Visa issues best practices for safer mobile phone payments

Visa Europe and Visa Inc have issued a set of mobile acceptance security best practices to help protect cardholder and account data when devices such as smartphones are used to facilitate card payments.

The measures, which are for software and hardware providers, retailers and their acquirers, build upon what Visa Europe says is its leadership in the areas of encryption and tokenisation technologies.

They can be used to both simplify and reduce the costs of implementing and maintaining a secure acceptance solution, and work hand-in-hand with EMV chip acceptance.

Visa Europe says encryption and tokenisation technologies have already proven to be suitable to different retail and payment processing environments, while mobile technology is enabling a growing number of small and medium-sized retailers to accept payments using mobile devices.

Visa Inc points that because mobile devices and acceptance attachments today are not designed to the same security requirements as traditional payment terminals and merchants do not control the security of the network environments to which their acceptance devices connect wirelessly, there are important security considerations above and beyond those for traditional acceptance solutions.

“By engaging with industry in issuance of these best practices, and leveraging existing Visa guidance, we can ensure that any mobile acceptance solution deployed is both secure and suitable from the outset,” said Stanley Skoglund, Visa Europe’s head of payment systems and enterprise risk.

For more information click here