GfK: Promoting the security of mobile payments could be the key to wider adoption

What’s really holding back in-store mobile payments? — GfK — “While security is often buried in promotional content to some degree, elevating this message to the first position could be a key to quicker adoption. The message of ‘the safest way to pay’ may be the path forward for mobile payments.”

One comment on this article

  1. Without regard to the reality, many people seem to fear that new technology, particularly mobile technology, is fundamentally less secure than the old technology that it replaces. This does inhibit adoption. This appears to be a generational problem, each generation preferring the technology of its own day. Few people today can remember banking before MICR or ATMs. Few would want to give them up.

    As a security professional, I tend to prefer the newer technology, in large part because it provides the user with close to real time visibility into activity in their accounts. No one is in a better posittion to detect erroneous or fraudulent activity than the account holder.

    To the extent that I worry about the new technology, it is because it speeds up the process. While this makes the system more effictive and efficient, it may also reduce the window of opportunity for the user to recognize the need for and to take timely corrective action.

    While slow adoption may resist improving security, only in rare cases does it make it worse. Most of those are related to backwards compatibility. The preference for the magnetic stripe card over EMV and mobile is such a case.

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