Jun 29, 2015

By: Hannah Walker, Director of Government Relations, Food Marketing Institute
Payment Systems

Last week, I joined over 100 payments professionals for an International Payments Policy Conference hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank.  The two-day conference focused on protecting the retail payments system and included a series of presentations and panel discussions from various industries, including the card networks, merchants, technology solution providers, processors and bankers.

As one would imagine, there were as many opinions as people in the room.  Merchant representatives continued to raise our desire for an open standard setting process and the challenges current PCI and EMVco structure present.  Network representatives continued to claim the American consumer will never remember a personal identification number (PIN).  Of course the banks have their own ideas on devaluing the data as do the processors.

With all of these differing opinions and approaches it is easy to get deep in the weeds and miss the big picture.  The great benefits from this experience and from the conference are that all stakeholders agree payment card fraud is a problem that is not going away.  We also all agree that every link in the chain has a responsibility to protect this sensitive data. We all agree that we are fighting a common and sophisticated enemy that only has to be right one time, whereas everyone in the payments chain must always have the proper precautions and framework in place to keep the system secure.

While this week may not have brought out a tangible solution to the problem, as a participant, I felt optimistic that all industries could come together, hear concerns and arguments from all sides of the conversation and remain committed to keep up the good fight, foster innovation and find areas where we can collaborate to protect consumers' payment data.