Mastercard, the financial services company, has entered into an agreement to acquire NuData Security, a global technology provider that aims to help enterprises prevent online and mobile fraud using a combination of indicators.
Rather than partnering with technology companies, Mastercard has decided to buy a company that focuses on securing payments, announcing its acquisition of NuData Security. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
According to Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise risk and security for Mastercard, “Securing all payments today and tomorrow remains a top priority for Mastercard.”
“The addition of NuData will build on our layered security strategy to safeguard each and every transaction across the globe. The combination of session and biometric information will provide even richer context around potential cyber and device-specific threats, enabling us to deliver even greater trust and peace of mind,” he added.
Read more: IBM and Visa team up for IoT-enabled payments
Watching the detectives
NuData’s flagship product is called NuDetect, it works by identifying authentic users from potential fraudsters based on their online, mobile app and smartphone interactions, flagging those that represent the highest risk.
According to Mastercard, the technology assesses, score and learns from each online or mobile transaction to enable merchants and issuers to make decisions about payment authorization in real-time.
Rival financial services company Visa has already opened up a program to allow IoT manufacturer companies to offer secure payments, and has announced that it is working with chipmaker Intel to integrate Visa’s encryption technology with Intel Data Protection Technology for Transactions.
Read more: Japanese bank Mizuho begins development of IoT payments platform
Protect and survive
According to Clive Longbottom, analyst at Quocirca, it should come as no surprise that the main card payment providers are trying to strengthen their security capabilities.
“The security environment for card players is changing rapidly. No longer is chip and pin the only game in town – tap and pay, and the back-end of PayPal, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and so forth, mean that there are far more attack vectors for the black hats to aim at,” he said.
“Acquiring a broad scale security heuristics and behavioral analytics company makes sense in trying to provide better insights into what is happening, and so stopping more fraudulent action in its steps,” he added.
However, Longbottom believes that the future of securing payment authorization lies with Blockchain.
“Blockchain makes the movement of money fully traceable and therefore makes such types of financial fraud almost impossible,” he suggested.