Investment

IDology, an Atlanta provider of fraud-prevention and identity verification, has made an equity investment in the mobile identity authentication provider Payfone.

Merchants that sell digital goods each spend an average of $10.1 million a year on fraud-related costs — and many expect fraud and chargeback costs to rise in the coming months in the wake of the EMV chip card migration at the point of sale.

Adoption of mobile payments has been slow, and it's not clear why. Some have suggested the problem is a lack of understanding among consumers. Others have questioned whether mobile payments really address a consumer pain point.

Samsung may have a hard time convincing users of Samsung Pay that a breach of its LoopPay technology by Chinese hackers has nothing to do with payment card data or the security of the mobile wallet.

Europe has been a clear leader in the adoption of EMV. One notable migration took place in the United Kingdom. The U.K. began the process of promoting EMV in 2002 and completed the full roll out in 2006.

The major card networks operate from a position of strength as among the first movers in providing tokenization, but they must move with the market if they want to hold that position.

The central bank originally established a 10-year time horizon for completing upgrades to the nation's aging electronic payment system. But a task force convened by the Fed thinks that's not ambitious enough.

Though the EMV transition is a significant step in the effort towards making payments more secure, this EMV liability shift won’t solve mass data breaches on merchants.

Hackers did not steal banking or payments data from Experian, but they might as well have. Breaches like the one sustained at the company call into question the entire system of identification that banks rely on to open accounts and conduct other everyday business.

Compared with other recent breaches, the theft of 6,400 user email addresses and passwords on the American Bankers Association's website might seem like small potatoes. But experts said the attack — the first in the association's history — was still significant and could have implications for banks.