debts. By carrying too many credit cards with you at a time, the cards might in danger of being stolen or lost and being used by somebody unknown. Thus when these happened, you might found that you are horribly in debt with the credit card companies.
Prevention: Clear any outstanding balances and cancel your credit cards formally which are no longer used. It is also advised that shoppers to only carry one card at a time to reduce the risk of your card be stolen or lost.

A Little Tips…
You can often detect warning signs of being in too much debt long before your receive the collection notices. If more than 2 or 3 danger signs apply to you should consider getting some help with your finances.

• You have begun charging essentials like food and daily expenses to your credit cards.


• You make only minimum payments on your charge card accounts each month.


• You are at the limit of your credit cards, or have too many credit cards.


• You are unsure how much you owe creditors.
  

Just let me stop here for this topic, and hope that everyone of you can make use of it. Ciao!

~SiuLing~


Further more

• Credit Card Debt


• Head into the new millenniumwithout that credit card debt


• The Truth About Credit Card Debt

Electronic currency

Do you know what electronic currency is?

Electronic money is also known as e-money, electronic cash, electronic currency, digital money, digital cash or digital currency refers to money and scrips which is exchanged only electronically.‘E’ is the first letter of the word ‘electronic’ and ‘currency’ is a money system. You can think of e-currency as Internet money. Just like in normal everyday monetary currencies, electronic currencies are also varied. Each one of them is backed by an underlying monetary currency or in some cases, even valuable or precious metals such as gold.

Benefits of using e-currency service on internet

The e-currency enables its users and merchants to conduct e-commerce services as in buying and selling products and services via internet. It also provides both the buyers and merchant the convenient way to send and receive the payment just by clicking the confirm button and the deal is done.

E-currency services allow people not to use their credit cards while making payment through internet as it exposure the card’s holder the risk of card information being known by the merchants who they do not know well and most likely are located far away from the users.

Banks also benefited from the application of e-currency which enables its customers send money from one place to another without using cash. Using e-currency, customers can pay bills, change money from one account to another, and pay for things they want to buy such as food, a car, a television or a service such as Forex Trading.

Example of corporation that provide E-micropayment systems:

Paystone Technologies Corp

Paystone Technologies Corp. founded in 2001, is a private Internet payment and money transfer company keen to providing secure, easy, real time Internet transactions. It also provides an inexpensive online payment method without the risk of chargebacks from fraudulent credit card use. Paystone can efficiently handle small financial transactions (micropayments) as low as $0.25 which would also beneficial to its users.

The three features that provided by Paystone Technologies Corp. are:

1. The Online personal account provides individual with a secure way to buy products online or send and receive money real time. Besides, it also allows the individual to get their income which generated from their website quickly, easily and inexpensively. Furthermore, Paystone also provides an email money transfer option which the account holder can send funds to the email address of anyone in selected countries around the world. The recipient of the funds just need to signs up for Paystone in order to cash withdraw the money from their local bank account.
2. The Merchant accounts and micropayments realise the full benefits of Paystone solution to maximize the revenue of large online merchant by reducing the cost, limitation, risks of using credit cards and solve some other e-commerce issues.
3. The Group Pay Account is an efficient, easily implemented solution for companies who pay a larger numbers of individuals for commissions, payroll, rebates or incentives. Group pay also eliminates the high cost of issuing, disbursing and enable the users to manage their cheques in more efficient way.

How to safeguard our personal and financial data?

In nowadays world, almost all computer users are internet users, such as you and I also are users of internet. Internet is a public network which connecting computers throughout the world and this is the reason why people always say that internet is a borderless world. As a user of internet, it is unavoidable that we might need to register at some websites in order to become member of those websites or to subscribe the services provided. When during the registration process, it might be necessary for us to fill in some personal information to complete it. This has exposed the users of internet to the risk of losing their privacy or said to become the victims of identity theft.


Since today’s world is a keep on seeking for advancement, impossible is nothing, that’s mean everything can be happened and sometimes may be out of your imagination. Thus, it is important for internet users to always be alert and beware when you are asked to submit your personal data which including your name, address, contact number, gender, date of birth, e-mail address etc. and especially your financial data such as credit card’s number or bank account’s number when doing online funding transactions.

It is to be informed that identity theft is one of the nation’s fastest growing crimes. In 2003 alone, it was reported that 9.9 million people were victims of identity theft. Therefore, in order to protect ourselves from becoming one of the victims of identity theft, it is necessary for us to learn about how to safeguard our personal and financial data.

So, what can we do?

• Do not reveal any personal information or particularly passwords to anyone. Please always remember to log out properly after visit any website that contains privacy data to ensure that nobody can access into your personal information especially Financial Data Center before leaving the website.


• Close the browser window when using a public computer. You can avoid your personal information and mail reading by other users by doing this particularly when using a computer that shared in public places such as school computer lab, Cyber cafe etc.


• Avoid using passwords that are easily to be guessed. For example, your date of birth, contact number, identity card number and etc. This kind of information are not encouraged to write down or recorded in whichever type of medium and never carry it along with you in your wallet or handbag.


• Install antispyware and antivirus software. Some popular antivirus software such as AVG, BitDefender and Kaspersky are commonly used by computer users currently in trend. Antivirus helps to protect personal information, financial data and etc to be hacked or stolen by other users.


• Using access control mechanism to limit actions that can be performed by other users. Web owner can determine who can use the network resource and what resource can be used with the help of the mechanism to certain the most information or data that can be accessed by different authorised users.


• Keep your card close. No matter when you are out shopping or eating out in any places, you should watch how personnel handle your card when making payment and never ever left or throw the receipt away in a public place but take it with you to home.
  
• Pay attention when using an ATM. When you are doing transactions by using ATM, you should always take notice to those people who are a little bit too interested with your transaction and cover the keypad when entering your PIN to avoid others from knowing it.
• Keep credit cards to a minimum. It is advised that not to hold a number of credit cards in hand and keep only the credit card which actually use while other credit cards which no longer to be used should be destroyed appropriately by shredding them.

As conclusion, it is important for us to build up a community which is willing to work together to help to prevent personal and financial data leakage to identity theft and always be a smart users when using internet so to keep ourselves from suffer of advancement of technology.

For further details, try to have a look on Understand and Cope with Identity Theft, Smart Card Alliance Releases Security, Privacy Guidelines and Identity Theft Affects Internet Marketers and Business Owners Too!

Even more about AVG (AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0.1), BitDefender, and Kaspersky!

~SiuLing~

The application of 3rd party certification programme in Malaysia

3rd party certification is the verification of the public or private key’s holder by a trusted third party known as Certificate Authority to ensure that the web sites are genuine by using digital certificate. It authenticates web sites, individuals, and software companies so that consumers or people using the websites can trust and rely on them.



3rd party certification programme has become increasingly important in the world of internet. The most famous 3rd party certification programme is VeriSign. Another 3rd party certification programme is MSC Trustgate, which is an affiliate of VeriSign incorporated in year 1999, and it is Malaysia’s premier licensed Certification Authority.

Why VeriSign?

The Internet Infrastructure of VeriSign enables confidential information or important data to be delivered across the net safely so that the users can do their transactions with confidence. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate encrypts sensitive information when people doing online transactions. Sometimes, some web sites have encrypted https connection where the users can see “https” in the URL.

A Certificate Authority verifies the identity of a certificate owner with the unique, authenticated information contained in the certificate. When a user points to a secured domain, SSL handshake will authenticate the web site and the user. The user can see the authenticated organization name when he clicks on the closed padlock in the browser window or certain SSL trust marks, such as the VeriSign Secured Seal.

The authenticated organization name is even prominently displayed in high-security browsers and the address bar will turn green when an Extended Validation SSL Certificate is detected. If the information does not match or the certificate has expired, an error message or warning will be displayed.

I think the implementation of 3rd party certification programme can extensively improve customers trust since the web sites they are dealing with are certified as genuine web sites. This enables them to do transactions and transfer their information without much worry that their information will be revealed by impostors. Therefore, it is essential for the implementation of such programme in the e-commerce world.

The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

If you think no one would be interested in your personal data, think again. The reality is that anyone can be a victim of data theft like your financial accounts, your credit card records and information, your identify information and your other personal asset. In fact, according to a source which is from the International Federation Trade Commission body, there are more than 50 million victims every year worldwide. It is often difficult to know how thieves obtained their victims' personal information, and while it definitely can happen offline, in many cases start when online data is stolen.

There are dishonest people all around and in the Internet. But you can't judge an online operator's trustworthiness by the look in the eye. It's remarkably simple for online scammers to impersonate a legitimate business, so you need to know whom you're dealing with. If you're shopping online, check out the seller before you buy. A legitimate business or individual seller should give you a physical address and a working telephone number at which they can be contacted in case you have problems.

When it comes to crimes like information theft, you can't entirely control whether you will become a victim. But here are some of the ways that you can minimize your risk while you’re online.

If you're asked for your personal data like your name, email or home address, phone number, bank account numbers, Socso or EPF number. Learn how it is going to be used, and how it will be protected, before you share it.

Don't open unsolicited or unknown email messages. If you do get an email or pop-up message asking for personal information, don't reply or click on the link in the message. Most importantly, do not to respond to solicitations for your personal or financial information.

Example of pop-up message

If you believe there may be a need for such information by a company with whom you have an account or placed an order, contact that company directly in a way you know to be genuine. Never send your personal information via email because email is not a secure transmission method. Most email programs have email filters built-in to the application. Set your email filters, so you can limit the amount of unsolicited email you receive.

If you are shopping online, be careful about providing your personal or financial data through any company's website without taking measures to reduce the risk. There are some indicators that show vendors have taken measures to secure their sites such as a lit lock icon on the browser's status bar or a website URL that begins "https:" (the "s" stands for "secure"). Unfortunately, no indicator is foolproof; some scammers have forged security icons.

Example of webisite where data transfered are secured and protected

Read website privacy policies. They should explain what personal information the website collects, how the information is used, and whether it is provided to third parties. The privacy policy also should tell you whether you have the right to see what information the website has about you, whether they provide or sell your information to third parties, and what security measures the company takes to protect your information. If you don't see a privacy policy or if you can't understand it, please do not proceed with it.

No system in this world is completely secure. If you have important files stored on your computer, copy them onto a removable backup or disc, and store them in a secure place in a different place or building than your computer. If a different location isn't practical, consider encryption software. Encryption software scrambles a message or a file in a way that can be reversed only with a specific password. At the same time, make sure you keep your original software start-up disks handy and accessible for use in the event of an operating system crash.

Example of encryption software