In August, news first surfaced that the White House began offering large enterprises “extra incentives” to boost their cybersecurity defenses.
The Ecommerce Times followed up on that report by asserting that the White House has started to embark on an uphill battle to make companies care about cybersecurity.
Why an uphill battle? MAD Security‘s Kati Rodzon tells the publication that many companies will simply “do the bare minimum.”
The initiatives are a follow-up to the cybersecurity executive order President Obama signed in February, following Congress’ failure to agree on cybersecurity legislation last year. The order was intended to facilitate more information-sharing between the government and private companies regarding cyberattacks, as well as to set up a framework for cybersecurity initiatives.
But according to a widening array of business analysts and consultants, simple concerns related to online and mobile payments will be the dominant roadblocks to ecommerce growth in 2014.
Consumers want to know they can trust the companies that they provide their credit card information to, one analyst was quoted explaining.
All told, it’s been the biggest concern of 2013, and it will likely be an even bigger concern in 2014. But experts say that there has been a steady “uptick” in the number of partnerships recently forged among payment processing providers and online security software vendors.
Earlier this month, Alaric – a global supplier of fraud prevention and payments solutions – announced that North American Bancard – an industry titan in payment card processing for tens of thousands of North American merchants – has selected Alaric’s Fractals fraud prevention and detection product in what was described as “a competitive pitch for the merchant acquirer’s fraud and risk solution.”
Details shared in the formal announcement indicate that because North American Bancard handles all areas of merchant payment processing, including credit, debit, EBT, check conversion and guarantee, and gift and loyalty cards, NAB makes use of a wide range of risk information sources. In this case, however, Alaric’s Fractals product enabled NAB to bring this information together in one place to make “intelligent fraud and risk decisions efficiently and accurately.”
“We had stringent criteria when it came to selecting our new fraud and risk system,” said Aliki Liadis-Hall, director of compliance at NAB. “We needed to be able to manage our fraud risk exposure across mobile POS, e-commerce and traditional retail channels with a single system.”
Plenty of industry analysts, however, expect to see more “major” announcements like these as the year progresses. In fact, companies that fall short of publicly touting their security safeguards and prowess will lose business next year.
In the final analysis, customers won’t take chances with online shopping like they used to.
