Visa tightens payments security in the Philippines

MANILA, Philippines — Global leader digital payments provider Visa has outlined a robust approach for strengthening payments security in the country over the next three years.

Dan Wolbert, Visa country manager for the Philippines and Guam, said payment security has always been a key pillar of focus for the company.

The launch of its Future of Security Roadmap for the Philippines shows the company’s commitment to ensure that security moves at the speed of innovation through collaborations with industry stakeholders, merchants, policy makers, law enforcement and accountholders.

“We believe it is a shared responsibility among financial institutions, merchants, consumers and the government to secure the commerce ecosystem. We acknowledge the need for risk and security of payments to evolve with the changing payment landscape so that we can stay ahead of these technological advancements,” Wolbert said.

 The roadmap focuses on a number of key initiatives enabling security to evolve at the same pace as the technologies changing the way we pay.

These security initiatives include evaluating data by removing sensitive data from the ecosystem and making stolen account details invalid, protecting data by implementing safeguards to protect personal data as well as account details, and harnessing data by identifying potential fraud before it occurs and increasing confidence in approving genuine transactions.

Another initiative is empowering accountholders, third party providers and merchants to play an active role in payment security.

“Our commitment is to build trust and confidence among our clients, consumers and merchants in the payments ecosystem so that the country can embark on this digital and cashless journey,” Wolbert said.

 On top of the existing payment security solutions, Visa advocates the adoption of tokenization and 3-D Secure 2.0, a new standard for ecommerce , which can add peace of mind for consumers and help merchants increase their sales.

Tokenization helps to eliminate sensitive data, so the 16-digit number on the card would not be stored anywhere by the merchant, bank or payment gateway. This will help to reduce fraud rates on eCommerce in the same way EMV chip has limited fraud in the face-to-face environment.