Page 100 - Pay Magazine s2014

finance & strategy
Integrating Security into Your Company’s DNA
seCuriTy and sTarTups
acts as a hub for monitoring and stopping fraudulent activity. Through the IDology solution,
our customers can see potentially fraudulent transactions moving across the IDology network and are able to take action in order to separate legitimate customers from fraudsters. Our collaborative tools have been instrumental in lowering fraud rates.”
An essential part of iovation’s mission is to provide clients a consortium where they can share knowledge across industries. “With 2 billion devices and 18 million
incidents of client-reported fraud, we see first-hand the increase in thwarted fraud attempts that shared knowledge enables,” says Pierson.
FIS works with the Financial Ser- vices Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), a govern- ment initiative launched in 1999
to facilitate information sharing between the public and private sectors on cybersecurity threats. “We advise the government on what we see, and we are advised by the government, which includes brief- ings by the FBI and the Secret Service,” says Kealy.
“We have to be open in our dis- cussions with our peers in the industry,” he adds. “We’re all competitors, for sure, but we’re all in this together.”
Security vs. Convenience
Does data security come at the cost of consumer convenience? Although some analysts say a balance can be reached, others believe consumers would be willing to give up some convenience if it meant their infor- mation was safer.
“Maybe these recent and very public security breaches make consumers more tolerant over time of measures that add inconvenience but are more secure,” suggests iovation’s Pierson. He adds that he’s experi- enced a very different attitude among online banking customers
in Europe compared with the U.S. “Europeans expect hurdles to ac- cessing their accounts, and they’d be surprised if their banks didn’t require more than a username and password,” he says.
The key to striking a balance between security and convenience, according to Dancu, is remembering a significant proportion of custom- ers are legitimate, and companies must present consumers with a positive experience. “You want to make it easy to onboard customers and for them to use their cards, but you also must be sure to protect their privacy,” he says.
IDology has products that add levels of verification relative to red flags that might appear during a
industry experts agree the cost and effort to keep data safe aren’t barriers to entry for payment startups, and security shouldn’t go overlooked.
“If you’re a startup architecting a payments solution, it makes all the sense in the world to integrate security from Day 1. Not only is it much cheaper and more effective to build security in from the start, you also become more compelling in the marketplace.”
—Kevin Kealy, chief information security officer, FIS
“If you’re a small company taking on a big company, you have to offer some features and functionality significantly better than your competition and at a lower price. You also have to make sure you have a secure platform, which isn’t inexpensive to build and monitor, making it harder for new entrants to enter the market.”
—John Dancu, CEO, IDology Inc.
“If you’re dealing with financial data, you need to come to the table understanding that security is a prerequisite. Security doesn’t require millions of dollars of investment; you just have to design it right. Many startups are far more secure than the largest corporations.” —Amir Wain, CEO, i2c Inc.
“If I’m a venture capitalist funding the next greatest startup, and that startup doesn’t have a plan to address security in a manner acceptable to consumers and the enterprises they serve, I don’t think it gets funded.” —Greg Pierson, CEO, iovation
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