Ride-sourcing companies Uber and Lyft offer secure touch and pay mobile technology. Now NYC based Whisk has brought the same level of ride-sourcing payment security to existing black car and corporate car service companies.
As reported last August, Whisk’s mobile app secures city rides from pick up to destination using touch and pay technology. Companies like Whisk, Uber, and Lyft use Level 1 payment gateways like Braintree, which tokenize credit cards and are subject to frequent on-site audits covering technology and process security. Can the average car service using a POS scanner offer the same payment protection?
The car service industry has already had its share of client information breaches. In 2013, limousine software company Corporatecaronline reportedly compromised close to 1 million customers, including politicians, star athletes, and corporate executives.
Then in March 2014, Illinois based First American Bank urged its customers to stop using credit and debit cards to pay for cabs in Chicago until it could contain more information about a possible breach of the payment processor used by local taxi companies.
Whisk CEO and co-founder Michael Ibrahim said the taxi-substitute market was well served by Uber and Lyft, but his company saw that business riders with corporate requirements were left out of the modern experience. Whisk focused on developing new infrastructure for car companies serving corporations and now has partners with tens of thousands of existing customers.
Ibrahim said the ground transportation industry is lagging behind today’s mobile payment standards because many car companies lack reasonable threat protection. Ibrahim notes it’s expected that any company with tens of thousands of customers should fully tokenize credit cards in order to protect information in case of a breach.
“But many of these companies not only fail to tokenize, but store the credit cards in plain text on servers connected to the Internet without any processes to ensure those servers are secure,” said Ibrahim.
Ibrahim cites a large information gap in the car service industry when updating payment protection to today’s mobile standards. He said most car companies lack the capabilities to assess their own risks, let alone address them, and that the companies providing technology in this industry have been negligent.
He adds that Wisk stepped forward because, “This is not so much a function of the car services, since they wouldn’t have the skills to tackle these challenges. It is a function of their technology providers who have not shown any interest in exerting the effort to meet this same standard.”
While many traditional taxi and car companies complain of unfair tactics used by the ride-sourcing newcomers, these same car companies can’t complain about the enhanced client card security found in ride-sourcing technology.
Partnering with Whisk upgrades their payment options to the same level as today’s smart phone enabled rides, therefore installing safer and more secure payment security.