Resources for Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)

Good Consumers Will Show Up for Good Security Measures

www.digitaltransactions.net

For as long as we’ve had threats to transacting online, there’s been a data-security industry poised with a vast array of solutions to protect us, anxiously awaiting evidence of a compelling business case to get things started. But for just as long, it’s been axiomatic that consumers just don’t show up when it comes to protecting themselves—they simply won’t bear any cost or inconvenience in order to transact securely. No show, no dough.

While that presumption might have been true in the past—largely for reasons of the payment industry’s own doing—it’s not true any longer. Events have transcended even the bank card’s clumsy and sometimes self-defeating efforts to wire in point-of-sale-oriented signature-based cards for e-commerce. “Good” consumers just might show up after all. Go back to 1995, when buying on the Web really got under way, to see how logic got stood on its head. That’s when the bank card associations worked closely with the key Internet infrastructure providers and an assortment of security firms to come up with a protocol that would provide substantive digital identification and verification of all parties to an online credit card transaction. The result was the much ballyhooed but quickly jettisoned Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol. SET proved to be overkill—too slow and expensive for most consumers to use. So the first generation of e-commerce went on its merry way without it.

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