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MasterCard is urging ATM owners to add hardware for accepting chip-card payments. Those that don't may be faced with a higher level of liability. The plan affects inter-regional transactions on its Maestro network.
September 7 -
As Visa has been ramping up its promotion of one-time-use card data for security, Discover Financial Services is winding down its support of a similar technology. The key difference is that the system Visa is pushing is used at the point of sale, whereas the one Discover is discontinuing is used online.
August 31
With e-commerce becoming a bigger target for payment data theft, Global Payments Inc. is adding another set of fraud-detection tools to help its merchant clients fight back.
The Atlanta merchant processor has started offering fraud screening from Accertify Inc., an Itasca, Ill., unit of American Express Co.
Merchants in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Asia-Pacific region will have access to the service, which protects against card-not-present fraud, counterfeit attempts and identity theft, Global Payments says.
The service uses Interceptas, Accertify's fraud detection program, to evaluate potential fraud cases as they occur and monitor fraud trends.
The Accertify risk-management technology used with the Global Payment Global Transport gateway in such a way that the consumer making a purchase would not be aware of the fraud screening, says Jeff Liesendahl, Accertify's president.
Global Payments merchants will continue to deal directly with Global for pricing, service and support, Liesendahl says. They will also receive fraud alerts and fraud data reports from their existing Global Payments system after transaction-screening takes place via Interceptas, Liesendahl says.
Sid Singh, Global Payments senior vice president and global head of product, views the fraud protection as a vital aspect of e-commerce business.
"The e-commerce segment continues to grow at a healthy pace, and merchants are doing more sales through this channel than ever before, making it vital for all of our merchants to have stringent protection in place," Singh said in a company press release.
With secure chip cards, called EMV cards, gaining use worldwide at the point of sale, fraud rates are likely to continue rising in card-not-present channels, Singh noted.
"Our e-commerce merchants will now be able to safeguard their interests without compromising on sales revenues," Singh said.
Global Payments' effort to strengthen online fraud detection comes at a time when e-commerce is becoming a more appealing pathway for criminals, says Julie Conroy McNelley, senior analyst and fraud expert with Aite Group.
"E-commerce will come under more attack when the EMV smartcard becomes more prevalent in the United States because the crooks will not be able to skim point-of-sale terminals for data when the computer-chip card is in use," McNelley says.
The increase in e-commerce fraud has been proven by studies everywhere EMV is in use, McNelley says.
"It's like squeezing a balloon, the air has to go somewhere," she says. "In this case the fraud has to go somewhere."
Other companies may adopt a multi-pronged fraud-defense strategy similar to Global Payments' in the future by offering a layer of security in addition to their own analytics for e-commerce transactions, McNelley says.
Accertify collaborated with First Data Corp. earlier this year to launch Fraud FlexDetect, an e-commerce fraud-detection service. First Data is a unit of the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. private-equity firm.
Accertify also completed a partnership with Frontier Airlines two months ago for use of Interceptas to provide protection for online ticket purchasing.
