Investment

As Apple Pay launches Oct. 20, the new mobile wallet will be put to the test. It has the prestige of Apple and the participation of hundreds of card issuers, but it also faces several challenges that may be difficult to overcome.

The White House is slated to unveil a major package of initiatives on Friday to increase data security for financial transactions, including an executive order to add chip-and-PIN technology to government-issued credit and debit cards.

MasterCard will launch a contactless card with a built-in fingerprint sensor in the U.K. in early 2015 with Norwegian payment technology provider Zwipe.

Almost half of merchant payment-card terminals in the U.S. will be able to handle more secure EMV- chip technology by the end of 2015, according to an industry group.

Web standards developer W3C has formed the Web Payments Interest Group to create security and customer experience standards.

Next year's updates to the Payment Card Industry data security standards will give compliant retailers better protection, but hackers will be targeting the weaknesses of companies that don't put in extra effort.

The growing prevalence of Internet-connected devices, along with a seemingly endless string of data breaches, is creating more opportunity to convince retailers to safeguard sensitive account data through new technology.

Fuel retailers may shudder at the potential costs of upgrading gas pumps for EMV chip-based card acceptance, but they are a prime target for vendors offering secure mobile payments and deeper fraud-screening analytics.

Friendly fraud may sound like less of a threat to business than other more large-scale, aggressive attacks, but this sleeper predator costs retailers nearly $12 billion per year, leaving unprotected merchants completely empty-handed and liable for fraud that wasn’t really fraud in the first place.

International Dairy Queen, the ice cream chain owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said customer data were compromised by hackers.