Security • By Rob Gill
But on the more positive side, this level
of card-based fraud still only accounts for 8.3p for every £100 spent. Another encouraging sign is that banks and card companies were able to stop around 60 per cent of all attempted card fraud – adding up to a total of £843.6 million – in the UK last year. Card companies are understandably
coy about revealing their methods for tackling fraud. But there is no doubt they take the issue very seriously – even if the amount of fraud is tiny (0.08 per cent) compared to the overall value of all card transactions. One of the biggest recent moves has been the adoption of chip-and-pin tech- nology in North America. While this card security system has been around for ten years in the UK, it has taken much longer for it to be installed in the US. Steve Robson, Citi’s head of com- mercial cards EMEA, says: “This brings North America into line with the general market standard in the rest of the world. It’s important because it is one of the last areas that didn’t have chip-and-pin. The chip in the card makes you certain that it’s a real card. “Generally fraud will gravitate to the line of least resistance. If fraudsters are trying to copy cards and use fraudulent plastic, then this is closing one of the major areas for them to do this. But we will have to be increasingly vigilant online as we have closed fraud down from a face-to-face perspective.”
ONLINE PROTECTION So while chip-and-pin has tightened security on the face-to-face or ‘card present’ types of fraud, there is now a renewed focus on stopping online or ‘card-not-present’ (CNP) fraud. Card companies are continually en- hancing their technology to improve their monitoring of transactions that may be ‘out of character’ with a cardholder’s
In association with
“We are increasingly bringing in tools that enable us to risk- profile transactions and not simply accept or decline payments”
usual patterns of spending behaviour. They can then immediately alert the individual cardholder about any suspi- cious activity that has been detected on their cards. Carlos Pontes is global head of commercial payments at Diners Club International (DCI). He says: “As criminals shift their attention to e-commerce transactions, it is more important than ever to provide a com- prehensive security solution for card- not-present merchants. “DCI has enabled a layered approach for securing CNP transactions, across channels and with minimal friction. DCI uses Protect Buy, our 3D Secure authentication product, which leverages risk-based authentication to validate cardholder identity.” 3D Secure is a second password screen that pops up after the cardholder has used their primary password to authorise a transaction, and has been available as an optional extra security layer for consumer cards for several years. But corporate card providers know that forcing a customer to remember a secondary password for their corporate cards can be counterproductive. Citi’s Steve Robson admits that it can be difficult for cardholders to remem- ber a second password when using 3D Secure, and this has led to more impor- tance being placed on the ‘risk profiling’ of transactions. “We are increasingly bringing in tools that enable us to risk-profile
transactions and not simply accept or decline payments,” he says. “We will profile the transaction and use 3D Secure if necessary, but we don’t want custom- ers to have to go through that extra password online if we believe it’s a good transaction.” While card companies are fight-
ing fraud, they are also trying to avoid a situation where business travellers are left frustrated by having their cards unnecessarily de- clined. For example, Mastercard’s IQ product is designed to address this balance through the use of ‘real-time intelligence’ to help card issuers make more informed fraud- management decisions and reduce the number of real transactions that end up being declined. Mastercard has also made headlines
by pioneering the use of ‘biometric’ data instead of passwords to verify identification for online payments, such as the use of fingerprints or even using a ‘selfie’ picture taken on a mobile device. This is due to be rolled out during summer 2016 across multiple markets, including the UK.
SMART WAYS TO PAY The use of smartphones within the payments process brings us to the introduction of mobile payments through the likes of Apple Pay, which was launched last year in the UK, as well as the imminent arrival of both Android Pay and Samsung Pay, and what implications these new services have for security. Airplus International’s UK manag-
ing director Caroline Haywood says that “fraud is very low” for mobile devices, which can often be “more secure than traditional card pay- ments using chip-and-pin”. She adds: “Most mobile phones are password- protected and the latest iPhones even
BBT CORPORATE CARDS SUPPLEMENT 2016 29
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