Vend POS Blog

The past couple of years have brought us far too many horror stories of data breaches in retail.

As Chain Store Age cites, “The 2014 Identity Fraud Study reported an increase of more than 500, 000 fraud victims to 13.1 million people in 2016, the second highest number since the study began.” Moreover, it’s been found that the average cost of a breach per organization in 2014 is $3.5 million—an increase of 15 percent from the year before.

But it’s not just about the numbers. In this day and age, consumers aren’t just looking for unique and convenient shopping experiences—they also want their purchasing journeys to be safe and secure.

That’s why in 2015, we anticipate risk mitigation and data security to be among retailers’ top priorities.

There are a number of ways retailers can better manage risk in the coming year. One is to instill awareness and training across the entire organization to ensure that everyone knows the importance of risk mitigation. Retailers can also be more selective of their vendors that handle their data and processes.

We also expect merchants and solutions providers to come up with better ways to protect customer data.

Retailers and financial institutions in Australia, for example, have recently made the PIN as the primary form of card payment authorization because it has proven to be more secure than signatures. PINs keep customers safe from fraud in the event that they lose their cards. Unlike signatures, which can be forged, PIN codes cannot be easily cracked.

Another interesting security initiative can be seen in Apple Pay, which assigns a unique Device Account Number to each phone. The Device Account Number, along with a transaction-specific security code is used to process each purchase, so credit or debit card numbers are never transmitted with the payment, nor are they shared with merchants.