Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
– Henry Ford
In my physics classes at Georgia Tech, I found the principles around forces, momentum, and energy sometimes difficult to comprehend and distinguish. But I readily grasped a simplified version. I understood that if people apply their combined energy in the same direction, they can move the object of their attention to a designated spot faster and easier than if any of them tried it alone. And if they directly oppose one another or exert their efforts in different directions, the movement of the object is slow, its route is haphazard, and it may never reach its intended destination.
This last situation sometimes occurs with different groups of payments stakeholders—most notably, but not exclusively—the national card brands, along with their financial institution clients, and the merchant communities. Amidst all the charges and countercharges between the groups, it sometimes appears that these stakeholders are pushing in different directions—so the industry seems to be making little progress toward adopting payments standards and practices or fraud prevention solutions, for example.
An important payments risk issue affecting multiple stakeholders is card-not-present (CNP) fraud, which is expected to increase significantly after the United States migrates to EMV chip cards. We learned this from the experiences of other countries that have completed their migration. What happens is that EMV cards essentially close the door on the criminals' ability to create counterfeit EMV cards, so they shift focus to CNP opportunities.
Merchants contend that EMV card migration primarily benefits the card issuers since, for counterfeit-card-present (CCP) fraud, the issuer normally takes the loss—and EMV makes CCP fraud much less likely. Another way merchants may view EMV as being more issuer-friendly is that they must bear card-present fraud loss if they don't upgrade their terminals—at their expense—once the October 2015 liability shift goes into effect. So not only do they face increasing liability for card-present transactions, they will continue to be held responsible for the expected increase in CNP fraud losses.
The card brands and financial institutions counter the merchants' position on a number of fronts. For example, they point to the massive payment card data breaches that took place in 2014 at national merchants, saying these events eroded consumers' confidence in payment cards. Migrating to EMV cards and eventually replacing the magnetic stripe will provide clear improvements to payment card security, which will in turn increase consumer confidence in the safety of using cards. And that will benefit all stakeholders in this payment system. In addition, card brands and financial institutions are taking steps to help mitigate CNP fraud: they have invested heavily in several products and are collaborating with third-party providers to develop better customer authentication solutions to ultimately reduce the risk of CNP transactions for all stakeholders.
Disagreements among stakeholders will always exist, especially on elements that have a major financial impact on their businesses. However, there must be a diligent and ongoing effort by all parties, working together and with the same goal, to find areas of common ground that will result in a more secure payments environment.
By David Lott, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed