MasterCard Worldwide plans to bring payment security to U.S. consumers through passcode-generating display cards, the card brand announced Feb. 14 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
The MasterCard-branded display credit and debit cards, which the card brand recently tested and launched in Europe and Asia, function and look like normal magnetic stripe cards. But they also come with a built-in display that generates a one-time passcode. Issuers in Europe began rolling out the payment cards last spring (
Interested card issuers may use the passcodes as a card-verification code to help identify counterfeit cards or as a means to activate MasterCard SecureCode, the card brand’s online security service that protects against unauthorized use when a cardholder shops online.
Financial institutions issuing the cards would determine whether there is an additional fee for the card, a MasterCard spokesperson tells PaymentsSource.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Symantec Corp. is providing the technology through its VeriSign Identify Protection Authentication Service, which enables merchants to offer secure transactions and online access to help combat fraud.
NagraID will develop and manufacture the cards, which have a display screen, 12 buttons and an embedded secured chip, Philippe Guillaud, the Los Angeles-based company’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, tells PaymentsSource. NagraID also will make the cards available to MasterCard issuers, he adds.
The use of dynamic data in payments and authentication has been growing, Gwenn Bézard, co-founder and research director at Boston-based Aite Group LLC, tells PaymentsSource. “Most consumers log in to their online bank accounts with static information that rarely changes. And anything that is static has a level of vulnerability,” Bézard explains.
The display card is one means to provide cardholders with more information for online authentication, especially when making purchases online or using an online bank account, he notes.
Some consumers may appreciate having this extra level of security, but many financial institutions have been reluctant to distribute hardware-based authentication products, Bézard says. But display cards are relatively user-friendly because consumers do not have to carry around anything extra, he adds.
But whether that means display cards will succeed remains to be seen, Bézard says.
Though not yet widely available in the U.S., similar cards are relatively common in Europe. Germany-based Giesecke & Devrient GmbH has developed two cards that generate one-time passcodes to provide consumers with more security for online banking and e-commerce (
Visa Inc. in June launched a similar product called CodeSure that provides European cardholders additional security when making online purchases by generating single-use numeric codes (
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