StrongKey, Others Back NIST Retail Fraud Guide to Improving Mobile Payments Security

The folks at StrongKey dropped word our way recently about a project in which it held a major piece, along with a few other vendors. It’s a project that should be music to the ears of every mobile payments enthusiast, especially those with the almost-universal concern about security in the field. StrongKey contributed to a recent release from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on retail fraud and how to prevent it. Naturally, mobile payments security played a major role in this report.

The NIST report, Special Publication 1800-17, titled “Multifactor Authentication for E-Commerce”, offers insight on how companies that want to put more security in place at their point of sale and checkout operations by using multifactor authentication (MFA). The concept may seem impenetrable for many retailers, so the NIST report seeks to break this complex topic down into more readily digestible chunks for retailers eager to beef up security.

Given that around 75 percent of businesses in Experian’s “Global Fraud Report 2018” indicated a desire to learn and pursue more advanced security tools, the NIST report comes out at the right time. Strongkey, for its part, stepped in as a “technical collaborator,” contributing both its FIDO server system and its Magento open-source component to the cause.

StrongKey’s CTO Arshad Noor noted “It is no longer a secret that passwords, as the sole authentication mechanism for sensitive transactions and resources, have become an epidemic problem in the digital world. The FIDO Alliance’s mission is to change the nature of online authentication; eliminating passwords is one aspect of that mission….”

It is as clear as it’s ever been that businesses are taking mobile payments fraud—and all other kinds besides—as seriously as the topic deserves. Preventing fraud is one of the best first steps to ensuring a better customer experience, which in turn keeps customers coming back. We all know that customers tend to shy away from businesses who experience data breaches, and using MFA to protect against such breaches is a good plan.