Data security

The recent security breaches at Nieman Marcus and Target remind us in the payments industry that as criminal efforts to steal cardholder data become more sophisticated, so must the methods we use to prevent these crimes.

Some of the toughest types of payments fraud to combat aren't from an overseas hackers den but from everyday people misusing their own accounts or those of a relative, says Rick Lynch, Verifi's senior vice president of business development.

Webster Bank's use of advanced alerting allows it to receive valuable, real-time feedback from its customers about how they prefer to make payments, says Greg Jacobi, senior vice president of distribution and customer experience for Webster Bank.

There's a new Bitcoin wallet and vault provider in town, Xapo, launched by payments veteran Wences Casares with $20 million in funding from investors.

Preparing for a Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance assessment is a major task for any size organization.

EMVCo, the EMV standard governing body has released specifications for payment tokenization, a process that it says will strengthen security on card-not-present transactions initiated by EMV-chip cards.

Mobile banking technology company Monitise is attempting to make account alerts two-way conversations, with an eye on marketing and security capabilities for payments applications.

Three months after coming to light, the massive exposure of 40 million card accounts at Target Corp. still has the payments industry and consumers talking about what should be done to prevent this happening again. In the United States, that is.

Chase Merchant Services has developed technology that could have helped its parent company, JPMorgan Chase, deal with the hefty task of reissuing 2 million cards in the wake of the massive Target data breach.

MasterCard and Visa have formed a new group to improve efforts in the U.S. to migrate to the EMV-chip cards other security methods.

The Electronic Transactions Association is lobbying Congress to enact a uniform national data breach reporting standard that would replace a welter of contradictory state and local rules.

Knab, a branchless bank based in Amsterdam, is aiming to attract 250,000 customers by 2017 through the promise of smoother payments.

Yapital Financial AG has signed a five-year agreement with security and payment gateway provider ReD to deliver fraud protection services for its European payment system.

Target Corp., still reeling from a security breach that exposed the personal information of tens of millions of customers, is seeking a new top technology executive to help prevent future attacks.

Visa Inc. is deploying a classic fraud prevention model to combat the growing sophistication of prepaid card fraud.

As evidenced by recent high-profile data breach incidents at major retailers , keeping payment data secure in today’s world is an increasingly complex challenge.

Flexcoin, a Bitcoin bank, was forced to shutdown after hackers stole 896 units of the digital currency, the Guardian newspaper reported.

Consumers are more concerned than ever about how to protect their payment card data, but they also know they have very little skin in the game because of card issuers' zero liability policies.

Most issuing banks are not allowing recent retailer data breaches to change their schedules for adopting EMV-chip cards, even though Target and other companies have said they would fast-track their own plans.

As U.S. issuers and financial institutions prepare for the shift to EMV, two significant benefits over traditional magnetic stripe cards are clear: increased security and reduced incidences of card fraud. However, the migration itself poses risks that must be addressed.