Saturday, June 13, 2009

PIN Debit Growth Almost 4x Higher Than Signature Debit

DEBIT CARD ISSUERS EXPECT TRANSACTION VOLUMES TO GROW

Debit card issuers predict 7% transaction growth both for PIN- and signature-debit this year, according to the Pulse electronic funds transfer network's 2009 Debit Issuer study.

"Debit card use is expected to continue to grow as the economy bottoms out and begins to recover because consumers use their debit cards for a large portion of necessary everyday expenses," Cindy Ballard, Pulse executive vice president, says in a statement.

New York-based management-consulting firm Oliver Wyman surveyed 73 financial institutions for Houston-based Pulse, which is owned by Discover Financial Services. Together, the participants issue 94 million debit cards and operate 61,000 ATMs. The financial institutions, which include large banks, community banks and credit unions, experienced 8% overall transaction growth in their debit card programs between July and December 2008.



One large bank attributed the growth to greater consumer confidence in the economy during that period, according to the report. Consumers continue to prefer to use debit cards for small-ticket purchases, the study found. Twenty-seven percent of all debit purchases last year were for less than $10. "We've seen a shift from higher-value merchant categories like casual dining to groceries, which have lower tickets," a large bank says in the report.

Debit card penetration, which the
report defines as the percentage of eligible account holders who have a debit card, was 73% in 2008, that same as 2007. "Best-in-class" issuers had an average penetration rate of 91%. Instant debit card issuing at branches may help improve card penetration and active rates, the report suggests. Financial institutions continue to use multiple definitions of an active debit cards. The number of issued cards used "actively" in 2008 was 66.1% under the expanded definition of active cards-those used to conduct any transaction in the previous 30 days. Earlier studies defined active cards as those used to make any signature-debit purchases during the previous 30 days. Under that definition, debit card active rates declined to 56% last year from 59% in 2007.

Source:
CardForum





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HomeATM Eliminates Fencing Too! (almost)

But we can completely eliminate "phencing", the selling of your stolen card data acquired by phishing techniques...

Instead of "typing" your debit or credit card numbers into a box on a website, if you were to use HomeATM's PCI 2.0 Certified Terminal with a Built-In PIN Entry Device your card data would NOT be available for hackers or phishers to acquire.  In fact your cardholder data would be "Instantaneously Encrypted Inside" our terminal. 

What that  also means is that your data is NEVER in the clear.

If your data is never in the clear, then fraudsters can't steal the information.

So it stands to reason, that if they can't see it, they cannot steal, thus they cannot sell it.

That does not necessarily mean that we "completely" eliminate fencing as the picture (above left) illustrates, but rest assured we do in fact eliminate "phencing."


Remember...Never Type...Swipe.

Rhetorical Question: When it comes to your credit/debit card data... wouldn't you rather be the one doing the swiping?


Speaking of which...let your voice be heard!
Refresh this page an please take 30 seconds to answer the 5 simple YES/NO questions posed in the poll.
 Thanks and have a great weekend!


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HomeATM Eliminates Phishing


If online banks switched from username password (typing) to swiping they would eliminate phishing entirely.

If you required your online bank enrollees to swipe their card, they prevent would be hackers from swiping their card information.

Instead, it's your customers who would be doing the swiping. (of their card data located on the magnetic stripe)

And because the data is "instantaneously encrypted INSIDE" our PCI 2.0 Certified SafeTPIN the data is NEVER in the clear.

That means that even if your customers  fell for a phishing attack, hook, line and sinker, the fraudsters wouldn't consider them a keeper...not the type.

So don't type...swipe.  (and wipe...out the emerging sophisticated phishing attacks, including cloned bank websites, DNS Hijacking, even wipe out the threat of cloned cards. 





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Thousands Afffected by New Major Credit Card Breach,

Major Credit Card Security Breach, Thousands Affected - NBC 15 Online

(MOBILE, Ala.) - A news station "down south" is reporting that a "major credit card security breach is affecting thousands of people tonight."  NBC15 Mobile, AL says they have confirmed several credit card companies are canceling accounts and issuing new credit and check cards.  Is it more Heartland fallout or new?  Hard to tell from this story, as they make it sound new.  Since I can't find anything else on it, either they have one heckuvan exclusive or they they are "just now" reporting about the Heartland Payment Systems breach which was announced last January. 

Here's their story:

Credit card companies say they wanted to play it safe and cancel the cards right away before mystery hackers spent too much of other people's money.  Nancy Pierce recently found $700 in unexplained charges on her credit card account. "It's scary when something like this happens," Pierce said. "You don't know who's doing it. "Most of these charges were phone cards from Australia."

Pierce is not the only one seeing mystery charges. Officials with Visa say several credit card companies have had to cancel thousands of accounts and are issuing new cards, because of a hacker.

"It was so great to know and I even thanked them," Pierce said. "I said thank you so much for keeping an eye on my account and for letting me know and stopping it before it got worse."

NBC 15 News contacted Visa to try to find out where the security breach happened.. A Visa representative told us: "For security, the bank does not disclose that information to its customers. They always are going to refer you to Visa, but unfortunately at Visa we don't have access to anyone's information. It can only be accessed through the bank."

Officials with Bank of America, a Visa cardholder, would not talk either. The bank says letters are already in the mail en route to their affected customers.

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