The noise levels around mobile payment are deafening. Just take the scramble for attention at Cartes, Paris. Despite the infatuation with mobile and proliferation of wallets and mPOS devices, the industry has yet to address consumers’ concerns over security, which remains the major stumbling block to widespread adoption of mobile payment.

Consumer trust matters – a lot. Without a more unified approach from the payment industry, the regulators are stepping in for the consumer. The European Central Bank’s (ECB) new recommendations on mobile payment security therefore come as no surprise.

Now it is our duty as payment providers to respond to the proposals and to provide input and advice so that a united set of standards for mobile payment security can be established for the benefit of the consumer. We therefore urge our peers across the payment environment to take the opportunity and add your voice to this draft document for public consultation.

At IRIS Analytics, we welcome the recommendations and are ready to share our thoughts on the ECB recommendations:

• We are pleased to notice that the recommendations do not exclusively rely on strong or two-factor authentication as a precondition to mobile security but that it leaves room for multi-layer security to provide ‘fail safe’ defenses.
• The paper acknowledges that strong authentication – which, more often than not, translates into tedious extra steps and inconvenience for the consumer – can be overcome.
• It calls for transaction monitoring to be put in place as an additional line of defense, both in situations where two-factor authentication is required and situations where it is not required. 

Versatile and powerful tools, which are able to identify and analyse fraudulent transactions in real-time, can deliver tremendous value in balancing the need for secure transacting with convenience, also in the mobile environment.

Our own IRIS software serves as a highly effective additional line of defense across Europe, the Middle East and the US. Our clients increase customer convenience without increasing risk, by accurately identifying those transactions that do not need to go through a two-factor authentication process. The benefit is that they save the cost of delivering Out-of-Band OTP data when it is not necessary.

We look forward to working with the regulators and the industry in a collective effort to define a secure, convenient and  trusted standard for mobile payments.

Nikolaus D. Bayer, co-founder and Managing Director of IRIS Analytics GmbH.