Can Mobile Operators be Trusted with Your Credit Card Details?
As mobile operators are consistently used more and more to process complicated payments from their customers, it becomes increasingly important to know if they can be trusted. We all want SMS payments, mobile wallets, and barcode transfers, but even more than we need convenience, we need our financial information to be handled securely.
Vesta, an electronic payments business from Portland, Oregon, recently did a detailed survey of quite a few major mobile network operators across the United States and Europe. This survey found that more than 25 percent of them had a low compliance rate with the crucial security standards in the electronic payments community.
They found that there have been an increasing number of breaches in security involving these companies that handle your sensitive financial information on a daily basis. Some of these errors have gone public and hit the headlines while others have received almost no proper news coverage. What is the reason for these multiple breaches? Do they happen in spite of the companies’ attempts to take all the correct safeguards for keeping their customers’ information safe? Or are these companies simply not taking the right precautions?
In 2006, a set of rigid and coherent standards were created by the largest mobile payment processers, companies like Visa, MasterCard, and AmEx. These standards are known as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, or PCI DSS. They are a set of 12 security protocols designed to keep security tight around your financial information, with the aim of helping to reduce card fraud and other crimes related to the theft of financial information. If the company that processes your credit card information consistently complies with all 12 points, your information will be far less open to outright theft or any type of security breach.
These points instruct mobile network operators to do such things as build and maintain a secure network, protect the data of the cardholders, and have a program in place to continually find any vulnerabilities in their systems. Mobile network operators should also have strong access control measures, test and monitor their networks regularly, and have a strict policy governing the security of the information they process.
Vesta found that, even though more than half of today’s payments are made through electronic means, a quarter of the companies surveyed did not comply fully with the above requirements. 35 percent of them didn’t even know that non-compliance with the requirements could earn their company serious penalties.
Even though PCI compliance is definitely not cheap, that is no excuse. PCI compliance is essential to running a mobile network operator service that has integrity and can be trusted. More than half of the companies surveyed stated that they felt the greatest downside of a security breach was not the loss of the customer’s money but the negative publicity that the episode would surely generate. The main threat to these companies from handling your information negligently was that if your details did get stolen, your confidence in their company might be shaken.
There are many ins and outs in this credit driven society. For more general credit card information please read the Kanetix guide to credit cards. There you’ll learn about types of cards, and money-saving tips.
