“Visa Europe has announced a new, more secure way for consumers to pay retailers via smartphones, a move that could set the stage for Apple’s Apple Pay and rival mobile payment services to be introduced into Europe in the coming months,” Eric Auchard reports for Reuters.
“Visa Europe said on Tuesday it would introduce to member banks by mid-April a ‘tokenisation’ service which substitutes random numbers for a user’s credit card details when a merchant transmits transaction data, reducing the risk of online theft,” Auchard reports. “Similar security from Visa Inc, the former parent of Visa Europe, and rival card issuers MasterCard and American Express has been key to the success of Apple Pay since it was introduced in the United States last year, according to industry experts.”
“Steve Perry, Visa Europe’s chief digital officer, said in an interview his association’s plan for secure credit card data transmission parallels what Visa Inc offers in the United States. But he declined to comment on whether Apple Pay had agreed to use his organisation’s version in European markets,” Auchard reports. “‘Apple and Visa (Inc) have an agreement around what has happened,’ Perry said. ‘I am as excited as anyone, but we have to wait,” he said. The Visa Europe executive referred further questions to Apple.'”
Read more in the full article here.
It seems like they are trying to bypass the need for a fingerprint scanner because Android doesn’t have an effective one yet and it will allow any texting capable cell phone to use it.
If so, then people will still have to use Apple Pay if they desire true transaction security. Just tokenization, alone, is insufficient. But, if this step enables the expansion of Apple Pay into Europe, then that is great!