Netherlands-based European payments provider CCV is now using Authentic, an intelligent payments platform from NCR’s Alaric. CCV plans to implement Authentic across Europe to support a new state-of-the-art payments processing solution it has developed for its customers, due to go live in December 2015.
Vodat International is using Authentic, an intelligent payments platform from Alaric, an NCR business. Vodat is using the platform to underpin its Unified Payment Service, which is providing retailers with a managed, PCI-compliant card processing solution.
Bank of America Merchant Services inks its participation in the American Express’ OptBlue program. OptBlue provides simplified sign-up and management of American Express card-related processing for small businesses.
Millions of smart cards are in use today in Latin America and the Caribbean in EMV chip cards, mobile payments, e-passports, smart transit fare cards, secure government, healthcare, enterprise IDs and more. Now the Smart Card Alliance Latin America group has signed a big deal with Florida State University.
NCR Corporation announced Cumberland Building Society has deployed its Paym mobile payment service using Authentic and Fractals software from Alaric. The deployment is an extension to the existing relationship between NCR and Cumberland Building Society where Alaric’s flexible and highly configurable Authentic and Fractals solutions are already used to process and protect payment transactions. This includes Cumberland Building Society’s ATMs, internet banking and now mobile payment channels, as well as when Cumberland Building Society customers use the LINK ATM network or use their Visa debit cards. The Paym service allows consumers to make secure, convenient payments to account holders of other participating banks or building societies using only the recipient’s mobile phone number. No need to know, or remember, sort codes or account numbers. The Fractals intelligent fraud detection and prevention solution delivers value to issuers, acquirers, processors, networks, PSPs, ISOs and merchants, for all product types, including credit, debit, prepaid or gift cards.
Unity Bank plc has recorded a 1Q/14 26% profit before tax from the year ago period, corresponding with its mandatory annual re-certification of its PCIDSS. The bank also received its Report on Compliance (RoC) from the external Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), NetHost Legislation Ltd. This is in line with the directive from the Central Bank of Nigeria that all banks must achieve certification to the PCI standards, Unity Bank had successfully attained its certification on April 5, ahead of almost three-quarter of the banks in the country and is among the first to complete its annual recertification. The bank has also disclosed that to ensure that it continues to maintain its high security standards for the protection of card-holder data and card production environments, it is putting resources in place to train its own team of Internal Security Assessors (ISAs) to lead future recertification exercises and work with external Qualified Security Assessors (QSAs) to obtain RoC.
Equens was elected by the Finnish OP-Pohjola Group as new card processing partner. Both parties signed a long-lasting contract for card services.It is highly exceptional that a bank actually acts upon the SEPA European level playing field by switching from processor. With OP-Pohjola as new client for card-related processing services Equens will create a clear footprint in the Northern European cards market. Expectations are that the first card transactions will be processed in Q4 2014. OP-Pohjola already had an agreement with Equens for the processing of SEPA payments as well as their regular cross-border euro payments since 2008. With this new agreement OP-Pohjola Group will also entrust their debit and Visa Electron card processing to Equens. Equens card and payment processor processes 10.4 billion payments and 4.4 billion card transactions, operating over 61 million payment cards, 873,000 payment terminals and 21,000 ATMs.
Fiserv financial services technology will begin personalizing chip payment cards based on the Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) standard, which features a micro-processing chip that stores cardholder data securely. The adoption of dual-interface chip technology also helps prepare the U.S. payment infrastructure for the arrival of NFC mobile payments by building the necessary infrastructure to accept and process chip transactions that support either a signature or PIN at the point of sale.
EDB Card Services AB has successfully implemented the XYPRO “XYGATE Merged Audit” (XMA) tool to integrate EBD’s HP NonStop servers with its RSA enVision SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system. EDB Card Services AB, part of EDB ErgoGroup, is one of the leading payments services companies in Scandinavia. It provides a wide range of card-related services including issuing, acquiring, processing, switching, national card blocking etc. for banks and payment operators in Sweden, as well as greater Scandinavia and Europe. The “XYGATE Merged Audit” (XMA) tool gathers security audit data from various sources on HP NonStop systems (such as EMS, Safeguard, ODBC, BASE24, XYGATE tools, custom programs etc.) and intelligently merges the security audit data together to form a single SQL database.
While the majority of PCI compliant organizations suffer fewer or no breaches, most practitioners still do not perceive PCI-DSS to have a positive impact on data security. This is based on findings showing, 64% of PCI-DSS compliant organizations reported suffering no data breaches involving credit card data over the past two years while 38% of non-compliant organizations reported suffering no breaches involving credit card data over the same period. Moreover, 63% of compliant organizations suffered no more than a single data breach, compared to 22 percent of non-compliant organizations, and 26% of non-compliant organizations suffered more than five breaches over the same time period. These findings, according to Imperva data security and the Ponemon Institute’s the “2011 PCI DSS Compliance Trends Study,” also shows hypocritical sentiments showing 88% did not support the claim that PCI-DSS compliance has a positive effect on the number of breaches experienced and only 39% mentioned data security improvement as one of the regulation’s value propositions for business. Additionally, only 33% believe that PCI-DSS compliance expenditure is covered by the value it brings to organization.
Factors driving the U.S. payments industry to consider a move to EMV include card-related fraud losses, the increasing annual cost of protecting existing payments systems and enhancing security features incrementally, and troubles U.S. travelers are having using their cards abroad. In response, the Smart Card Alliance Payments Council released its white paper- “Card Payments Roadmap in the United States: How Will EMV Impact the Future Payments Infrastructure?”- addressing the current state of the payments infrastructure in the United States and identifies actions that stakeholders would need to take to issue EMV cards, and to accept and process EMV transactions. Targeting issuers, merchants, processors, ATM owners, and suppliers of hardware, software, and support services, on different options for EMV implementation and critical considerations for deploying an EMV solution in their business environments, the paper mainly touches on the impact of the global deployment of EMV on possible roadmap options for the U.S. and cardholder verification methods and transaction authorization approaches and implementation options for each.
Ready Financial Group has added FIS’ “Mobile Financial Services” application to enhance their prepaid account offerings, in addition to its “READYdebit” Visa Prepaid Card and the recently launched FIS “READYdebit”-branded iPhone and Android application. The prepaid debit cards can be used globally anywhere Visa debit cards are accepted, including ATMs, to offer a traditional checking account debit card and bill pay without the worry of possible overdraft fees. Ready Financial Group currently utilizes FIS’ prepaid alerts which provide SMS messages alerting customers when funds are loaded or removed and, with the addition of FIS’ Mobile Financial Services application, can let its “READYdebit” Visa account holders perform financial transactions via their mobile phones. All card-related data handling is also PCI compliant.