Industry news website Retail Banker International recently featured over 200 banking and payments experts, including Bluefin’s CIO Tim Barnett and CISO Brent Johnson, capturing highlights of 2023 and a look ahead into the global data forecasts for 2024.
What trends do leading industry executives expect to dominate the payments world in 2024? Tim Barnett, CIO, Bluefin, expects an increase in mobile wallets and wearables, which in turn will cause an increase in e-commerce fraud – tokenization will be a key strategy to keeping data secure.
“I expect mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay to grow in usage in 2024. Wearable payment devices like Apple Watches will only continue to grow in popularity as well. Paying this way is actually safer than using a debit or credit card because these types of transactions tokenize credit card information as opposed to physical cards that transmit actual card numbers.
Now that security measures at the payment terminal have been strengthened, fraud will increasingly start to migrate online where authentication measures are still being developed in some cases. Because of this, I anticipate there will need to be an increased push for authentication in the e-commerce space.
This authentication also needs to extend to mobile payments. Many younger consumers are not even carrying wallets anymore and depend on their phones as their primary mode of payment. Since smartphones are so critical to many aspects of people’s lives, the big tech companies that are behind their technology will increasingly be the target of attacks targeting consumers’ personal data.” – Barnett
With increased threats on consumer data, Bluefin’s CISO Brent Johnson, predicts the importance of securing the identity side of payments will come in the form of increased biometrics into a variety of new payment methods.
“With the rise of embedded payments, SaaS led payments, and more digital and mobile payments, attacks will shift to where the valuable data is at – the backend processes. Payment and personal data is often no longer with the merchant or even at the point of sale; it’s with providers like Apple and Google. While these companies offer more secure payments due to the use of tokens, they will also be the target of new attacks. For cybercriminals, it will be less about targeting physical card numbers and more about identity.
Because of these evolving attacks, CISOs and security leaders need to stay up to date on new tools like AI that can help with risk monitoring and fraud detection. AI use in risk monitoring will skyrocket in 2024. Additionally, AI offers security leaders offensive measures to protect against potential threats, not just defensive tactics to respond to attacks.” – Johnson
Read RBI’s full article here.
