Our Card Fraud survey is still open — we’re trying to answer the question of who first detects card fraud: cardholders or their banks? The survey can be found here. I’ve received a couple of comments suggesting I left out an important fraud detector in the survey:...
We often get interesting questions about payments, and the latest one stumped us: "How many credit and debit fraudulent uses are first detected by the bank? By the customer?" We don't know the answer to that one or of any good source for this data so we...
As a biller or merchant, you are vitally concerned about your payments “back office”, that set of core functions involved with accepting consumer payments. Whether you are in Treasury or Technology, if you are concerned with payments, you are asking yourself, every...
Chernobyl is certainly at the top of the list of man-made disasters. In light of recent events, I’ve been thinking that the Target breach has become the Chernobyl of the payments world. As a group, we Americans never thought that much about payment security – we...
The news from Target, increasing the number of cards compromised to 70 million and the expansion of data loss to mailing and email addresses, phone numbers, and names, affirms that we’re in a security crisis. As my colleague Scott Loftesness puts it, card data is,...
The arrest of eight in New York who participated in a global $45 million ATM cash-out attack revealed, once again, some hard truths about the cyber security posture of financial systems and the enterprises that operate essential payment infrastructure. First, the...
We've launched a new research effort exploring best practices among merchants about how payments and fraud risk management functions are organized, staffed, and measured. If you work in the payments or fraud risk management functions for a merchant, please take a...
In one of my prior lives, I made the phone call that triggered what eventually became the industry standard for chip card deployment now known as EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa). That call was made almost 20 years ago. At the time, I was at Visa where we were...
You have to admire great execution when you see it - and this morning Jeff Mullen and Philip Yen from Dynamics stopped by our offices to say hello and share some of their excitement at the reactions they've been getting to their new "ultra smart" payment cards -...
One of the more interesting elements added late in the game to the Durbin amendment was the language added around card-related fraud costs. This has led to much speculation about what this might mean for various anti-fraud technologies (e.g., EMV in the US, a...
