Safety and Security

The Roadmap For Keeping U.S. Payments Secure
December 16, 2014

The U.S. Payments Security Task Force (PST) was established earlier this year and dared to go where no task force has ever gone before: it has created a roadmap for protecting cardholder data at the merchant point of sale. It was a pretty daunting assignment....

The Top 3 Payments Security Threats This Holiday Season
November 24, 2014

Nearly half of consumers said they would “definitely” or “probably not” shop over the holidays at retailers that experiences data breaches, according to a recent survey. Consumers still need reassurance from the retail world that these breaches won’t happen, says Ajay Bhalla, President, Enterprise Safety...

Apple Pay
MasterCard: Security Is Nice, Functionality Is Better
November 21, 2014

MasterCard sees mobile payment security as crucial, but it’s power is relevant only to the point that shoppers are actually using it. And with Apple Pay, that is starting to happening meaningfully. In a talk with analysts on Wednesday (Nov. 19), Ed McLaughlin, the chief...

When’s A Token Not A Token?
October 31, 2014

There are three things that consumers, merchants, issuers and card networks all want from a payments experience: that it be secure, that it be easy to use and that it be available to consumers at all of the places they want to shop. The payments...

Mastercard
Fighting Digital Attacks, MasterCard Style
October 03, 2014

MasterCard Thursday (Oct. 2) announced the launch of SafetyNet, which it said was a preemptive security system “to identify potential attacks before they start and in some cases before the bank or processor is even aware.” The card brand said SafetyNet “is complementary to the...

Innovation
Smile! MasterCard Toys With Mobile Facial Recognition For Payments
September 22, 2014

MasterCard is labeling “successful” a biometrics payments trial (facial plus voice) where more than 14,000 transactions were confirmed in a closed iOS and Android pilot using only MasterCard employees, according to a Computerworld report. An employee-only trial would ostensibly solely be a test of the...

MasterCard Forecasts Future of Biometric Payments
September 19, 2014

In the wake of the launch of Apple Pay, MasterCard announced that it recently held a closed pilot to understand the consumer experience around voice and facial recognition, according to a company blog post by Ajay Bhalla, President, Enterprise Safety and Security at MasterCard.

Mastercard
EMV Cards To Top 575 Million In U.S. In 2015
August 14, 2014

More than 575 million U.S. payment cards will include EMV chips by the end of next year, according to a statement issued jointly from Visa and MasterCard on Wednesday (Aug. 13).  That number is partially based on EMV shipment plans from nine key card issuers:...

Company Spotlight
Fraud Report Compares Payment Options
May 29, 2014

An inaugural quarterly fraud-index report from online-payments provider 2Checkout identifies Discover and Diners Club credit cards as experiencing the most amounts of fraud and Acculynk payments as having the least fraudulent activity. Discover and Diners Club scored a fraud-index rate of minus-75, indicating that consumers...