Banks Look to Cellphones toReplace A.T.M. Cards手機取代提款卡 美銀行力推
文/Stacy Cowley
譯/陳韋廷(4/7)
Wallets can be lost, stolen or forgotten, but most people today would not be caught dead without their phones.
Banks understand, and are grabbing on to that trend. Customers who do not want to fumble around in their wallet for their ATM card — or who have misplaced it for the umpteenth time — will soon be able to unlock cash dispensers’ coffers by using their phone.
JPMorgan Chase, which has more ATMs in the United States — 18,000 — than any other bank, has activated this technology on a few hundred machines in four test cities, including Miami and San Francisco. Six thousand more are upgraded and ready to go.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo plan to introduce cardless options to all their machines by the end of the year. And while swiping an ATM card may not exactly seem onerous, bankers think going card-free will be a hit with consumers.
“It’s about having the choice,” said Jonathan Velline, Wells Fargo’s head of ATM and branch banking. “If you’ve lost your card or left home without your wallet, chances are you still have your smartphone in your hand.”
But of course, any new financial technology brings with it new security holes.
For decades banks have battled “skimming,” in which criminals sabotage ATMs to steal the information off a card and use it to clear out people’s accounts. The replacement of magnetic stripe cards with chip cards significantly reduced that problem, but mobile access brings in new worries.
One Chase customer recently had $2,900 stolen from her account through the bank’s new cardless system — which she had never used. A thief got her online banking user name and password, installed Chase’s mobile app on his or her phone, and used it to withdraw cash. Unlike most cardless systems, Chase’s does not require customers to enter their four-digit PIN at the cash machine.
Chase refunded the customer’s lost money and immediately made security changes. “We’ve put safeguards in place to protect our customers,” said Michael Fusco, a Chase spokesman. The bank’s system still does not require PINs, but Chase is confident it can detect and prevent similar attacks, he said.
Other banks have fared better, and say their fraud rates on mobile ATM transactions are significantly lower than those for traditional card-swipe withdrawals.
Wintrust Financial, which operates community banks in Illinois and Wisconsin, added cardless access to all its 250 cash machines nearly three years ago. Thanks to multiple layers of security, there has been no fraud so far, said Thomas P. Ormseth, a senior vice president at the bank. (“Knock on wood,” he added.)
皮夾可能會搞丟、被偷或是忘了帶,但時下多數人怎麼樣也要把手機帶在身邊。銀行業者深明這一點,並正緊緊把握這個趨勢。不想在皮夾裡翻找ATM(自動櫃員機)卡片、或是無數次忘記卡片放在什麼地方的顧客,很快就能用自己手機來為自動提款機的錢箱解鎖。
摩根大通銀行在全美的ATM比任何其他銀行都多,達1萬8000台,該行已在邁阿密、舊金山等四座試點城市的數百台機器啟用這項技術。另有6000台機器亦已升級,準備推出。
美國銀行和富國銀行計畫在年底前把無卡功能選項導入旗下所有機器。雖然刷個ATM卡片似乎並沒那樣麻煩,但銀行業者認為無卡交易會大受消費者歡迎。
富國銀行ATM暨分行金融業務部門主管喬納森.威靈說:「這跟有所選擇有關。若你遺失了卡片或出門沒帶皮夾,你手上很可能仍有智慧手機。」
當然,任何新的金融科技都會帶來新的安全漏洞。
銀行業者數十年來一直跟「側錄」行為對抗,罪犯破壞ATM來竊取卡片資訊,並用來提光人們的帳戶。以晶片卡取代磁條卡大大減少了這個問題,但行動登入則帶來了新的憂慮。
一名摩根大通顧客最近被人透過該銀行新的無卡系統,從她帳戶內偷走2萬9000美元,但該系統她卻從未使用過。有個小偷拿到她的線上銀行使用者名稱與密碼,在他或她的手機上安裝了摩根大通的行動App,並利用它來提款。跟多數無卡系統不同的是,摩根大通銀行的App並未要求顧客在自動提款機上輸入4位數的PIN碼。
摩根大通發言人麥可·法斯科表示,摩根大通退還了該顧客損失的錢,並立即進行安全性更改。「我們已實施安全措施來保護我們的顧客。」他並說,該行系統仍未要求輸入PIN碼,但有信心現在可偵測並防止類似攻擊。
其他銀行的情況更好,並表示它們行動ATM交易的詐欺率遠低於傳統的刷卡取款交易。
銀行業者Wintrust Financial在伊利諾州與威斯康辛州經營社區銀行,在旗下所有250台自動提款機新增無卡登入功能已接近三年。該銀行資深副總裁湯瑪斯.歐姆西斯表示,多虧有多層安全機制,迄今還未發生詐欺事件。(他接著說:「老天保佑。」)
說文解字看新聞
隨著科技不斷發展,金融交易朝無卡化發展已為大勢所趨,而在行動科技的普及下,行動支付更是大行其道,人類交易方式再次迎來變革,消費者只需要利用行動裝置,並開通跟銀行的付款管道,便可在不用現金或信用卡的情況下進行付款。
Fintech(金融科技)是近一兩年才爆紅的新字,由financial與technology組合而成,指的是以資訊科技重塑和創新金融服務的一種新型經濟產業,而此新潮流趨勢正逐漸改變全球金融界的運作方式。
第二段單字fumble指的是「摸索、亂摸」的意思,常搭配about、around、for、after等介系詞使用,例如to fumble around in the dark則為「在黑暗中摸索」之意。此外,同段中的for the umpteenth time有「無數次」的意思,在文中當副詞片語使用,而umpteen意指「很多的、數不清的」,對應的序數詞則為umpteenth。
而俚語not be caught dead則常使用在極度不願意做某事時,表示寧願死也不要做的意思。例句:He wouldn't be caught dead goiing out in a suit other than Chanel.(他寧死也不要穿非香奈兒品牌的西裝出門。)
In a Walt Whitman Novel, Lost for 165 Years, Clues to ‘Leaves of Grass’惠特曼匿名小說 有「草葉集」影子
文/Jennifer Schuessler
譯/田思怡
Readers who picked up The New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper.
The story, which was never reviewed or reprinted, appears to have sunk like a stone.
But now comes another rich revelation: The anonymously published tale was nothing less than a complete novel by Walt Whitman.
The 36,000-word “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,” which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, has been republished online by The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts.
“This is Whitman’s take on the city mystery novel, a popular genre of the day that pitted the ‘upper 10 thousand’ — what we would call the 1 percent — against the lower million,” said David S. Reynolds, a Whitman expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
But it also, Reynolds and other scholars who have seen it say, offers clues to another mystery: how a workaday journalist and mostly conventional poet transformed himself into the author of the sensuous, philosophical, wildly experimental and altogether unclassifiable free verse of “Leaves of Grass.”
That transformation was one that Whitman himself wished to obscure.
That doesn’t faze Zachary Turpin, the graduate student at the University of Houston who found “Jack Engle.”
Turpin called it “rollicking, interesting, beautiful, beautiful and bizarre,” with antic twists, goofy names and suddenly revealed conspiracies that recall “a pre-modern Thomas Pynchon” or even, he ventured, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
This may sound a long way from “Leaves of Grass.” But Jack Engle and the other raffish young male characters, Reynolds said, are reminiscent of the man-of-the-streets persona he created with “Leaves of Grass.”
And then there’s Chapter 19, which Ed Folsom, editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review called “a magical moment.” Here, Jack enters the cemetery at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, and the madcap plot grinds to a halt in favor of reveries about nature, immortality and the oneness of being that strikingly echo the imagery of Whitman’s great work.
1852年3月13日當天拿起紐約時報的讀者,也許在三版看到了一則小廣告,內容是關於紐約時報的對手報預定隔天開始連載的一篇故事。
這篇故事從來沒有被評論家評論過,亦未重新發行,有如石沉大海。
而現在卻有另一個很有意思的發現:這篇匿名刊出的故事正是出自惠特曼的一部完整小說。
這部「傑克.恩格的生活與探險」有3萬6000字,去年夏天被一名研究所學生發現,已由「惠特曼評論季刊」在網路上重新刊出,愛荷華大學出版社也出了紙本。這是一部準狄更斯式的孤兒歷險故事,裡面有一個邪惡的律師、善良的貴格會信徒、假親善的政客、一位性感的西班牙舞者,不少料想不到的情結轉折,以及突兀的敘述轉換。
紐約市立大學研究所中心的惠特曼專家大衛.雷諾茲說:「這是惠特曼的城市(神祕)推理小說作品,是那個年代盛行的小說類別,讓『最上層的一萬人』,也就是我們今天稱為頂端百分之一的人,與下層的一百萬人對峙。」
雷諾茲和其他看過這部小說的學者說,小說也為另一謎團提供了線索:一個以記者為業和大致傳統的詩人,如何蛻變成訴諸感官的、富哲思的、具狂野實驗性的,而且完全無法歸類的自由詩「草葉集」的作者。
這樣的蛻變是惠特曼本人希望隱藏的。
這不會困擾發現「傑克.恩格」的休士頓大學研究生薩克雷.特賓。
特賓稱這部小說「活潑、有趣、美、既美且怪」,有搞怪的情結轉折、可笑的名字和突然被揭發的陰謀,令人想到「一位前現代的湯瑪斯.品瓊」,他甚至大膽的說,「那是一個瘋狂、瘋狂、瘋狂、瘋狂的世界。」
這聽起來或許與「草葉集」相去甚遠。但雷諾茲說,傑克.恩格和另一些放蕩不羈的年輕男性角色令人想起他在「草葉集」裡創造的市井人物。
而到了第19章,惠特曼評論季刊的主編艾德.佛爾索姆稱之為「一個神奇的時刻」。在這一章,傑克進入曼哈坦下城的三一教堂墓園,荒謬的情節慢慢轉換成幻想,想著自然、不朽和存在的統一性,與惠特曼偉大作品裡的意象若合符節。
(本文版權歸聯合新聞網)
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