SPVA NEWSLETTER VOLUME 13 SPVA Heading to CARTES North America
CARTES is heading to North America (Las Vegas) for the first time and SPVA will be front and center. VeriFone Principal Architect Marc Massar will speak on behalf of SPVA during a March 5th presentation titled, “EMV Will Save the World! Or Not!” During his session, which runs from 4 to 4:30 p.m., Massar will discuss EMV, smart card technology, as well as the expansion of non-traditional payments models. Recently we had a chance to catch up with Marc, who shared his thoughts on CARTES coming to North America, EMV and his love of Italy. Follow Marc on Twitter @marcmassar. CARTES has had a lot of success internationally. How excited are you that they made the decision to come to North America this year? I think this is a great decision and I’m very excited to see it coming to North America. I think that with the recent Visa announcements, and so much buzz in the market around EMV and chip technology in payments, this is the perfect time to bring the show to North America. For more than a decade, EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) cards have been widely embraced across the globe as a means to reduce credit card fraud. The United States, however, has been slow to adopt the technology. Why the hold up? You have to look back at the history of payments and see how EMV developed outside of the United States. Europe had a very different set of problems to solve as they relate to payments back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Europe was, and still is, largely offline and the technology to clone magnetic stripe cards was easy to acquire. Attackers took advantage of these scenarios to capture card data, make new cards and buy goods and services underneath well-known floor limits. So they had to come up with ways to solve the fraud issues that arose from a) not going online for authorization and b) easy to counterfeit payment cards. The United States has a very different payments infrastructure and so we had a different set of problems to solve. Counterfeit cards in the United States are definitely a problem, but because of the online monitoring tools in use by merchants, acquirers, issuers and the brands, the scope of that problem was never the same size. It has always seemed easier to put money and resources into catching fraud at the aggregation points for transactions rather than the end-point capture devices. It sure would be nice if we had both, though. Do you feel that EMV is the best counterfeit deterrent available? That’s a tough question to answer without getting too into the weeds, but the short answer is, “Yes, it’s the best counterfeit protection mechanism we have today.” The longer answer is not so easy. Going to chip cards, or chip-based mobile transactions, just isn’t enough to prevent counterfeiting until all cards are issued with chips. And EMV still has a tough time addressing e-commerce transactions. I’m unlikely to hang a chip card reader off of my laptop or home PC when I want to buy something online. EMV clearly makes cloning of a chip card to another chip card extremely unlikely, if not impossible, but there are so many attacks that can be perpetrated in the payments world. I think we should always be mindful that attackers won’t just give up and there are other technologies we could use in conjunction with EMV to not only help us with the counterfeit of chip cards, but also other skimming-related activity. If you had a day to do anything you wanted, what would you do? I really love to travel with my family, so I think I would like to spend a late spring day in Florence, Italy with my family, slowly moving from one Piazza to the next and ending with a late afternoon in one of the gardens at the Pitti Palace. My wife and I went to Florence several years ago and it was nice and cool, relaxing and the food was the best. And my kids just love to play outside and explore. Please tell us three things about yourself that might not be widely known. I could say something about my two-tone shoes and colored socks, but I think too many people know about that to be considered “not widely known.” So, maybe a couple other obscure facts: - I was an English Lit major with a Classics minor in college. It’s a far cry from Information Security and payments, but I needed something to put me through school and technology always came easy.
- Halloween is my favorite holiday and I try to make it bigger every year at my house. This year we had flaming pumpkins that shot colored flames out of their tops in synch with music. Next Halloween is going to be hard to top...
- I co-founded a company that was focused on providing content-based services to hotels and hotel guests using wireless networks and in-room portable devices. That was in the late ‘90s. We were a little ahead of our time.
What is your current personal goal?
I would really like to spend more time with my family and spend more time taking some music lessons. My kids are all very musical and I would love to get back into it and be able to play along. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Are you heading to Vegas for CARTES North America? Let us know. We’d love to catch up with you during the event to discuss what’s on the horizon for SPVA.
7th Annual Prepaid Expo SPVA will also be represented at the 7th Annual Prepaid Expo in Las Vegas, March 12-14. Greg Boardman, Ingenico’s senior vice president, product and development will speak on behalf of SPVA during a March 13th panel discussion on “Combating Fraud in the Retail Payment Environment” from 2 to 2:45 p.m. Stop by and say hello. Securing Payment Card Data with Encryption and Tokenization l Free Online Webinar Earlier this month, Dave Faoro, chairman of SPVA’s End-to-End Technical Working Group, participated in an online webinar that took a close look at the state of the payment card industry, provided an overview of tokenization and encryption, cited specific case studies and explained how to use tokenization and encryption as a one-two punch. View it here on demand.
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