MasterCard has announced that it’s going to be investing over $20 million to improve its cyber security. Speaking in a press release, the company’s President of North American Markets, Chris McWilton, noted that “progress is being made with the move to EMV and mobile payments,” but emphasized that the company’s “continued investments reinforce the efforts we are taking to protect the payments system for cardholders, merchants and issuers.”One of the new measures will be “independent layer of security on top of the tools and policies of financial institutions” called the MasterCard Safety Net. Another important endeavour will be what the company is calling “a pilot program” to test out new biometric security measures. Developed in collaboration with First Tech Federal Credit Union, the initiative will employ fingerprint scanning as well as voice and facial recognition technologies.
It isn’t yet totally clear how those measures relate to the company’s forthcoming biometric credit card, but the company certainly seems to be relying heavily on biometric technology for security going forward, and rightly so. Industry experts have been warning of the new dangers emerging as more financial transactions go digital and mobile, and biometric technology is often pointed out as a key factor in any security apparatus dealing with these kinds of transactions. MasterCard is smart to bank on it.
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