Inherent Fraud Protection

Last month, convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez, the world’s largest credit card hacker, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. His breaches involved the first known decryptions of PIN codes, “the holy grail of bankcard security”, according to Wired. The song is nothing new: As criminals become more devious, law enforcement and security work to get ahead of the curve.

Purchasing controls such as PIN codes and maximum per transaction limits are used to minimize the risk of fraud for universally-accepted credit cards and private label (or closed loop) payment cards alike. But by their very nature, private label payment cards are inherently more secure than universal credit cards. Private label cards can only be used within a single network of merchants. For instance, a Super Mart private label card, say, would be accepted only at Super Mart-branded stores, making the cards inherently less appealing to fraudsters.

And private label cards don’t have to rely on an infrastructure shared by millions. As a result, purchasing controls can be customized to address the needs of a particular merchant network and industry, like requiring purchase order numbers that match individual customer PO format rules, restricting purchases to specific goods and services, or even requiring industry-specific information to ensure the validity of a transaction.

Simplicity in Payments Innovation

Last week, I attended Commercial Payments International’s (CPI’s) Global Summit in New York City. Conferences like this offer the opportunity to meet, network and brainstorm with other payments professionals, but they also offer several “big thoughts” to chew on during the plane ride home. This year’s CPI Summit had a few of those “big thoughts”, and so (fair warning) you will probably be hearing a lot about the conference for the next month or so from me.

This week’s topic is the idea of Simplicity in Innovation. In the opening session, one of the speakers said something that resonated and set the tone for the rest of my conference: If your new innovation requires a user’s manual, you’ve likely defeated the purpose of innovation.

I think this is an easy concept to lose perspective of when you are developing custom applications. All too often, individuals can get lost in the intricacies of a problem or various red-herrings that arise to distract you from a very basic problem-solution, and as I thought about this, my mind went straight to the iPhone in my hand.

I’ve been an iPhone user for all of a month now. It’s been a much easier transition from my Blackberry than I had expected. The iPhone is intuitive, and it solves for problems I hadn’t realized I had. Yes, I knew that I needed to access email and attachments from my phone, but I hadn’t anticipated the business advantages that I would gain with such easy access to my LinkedIn account or how useful it would become in other situations. And, all of these, without even opening a manual! I am sure the iPhone entails a lot of complicated code behind the scenes, but for the user: I just tap, and I get what I need.

Simplicity in innovation, my new mantra!