Investment

Marriott International's efforts to acquire Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide — combining two major hotel chains that have suffered data breaches — should force both chains to reexamine the way they handle sensitive payment card data.

Fallout from widespread data breaches hurts many payment industry sectors, but this year's tax-filing season brings fresh pain for the prepaid card industry, with new details out connecting prepaid cards with some of last year's biggest tax refund fraud busts.

The capacity for EMV cards to swiftly and drastically reduce payment card fraud in the U.S. is by no means assured.

Banks have to know a lot about their customers, who generally trust them to keep personal information secure. Who better to serve as digital identity providers in a post-password world?

Ryan Singer, CEO and cofounder of startup Blockchain Health, discusses the problems with the traditional "shared secrets" method of verifying identities, and the possibilities opened up by mobile computing devices.

Around the world, technology companies, governments and even some banks are coming up with new, safer and easier ways for people to prove they are who they say they are. Generally the goal is to allow people to be authenticated once by a trusted identity provider (a role banks could play) rather than share sensitive information with countless third parties, as they do today. Here we highlight just a few of the many organizations innovating in this space.

The U.S. shift to EMV — once considered as viable as the U.S. shift to the metric system — is well underway. Here are some of the latest signs of progress, as well as some of the biggest pain points.

Hackers penetrated the computer network of a Verizon Communications subsidiary, but the company says it plugged the hole before much data was compromised.

Hackers penetrated the computer network of a Verizon Communications subsidiary, but the company says it plugged the hole before much data was compromised.

Asking for static information like a mother's maiden name seems increasingly passé, since shared "secrets" can be stolen or gleaned from the Internet. But without a brilliant alternative, and done with care, knowledge-based authentication still has value.