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finance & strategy
M-Payments’ New Tools: The Technology + Services Reshaping Payments Security
them through all the likely change events, helping to block fraud at these points. “Payments industry participants at all levels, including merchants, must be mindful of evolving fraud tactics and employ a dynamic and multilayered fraud prevention platform enabling them to quickly and easily adjust their methods if fraud tactics shift,” Dancu adds.
Multifactor authentication also plays a critical role in supporting the growing range of biometrics solutions used in payments security, notes Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO of Norway-based Encap Security, which provides multifactor authentication support for nancial services. “Biometrics authentication for payments feels very alluring and futuristic, and stealing a ngerprint may be trickier than stealing a password or PIN, but it’s not impossible,”
he points out, citing the theft
of millions of ngerprints from the U.S. government in 2015. That’s why adding other security layers plus multifactor authentica- tion is vital to helping close all possible holes in m-payments security, he emphasizes.
The number of layers and auth- entication factors recommended to solidify m-payments security begs the question of whether these additional steps may add too much cost or cripple the convenience factor for consumers. But Jørgensen says payments industry participants still have plenty of latitude in devising
exible security solutions. “Banks should settle on an approach
that uses the appropriate number of factors using their customer’s device, using a method that’s most suited to the user, the device and the type of transaction taking place,” he advises.
transactions in general environ- ments and on mobile devices
is becoming a big area of de- velopment in the U.S. and in Europe, and I think there’s still a lot of work to be done,”
Diaz says.
Many organizations now are de- veloping new products and ser- vices to support the modernization of ACH payments. One example is JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Commerce Solutions unit, which formed a strategic alliance in the fall of 2015 with risk management provider Early Warning to roll out an ACH security service called Payment Chek Service. The aim
is to enhance security for ACH payments in all environments— including mobile—by instantly determining whether an account
is open, active and able to trans- act, and whether the customer is authorized to transact on the account, says Lou Anne Alexander, Early Warning’s chief market development o cer for payments. “By authenticating the mobile de- vice and the payment transaction, the tools Early Warning provides can be used to mitigate fraud for credit push and debit pull trans- actions,” she says.
As payment methods expand— along with fraudsters’ tactics— everyone in the value chain will have to keep security at the top
of their priority list. But the best path to success is one that employs multiple layers of security that is easy for legitimate consumers to conduct transactions.
ACH Goes Mobile
At the same time that m-payments are gaining a foothold, ACH pay- ments—the longstanding way funds are transferred between banks for many routine payments —are getting a makeover, Thales’ Diaz points out. Government agencies and payments industry groups have vowed to nd ways
to speed up ACH payments in the U.S. and their equivalent globally, so transfers take place in real time, instead of days. MCX, the coalition of U.S. merchants, includes ACH
as one option to transmit payments within CurrentC, its m-payments app, all of which is putting a spotlight on methods to improve ACH security. “The security of ACH
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