Shaun Weston interviews Ruston Miles from Bluefin, to discuss fraud, data security, entrepreneurship and what’s next for the company.
For the latest BankNXT Fintech Podcast, I interviewed Ruston Miles from Bluefin, quizzing him about fraud, new technologies, entrepreneurship and how he got his business up and running. Ruston is the founder and current chief innovation officer of Bluefin, a provider of secure payment technology specializing in PCI-validated point-to-point encryption.
We talked about the differences between the US and the UK with regards to point-to-point encryption: “The UK is the number one consumer, worldwide, of point-to-point encryption, and that is encrypted terminals with the PCI program,” he says. “So you have to ask yourself … in 2008, there was a mandate – not a liability shift like we have here in the US – to have chip cards and accept chip cards. After that mandate, and after the merchants did that, ‘card not present’ fraud spiked 80% and continued to rise. That is not because the hackers said Oh well, we give up. We’re gonna go over here … There’s a difference between hacking and being a fraudster.
“So the hackers were still getting the data – on the EMV chip, there’s still the full credit card number – that data was still being hacked through the systems because those systems didn’t use encryption, so the bad guys got it. They couldn’t go and create a chip with it, but they could go online, mail order, or telephone order, and use that. You know, Bluefin was the first in North America to provide this technology, but before us there were four others in the UK.”
