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Invisible yet inviolable Blended commerce
As POS devices and payments became more elegant and Coates went on to say that blended commerce enables con-
invisible, POS manufacturers and technology providers sumers to limit time spent in stores by ordering ahead,
continued to certify and power next-generation commerce pinpointing exact locations of store items and checking
solutions. Hardware slowly faded from the center of the out on their own devices, all without touching the store's
customer experience while inconspicuously operating be- POS. He added that store apps use artificial intelligence to
hind the scenes to enable mobile and digital commerce. anticipate when consumers need to replenish items. "We
worry sometimes about AI being evil, but we also want
Bluefin, a technology provider known for patented P2PE a personalized experience," he said. "The AI's assistance
and tokenization solutions, expanded its hardware ca- ensures that we order the things that we need."
pabilities and reach to digital commerce channels with
ShieldConex. The solution, a 2021 FinTech Breakthrough Ruston Miles, founder and advisor at Bluefin, agreed, stat-
award winner for Best Financial Transaction Security Plat- ing that he expects safety and security to remain top of
form, brings hardware-based encryption and vaultless to- mind for retailers following the pandemic. "I think mer-
kenization to ecommerce. chants will have some work to do around safety for these
consumers coming out of the pandemic, and that will
James Johnson, managing director at FinTech Break- drive omnichannel commerce through the roof," he said.
through, commended Bluefin for prioritizing consumer "People are going to want to do in-app purchases so they
protection at a time of viral ecommerce growth. “Sensitive can touch their devices and not your kiosk or your credit
payment information like credit card numbers [is] entered card machine."
through online forms and websites in growing numbers
each day and most organizations have not updated their Miles further noted that blended commerce will flip the
payment transaction security approach along with this script by assigning card-not-present (CNP) interchange
growth,” he said. “Bluefin’s vaultless tokenization tool, rates to some card-present transactions. Consumers who
ShieldConex, brings much-needed ease and security to the are present in the store will make CNP transactions on
payment space by helping organizations reduce the scope their devices; card brands will have to catch up with that
of work and costs associated with maintaining regulatory too, from a pricing perspective, he stated. There's a lot of
compliance." work to be done to make transactions safe, secure and
convenient, which creates lots of opportunities for ISOs,
Mobile, ecommerce growth agents and processors, he added.

As Johnson noted, migration from dumb devices to ecom- Expanding protection
merce and mobile apps kicked into high gear during the
COVID-19 pandemic when business closures pushed con- Miles pointed out that hackers are not just exploiting pay-
sumers to mobile and digital commerce channels. Con- ment card information (PCI), they are also going after
sumers who had already used in-app and online shopping personally identifiable information and personal health
doubled down while others transacted online for the first information. In response, service providers that had been
time, according to recent reports, including a study by Re- encrypting and tokenizing PCI to make card data useless
tailX and ACI Worldwide titled USA 2020 Ecommerce Coun- for hackers, sought to leverage protections developed by
try Report. the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) to safe-
guard other types of data.
Researchers expect ecommerce growth of 18 percent per
year to continue beyond the pandemic. "Around a quarter "The PCI SSC brought that technology to the payments
of all consumers say they now prefer online shopping," industry first, and the industry soon saw a need to ex-
RetailX researchers wrote. "This is a number that will tend those protections beyond just payments," Miles said.
grow as the ongoing effects of the coronavirus pandemic "Privacy laws are driving that from the East and the West,
continue to boost ecommerce by exposing more first-time from California and Virginia and giving us a lot of tail-
online shoppers to the joys of ecommerce. Despite its ma- winds."
turity as a market, around 10 percent of adults aged 18-64
have experienced online commerce for the first time only Troy Leach, senior vice president, engagement officer for
due to the effects of Covid-19." market intelligence and stakeholder engagement at the
PCI SSC, noted that technology always changes but the
RetailX hosted a March 2021 webinar to discuss survey council remains focused on developing security standards
data. Moderator Ludovica Quaglieri interviewed ACI merchants can trust. To this end, Leach "collaborates with
Worldwide executives Kieran Mongey, solution consult- the payments industry to help identify payment security
ing merchant retail, and Dan Coates, solution evangelist. risk and develop comprehensive strategies to secure pay-
During the discussion, Coates mentioned that consumers ment data and the supporting technology."
are bringing their own devices to stores in a model he de-
scribed as blended commerce, which combines in-app and Commercial off-the-shelf devices
in-store shopping to improve the customer experience. As part of its efforts to expand secure payments accep-

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