Visa's CEO Charlie Scharf is pushing for advances in payment technology and security.
In a statement, Scharf said “The recent series of data compromises are terribly unfortunate for everyone involved,” Scharf said in a statement Thursday morning. ”These incidents remind us of the need for all of us to continue to work together to secure payments from criminals. Visa is committed to ensuring our network operates at the highest level of security available and will continue to move the industry towards the adoption of new safeguards including EMV chip and tokenization.”
In a conference call, says Forbes, Scharf said that overhauling the existing system is expensive and means new parts, new terminals and new software, “but we can all see it’s necessary,” he said.
According to Forbes, Scharf said, “I think it’s fair to say that as best we can tell, some of the breaches don’t relate to payment system at all,” and rather, than be attributed to the retailers’ servers and internal systems.
Scharf said that that Visa is “redoubling” its efforts to shield consumers from fraud loss after a data compromise and is also making an advertising push to make sure consumers are aware of the protections their credit card affords them, Forbes reported — a push that, based on consumer confidence surveys Visa ran, seems to be working. “Consumer confidence in using cards is something we pay very close attention to, it still looks very very good,” he said.
