Security on credit cards and banking industry to step up

10 December 2009

The leading names in the credit cards industry have come together in an effort to stem the rising levels of cybercrime and credit cards scams that are affecting the industry.

MasterCard, Visa and American Express have all announced that they will all be introducing new security levels and techniques designed to protect their customers online and when using their ATMs as the fight against credit card fraud intensifies.

The three major credit cards players will now be making all security standards for financial and banking institutions, merchants and credit cards and debit cards consumers even higher from January 2010 after the latest results of fraud and scams were released.

The consensus from last week's Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Compliance Conference held in Sydney was that levels had reached crisis point with unprecedented numbers of cybercrime being committed every year, with this figure raising.

Last month Visa announced its plans to raise its security levels, alerting the industry that commencing in January 2010 Visa will only produce credit cards with smart chips. Currently approximately 37 per cent of existing Visa cards are enabled with a smart chip. Debit cards and prepaid cards will also have their security increased with smart chip technology commencing from January 2011 with the intention being that every Visa card will have a smart chip by April 1 2013.

These changes to the Visa process will also extend to ATMs Australia-wide as they too will need to be chip compatible by January 2011.

According to the Australian Banker's Association some of the examples of the banking industry's latest security upgrades include everything from new monitoring systems to new security chips on all issued credit cards and debit cards.

More specifically:

Enhanced systems that will constantly monitor all account transactions, especially if the account has been flagged as suspicious with verification for any transactions required by the bank on these accounts
All credit cards and debit cards to be rolled out with security chips and PIN security use only, starting in 2010
Greater anti-skimming protection at all ATMs
A two factor authentication system using SMS messages or a token for online and Internet banking transactions

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