What does this have to do with payment?

So where does my skepticism come from? Having majored in marketing, I learned to question every marketing message. What I did not realize back in college is that "news" about some magic fix for problems such as SPAM would also typically be filled with a lot of wishful thinking and result in lots of unfullfilled promises. How many times have you seen articles about some consortium of big name brand companies coming together to solve the big problems of Phishing or Spam? I found it quite entertaining the other day, as an AT&T/Yahoo customer, that the Spam filter associated with my AT&T/Yahoo email account placed a promotional email from none other than Yahoo Greetings itself in the Spam filter bucket. Yup, this is art, not science and it likely always will be. GET OVER IT!!!

How does this relate to payment? Payment is all about trust. We have to trust our systems and providers. However, it is very difficult to get the general public to realize that no system is ever going to be perfect and that they have to accept some responsbility and take some risk in order to have access to various payment products and services. Instead we bombard everyone inside and outside the industry with messages about magic fixes. In the end, all this does is perpetuate a larger and larger gap in expectations versus reality and reduce the notion of what Trust even means. Thus we have a vicious cycle and no end in sight.

Oh well, back to watching college football...