Credit cards to get more secure

09/12/2009

Visa, MasterCard and American Express have announced that they will toughen security standards for financial institutions, merchants and consumers in 2010 in an attempt to stop the growth of identity theft and other forms of payment system fraud. Visa has announced that it will start moving to universal chip and PIN technology for credit, debit and ATM transactions next year.

Speakers at last week’s Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Compliance Conference in Sydney described the online payments market as “the wild west when it comes to security”, a sector under “unprecedented attack” and one where “the cybercrime industry is doing really well”.

Visa Australia director of country risk management, Ian McKindley, said the industry was taking a number of steps to address security issues. Visa announced last month that from January 2010 all new Visa cards issued in Australia will feature smart chips to give higher security. Changes to debit and prepaid cards will follow in 2011. At the same time all non-chip cards currently in use will be replaced so that by 2013 the use of signatures in transactions will be phased out.

Source: The Sheet

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