Data security

Visa, which just revamped its digital payment system, will introduce secure "tokens" in September to replace the 16-digit account number for online payments.

The Clearing House and EMVCo launched separate efforts to develop standards for tokenization, a process that replaces sensitive account data with a secure token. But now, their paths are converging.

As the U.S. shifts to EMV-chip cards to improve security at the point of sale, fraud will move online, and ACI Worldwide is preparing for that challenge. The payment technology company's $205 million purchase of ReD will help it close up vulnerabilities in card-not-present transactions.

Security breaches at trusted global corporations, such as Target and eBay are becoming a regular occurrence. Valuable customer data serves as a new currency of sorts for fraudsters, prompting the digital underground to stage well thought out attacks on a scale previously unheard of.

The newly rebranded Visa Checkout is the latest of the card network's attempts to create a more streamlined, digital payment process that moves past the plastic card. Visa and Visa Europe have embarked on many projects around the globe in recent years, targeting e-commerce, mobile payments, P2P and other use cases.

The Justice Department's Operation Choke Point isn't really about combatting fraud, says Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association. Federal regulators simply don't like high-risk merchants, such as payday lenders and guns dealers, he says.

eBay's two most "extraordinary events" from the first half of the year were a now-resolved conflict with activist investor Carl Icahn and a cyber-attack that created financial headwinds. It is not yet actively searching for a new PayPal president.

ProPay, a subsidiary of the processor Total System Services (TSYS), is working with ThreatMetrix to offer fraud prevention technology to its customers.

Security breaches exposing consumers' personal information are becoming larger and more frequent in New York, costing businesses more than $1.37 billion last year, the state attorney general's office said.

Trustwave is promising to stop any data hacking attempts against a client made through a Web browser, but the tradeoff is the client has to give Trustwave hands-on control of its Web security.

Apple Inc. has not joined the Faster IDentity Online Alliance and its quest for more secure online authentication, but the technology giant has played a significant role in helping develop the foundation for new standards.

Wallaby Financial has hired Scott Grimes to be senior vice president of risk and operations, a new position for Wallaby, which sells mobile and web-based payment marketing.

Like many payments executives, Martin Ferenczi believes the U.S. payments market will not meet the card network-imposed October 2015 target for migration to chip-based EMV technology.

The telco-operated Isis mobile payments initiative plans to rebrand to avoid carrying the same name as a Middle Eastern militant group referred to as "ISIS" by western journalists.

Merchants are wary of the proprietary look and feel of the process by which the card networks and issuers are adopting new security standards.

Yapital, a payment technology company based in Luxembourg, is testing a feature that will allow consumers to authorize payments with their fingerprints. The technology is aimed replacing PINs that consumers use to authorize purchases though the Yapital app.

Half of all frequent credit card users are unbothered, or feel relieved, when a legitimate transaction is blocked, a new study found. The results show that cardholders are appreciative that banks are becoming more vigilant about fraud.

PayPal has added a new fingerprint identification option to its app for users of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S tablet, furthering PayPal's push to be an early adopter of Samsung technology.

PayPal has at least temporarily shut off two-factor authentication for the PayPal mobile app after a security researcher found a way to bypass that second factor.

Hundreds of thousands of people are in Brazil for the World Cup football tournament. While Brazil poses risks for payment crime, there are things payment companies and issuers can do to help their customers mitigate danger, such as communicating preventative measures.