Data security

The banking industry largely praised the passage of a major Senate cybersecurity bill Tuesday night, but concerns are mounting about the inclusion of eleventh-hour language that could prompt new rules for financial institutions.

The Senate approved a key cybersecurity bill Tuesday after several days of debate on the chamber floor — and several years of lobbying by business groups, including bankers.

U.S. merchants, card issuers, and payment processors are beginning to switch over to EMV. However, there are frequent reports that large numbers of U.S. merchants are not ready.

Consumers still aren't eager to make payments from their phones, despite the immense security boost mobile wallets provide through encryption, tokenization, dynamic account data and biometrics. So MasterCard is taking these technologies and hiding them in other products.

The Senate approved a key cybersecurity bill Tuesday after several days of debate on the chamber floor — and several years of lobbying by business groups, including bankers.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has hired a former FBI deputy director to lead a new consulting group to address financial crime issues.

Led by a team of financial services and regulatory veterans and young techies, Privacy.com represents the first mainstream attempt to build a business explicitly around transactional privacy in the era of Edward Snowden and Ashley Madison.

The bank owners of the clearXchange payments network and the Early Warning risk management service hope that by combining the two programs, they can remain in control of technologies that will become core to mobile commerce.

Nok Nok Labs has expanded its suite of payment authentication services for the Fast IDentity Online Alliance infrastructure, adding one-touch biometrics, out-of-band authentication and measures to address friendly fraud.

Last week U.S. House Small Business Committee held the second part of a hearing entitled “The EMV Deadline and What it Means for Small Businesses,” which was supposed to address payment security in the United States.

From mobile wallets to machine learning, from biometrics to Bitcoin, many examples of what the industry calls "emerging technology" have finally emerged. But change is happening slowly, as is usual in the complex financial services space.

SunTrust has removed a clause from its severance agreement that laid-off employees claimed would have put them on call for two years to answer questions without compensation. Loss of institutional knowledge may be the cost of offshoring.

Target, by all accounts, the corporate face of retail data breach, is driving full force to use its complete embrace of EMV to bolster its tarnished image and put it in the vanguard of card fraud protection and data security. And it is targeting one of the biggest sticking points to EMV: user adoption.

A major cybersecurity bill passed a key Senate test on Thursday after a series of setbacks earlier this year.

WASHINGTON – After several false starts this year, the Senate is gearing up for a vote on a major cybersecurity bill backed by the banking industry.

MasterCard plans to add its tokenization service to the MasterPass digital wallet to boost security for online and in-app purchasing.

October 1 marked the dawn of a new era in the U.S. payment card marketplace. While there are not yet rules from the card brands that demand all parties utilize EMV technology, the financial liability shift is a significant first step across a line in the sand that cannot be erased.

While migration to cards with chip technology should help mitigate card fraud, additional steps by retailers and more layers of security are needed.

With the EMV liability shift having just passed, banks and merchants alike are scrambling to comply with the card network-imposed deadline.

With EMV cards fighting counterfeit fraud at the point of sale, Gemalto Inc. says the timing is perfect to launch a payment card with a dynamic verification code to provide a similar improvement to e-commerce security.