The increasing popularity of online payment systems results from the world’s gradual transition to a cashless and contactless digital economy — an economy, projected in a recent Huawei white paper, to be worth $23 trillion by 2025. With digital commerce emerging as the largest segment in the projected $8.49 trillion global digital payments market in 2022, it’s not surprising that businesses are investing heavy capital in integrating this functionality into their operating platforms.

Credit cards remain a top favorite among the many ways consumers can now make purchases online. WorldPay’s Global Payment Report revealed that 34% of global consumers used credit and debit cards while purchasing items online. Credit cards were also the top payment option for point of sale (POS) transactions. However, concerns over the security risks of this technology continue to grow. The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be an aggravating factor as the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) discovered a 44% increase in credit card fraud reports between 2019 and 2020. In 2021 the FTC further reported that it received consumer fraud reports totaling over $5.8 billion, a whopping 70% increase on the previous year. 390,000 of these reports were credit card frauds that led to identity theft.

Considering the security risks confronting the 2.8 billion credit cards used globally, protecting sensitive cardholder data has never been more crucial. The good news is that businesses can protect consumer data by strengthening their payment processing software and platforms with standard security procedures and technologies that can avert cardholder data breaches. Creating those security procedures is the focus of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), a comprehensive list of 12 significant metrics against which businesses must measure their card payment policies and procedures. PCI-DSS guarantees compliance with its standard will ward off (Read more...)