Investment

A cybersecurity assessment tool designed to help bankers bolster their defenses against hackers and other cybercriminals is continuing to sow confusion among bankers, with some arguing it is effectively imposing tougher standards on the industry.

It’s too soon to connect the U.S. EMV migration to a statistical spike in e-commerce crime, but fraudsters already could be reacting to the growth in new chip cards and fast consumer credit approvals by turning to new account fraud, according to Javelin Strategy & Research.

U.S. merchants are still reluctant to embrace 3D Secure technology to protect card-not-present transactions, even though it has vastly improved from the initial tedious version that irritated consumers more than a decade ago.

Super Bowl attendees are predicted to spend an average of $82.19 on food, decor, team apparel and more, up from $77.88 last year. Total spending for Super Bowl 50 is expected to top a whopping $15.5 billion.

For many e-commerce merchants, the migration to EMV-chip card security at the point of sale — and the expected shift of fraud to the Web — is akin to a message in a bottle that hasn't washed ashore. Too many simply don't know about it.

A Federal Reserve task force has issued criteria for its faster payments initiative, part of a long journey to build a framework to securely and efficiently accommodate the near real-time processing for digital commerce.

At the four-month mark after the U.S. EMV liability shift went into effect, it's still a waiting game; larger issuers and merchants tend to be on top of the chip-card situation and many smaller ones are not, but experts say it's too early to draw conclusions.

Forced to find effective ways to authenticate customers, companies are evaluating physical biometrics for web passwords. But in the mad rush for alternatives to fight account takeover, could we be making the problem worse?

HSBC said a cyber attack temporarily shut down its Internet banking on Friday, the second time the bank's online services have been disrupted in the U.K. this month.

The potential for more convergence between financial products and physical products raises a whole host of data and privacy issues that banks must deal with proactively.