68 Percent Of Payments Pros Say New Tech Increases Risk

Here’s how serious the doubts are among payment-systems professionals about EMV and mobile payments: 68 percent of them say pressure to migrate to new payment systems puts customer data at greater risk instead of making it safer, according to a new survey by Experian and the Ponemon Institute.

Meanwhile, a separate study by Forrester Research found that EMV chip cards won’t be broadly accepted in the U.S. until 2020, five years after the October 2015 liability shift, in part because of new technologies like mobile and contactless payments, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Ironically, EMV chip cards are the new payments technology that respondents were most positive about in the Experian/Ponemon survey, with 53 percent saying EMV will decrease the risk of a data breach, and 59 percent citing it as an important part of their organization’s payment strategy. Just 23 percent said EMV would increase risk of a data breach, compared with 59 percent for in-store mobile payments such as Apple Pay and 54 percent for contactless payments.

Then why the foot-dragging on EMV? Part of the problem is that, despite a widely publicized string of payment-card breaches, security isn’t merchants’ top priority. Only 51 percent of the Experian/Ponemon respondents agreed that “the security of electronic payments is a top priority issue” for their organizations.

“There is a ton of pressure in a competitive environment on consumer convenience, particularly in retail,” Experian Consumer Protection VP Michael Bruemmer told Security Info Watch. “All of our clients, when they talk about anything they do in the stores with consumers it’s about consumer convenience and customer satisfaction. From our perspective, consumer satisfaction and consumer convenience can only be achieved with the appropriate level of security. To make it easy without making sure it is secure is not fulfilling the promise.”

Other problems include a slow-motion rollout of EMV chip credit and debit cards by issuing banks — fewer than 40 percent of debit cards are expected to be EMV by the Oct. 1 deadline‚ and the fact that as many as one-third of small merchants don’t even know about the transition to EMV chip cards.