New Card Design Offers Heightened Security

An innovative new credit card creation has been introduced to the world: a card that contains a small monitor as well as a button that issues a password to the user for each transaction. The card is the brainchild of Verisign and Innovative Card Technologies. The two companies recently announced their joint venture and have also stated that they will be trying to sell the idea to a number of different credit card issuers

With the help of this technology, POS security can be substantially improved and e-commerce transactions will also be far more secure. In addition, this card makes it impossible for someone to make purchases on someone’s credit card account without actually having the card. Therefore, thieves that hack into systems in order to gain credit card information will find that information to be useless.

Although the concept of the card is quite interesting and can lead to a substantial increase in credit card security, whether or not credit card issuers will be willing to adopt the new design still waits to be seen. Traditional credit cards that are currently in use cost card issuers less than one dollar per card. These new cards, on the other hand, will cost card issuers anywhere from $10 to $30 per card. Issuers willing to purchase larger amounts of the cards will enjoy the lower rate. According to Verisign representatives, the majority of credit card issuers would likely pay somewhere in the teens for each card in order to have enough for their current customers.

Of course, credit card companies could always pass this expense onto their customers. At the same time, the competitive nature of these companies is making it increasingly more difficult to get customers to pay for fees that are not enforced by other credit card companies.

Although I am not interested in paying any extra fees, I think I would be more than happy to pay a one time $10 fee in order to substantially increase my level of security. At the same time, this seems like another one of those situations where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In other words, if the credit card companies would simply pay the extra cash for this more secure technology, they could potentially save themselves a far greater amount of money when cases of credit card fraud and thievery are avoided.

Related Posts:

• Review of Chip-and-PIN Security Technology - Hopes have been high for the chip-and-PIN security technology for credit card protection. But it looks like even this new technology may...
• QSecure Provides Added Level of Security - QSecure, Inc has introduced a new security feature for credit cards.  The new feature, entitled the SmartStripe, is meant to help protect...
• New Credit Card Security Standard Published - The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Carnegie Mellon University have partnered with 23 other organizations in order to make...
• IBM Offers New PCI Compliance Program - In order to help businesses comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), IBM has announced a new PCI...

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Card Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.