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Education

More security needed port chip cards? Even if it does, is it
already certified to actually accept
New chip cards are deemed more secure than mag-stripe cards, as the data my card? Wait, is my card even chip
written on chips is dynamic, changing for each individual transaction. enabled?
However, this is only part of what's needed for the entire safety protocol to be
intact. Arguably, this confusion is a tempo-
rary transition problem, but the rate
Experts have pointed out that it's paramount to be able to enable additional at which this is being overcome is,
functionalities that ensure the encryption of data. Point-to-point encryption, yet again, slower than expected. For
through which data is encrypted from the point of capture all the way to the dipping to become a natural, nation-
acquiring bank, and tokenization, which allocates a random string of values to ally uniform habit for consumers, not
the actual payment data, have become essential best practices. only should the majority of termi-
nals become EMV certified, but users
In late summer 2016, POS company NCR Corp. realized that by rewriting the should also become 100 percent chip
magnetic stripe of a chip card, it is possible to deceive POS terminals into cardholders.
thinking that the chip card is indeed a mag stripe card, which would enable
hackers to continue their offline expeditions of fraud. Nonetheless, the process The negative byproducts
is more intricate than it sounds. Even if this were to occur, the back-end system
would identify that the data was compromised, rejecting the transaction. I expect you all know what the nega-
tive byproducts are? It's been predict-
Should I dip? Slide? ed. We've been warned. And it's hap-
pening. Online fraud was predicted
Confusion about how to pay at the POS probably entered all of our minds at to more than double between the
least once in the past year. Dieter Bohn, Executive Director of The Verge, tweet- inception of EMV and 2018, and 2016
ed, "US rollout of chip payments has been awful. Every point of sale terminal data did not disappoint. Five months
is a horrible guessing game." And he was right. Upon reaching the checkout in, Forter Co. detected an alarming
terminal, users still face uncertainty. Questions arise: Does the terminal sup- 27 percent increase in online fraud
between the fourth quarter of 2015,
and the first quarter of 2016. What's
more, according to the latest study by
Pymnts.com and Forter, fraud attacks
of digital goods in 2016 saw a 186 per-
cent rise.

As messy as the first year's rollout
might have been, and even though
EMV has proven to be an imperfect
answer, the necessity of replacing
outdated payment technologies in
the United States cannot be contest-
ed. Let's hope that EMV is the first
step toward a safer, more efficient
payments ecosystem, as well as an
educated merchant base that under-
stands its rights and risks.

Evi Triantafyllides is the Marketing Director
at PAAY, provider of a software solution that
qualifies e-commerce transactions at lower
interchange rates and shifts liability for ecom-
merce fraud away from merchants to card
issuers. The first full-time employee at PAAY,
Triantafyllides is responsible for the company's
marketing and, at the same time, focuses on
ISO relations and partnerships. Find out about
PAAY at www.paay.co or reach out to her
directly at evi@paay.co.

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