Quantum physics is suddenly big in pop culture. Black holes and spacetime, for example, are central to both the plots of current films “Interstellar,” and “The Theory of Everything.” In the latter, cosmologist Stephen Hawking spends his life trying to find a single theory to “explain” all of life. Similarly, those mindful of payment card security in an age of proliferating hacks are looking for a single theory — an unassailable, breach-proof idea — to make payments secure and safe for the foreseeable future.
Category: Card Processing
Payments Need Safe Holiday Travels, Too!
As you may have seen in last week’s newsletter, we mentioned that in addition to the holiday revelry, and holiday sales, your business is enjoying, you’ll also want to be careful of a potential uptick in fraud and hackery in your business’ databases and Point-of-Sale devices.
The Wallets, They Are A-Changin’
The Wallets, They Are A-Changin’ It’s That Time of Year It’s the time of year where customers are encouraged to…
Holiday Shopping Kicks Off to Record Sales — In China!
Black Friday may not quite be here yet, but in Canada, Thanksgiving has already come and gone, and in China — well, there they’re setting records already for online holiday shopping. We refer to the just-concluded “Singles Day,” in China, which comes on 11/11 — the idea being that all those “ones” emphasize “single-ness.” As Bloomberg News describes it “Singles’ Day, a Chinese twist on Valentine’s Day, was invented by students in the 1990s… When written numerically, the date is reminiscent of bare branches, the Chinese expression for bachelors and spinsters.”
The Road Ahead for Payments: Yellow Bricks, or Leaking Digits?
As our readers already know, changes are coming to the world of credit cards. Chief among those, as a new article in Wired states, are EMV cards, which “have an embedded microchip that authenticates the card as a legitimate bank card to prevent hackers from embossing stolen card data onto blank cards to use it for fraudulent transactions. The chip contains the same data that traditionally is stored on a card’s magnetic stripe, but also has a certificate used to digitally sign each transaction.
Halloween Spending, Holiday Trends — and Goodbye, Cash?
The Boston Globe says it succinctly: “Consumers may still be holding tight to their wallets after the recession, but there’s at least one occasion that doesn’t appear to have them spooked: Halloween.”
Why Secure Payment Processing is Important for Your Small Business
As a small business owner, you are likely looking for ways to save money in any area that you can identify. Sometimes business owners make the mistake of saving money by not using payment processing for their customers, which could result in bigger problems later on. If you want to protect your business and your customers at the same time, then secure payment processing should be implemented as soon as possible.
MasterCard Tips, the Final Chapter (Pt. III)
“First there was Heartbleed, then Shellshock, and now Poodle, yet another serious security vulnerability in yet another widely used piece of software that went unnoticed for years.”
What is a Virtual Merchant?
Any type of website that sells products or services online is known as a virtual merchant, because the payment transactions occur digitally. Even if you ship physical products to the customers who made the purchase, you still fall within the definition of a virtual merchant since the purchase was initiated online and all of the payment was made in a digital manner.
