Blog

The games that are being played!

June 8, 2013 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC

This weekend, Margo, my wife and business partner (with much better IT qualifications than I have) posted to our social blog, Clubs that Accept Me as a Member. In her post she said, "I am not into games, in fact I usually pass on participating," which reflects a position contrary to my own.

I love games and, as a child growing up in Australia, took part in cricket, tennis, golf and sailing. However, my passion remains for rugby, as well as car racing.

Today, I have become an ardent viewer of almost any televised sport. While I can no longer play rugby, racing cars remains a passion and I am finding my way to circuits across the western U.S., where for the past six years I have participated in weekend track events on some of the more famous racetracks.

Some of these are in the remotest locations on the planet. And camped out in a dessert, as we seem to be doing of late, there's very little in the way of supporting infrastructure. So much so that when it comes time to pay for services, I am always watchful about my credit and debit card use. Especially my Starbucks open-loop prepaid card. Coffee is just that important for me!

Recall how we were informed back in July 1996, as the Olympic Games were about to kick-off in Atlanta, that, "Among the most ambitious and important technology events at the Atlanta Olympics this month will be Visa's smart-card project — the first large-scale experiment with cash card technology in this country. Visa (would be issuing) about 2 million cash cards, which, unlike traditional credit cards, each contain a microprocessor chip storing a specific cash value."

So what happened and did we truly miss the boat? Even as VISACash cards were distributed in time for the Atlanta Olympics, this important event didn't go according to plan.

I can't recall all the reasons why VISACash failed to attract enthusiastic support among Olympic games visitors, but I suspect a combination of uncertainty among vendors and less than enthusiastic response from potential users. By any standard of measurement, however, it proved to be a failure and the introduction of chip cards into America stalled.

Fast forward to the recent $45 million heist from the world's ATM network, and perhaps we will see renewed energy in support of more affordable plans to re-launch EMV cards.

When I first wrote of the heist, I quoted ECS senior VP, Madhu Gopinath, who had told me that "with EMV in place across America, the 'mechanics' behind this current attack would have been so much harder to achieve."

But must we wait for EMV? I believe we will get there eventually with EMV cards and that they will make greater inroads into our society, but what about all the cards in circulation today?

This, too, was the subject of a recent conversation with OmniPayments Inc. CEO, Yash Kapadia. It's always good to talk to Yash; he has grown his payment processing presence in the Americas and focusing on these markets has allowed him to develop tremendous insights into market sentiment.

Even as he has "seen great strides being made in the adoption of EMV cards," he has also seen a marked uptake of interest card authorization.

"Like all solutions providers catering to financial institutions, where support of various debit card programs are involved — including the support of gift cards — we were very concerned to see what transpired recently. The amounts involved were shocking to see but clearly, there are solutions available and we can only expect greater attention being given to authorization products," Yash said.

"For some time now we have been strong advocates of our own authorization product, OmniAuth (part of the OmniPayments product family) and offer it as a stand-alone product, supporting other vendors' payments platforms, including products like BASE24 and BASE24-eps from ACI Worldwide."

Yash then said that OmniAuth, while initially developed to protect against credit card fraud, is already deployed at a large switch where BASE24 has been deployed and has been well accepted.

"From my perspective, what really differentiates the work we have done is that we have a framework supporting separate rules for cards (including debit and prepaid, open loop, gift cards), terminals (particularly ATMs), the retailers themselves, and of course, the banks," Yash said. "We see such a fine-grained response necessary today given what has transpired so recently."

I suspect that there will be many more solutions out there, but meeting the needs of big switches, such as I am hearing from Yash, is going to be very important.

"We are anticipating that this aspect of payments processing will become an even hotter item than it has in the past and definitely see fraudulent attacks on ATMs, such as the recent one, only further encouraging greater adoption of EMV with chip cards within the U.S.," Yash said.

"We all expected to see their introduction during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, but like everyone, were disappointed with the initial rollout, but are more hopeful this time around, given that the dollars involved have grown this big! We just have to afford doing it this time!"

Many of us don't like playing games. For us, it is enough to simply watch. However, as our reliance on plastic shows no signs of lessening, those involved in supporting the infrastructure have to become more involved — they are an integral part of the game and simply cannot stand by, passively watching from the sidelines.

Solutions are available that offer much greater protection — with many more on the way, I have to believe — so no, we simply cannot pass on participating any longer. After all, none of us wants to become the game, exploited at every turn!

About Richard Buckle

---

Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the Information Technology (IT) industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator, thought leader, columnist and blogger. Richard participates in the HPE VIP Community where he is part of their influencer team.

Connect with Richard: