FreedomPay and Microsoft Offer Banks enhanced Security to Unlock Customer Payment Data
New security solutions give banks and merchants access to data for smarter marketing and operating decisions
By: Jeff Vogel, Director of Product Marketing at FreedomPay
In the payments world, alternative players like Apple, Amazon and PayPal are vying to disrupt and disintermediate banks’ relationships with consumers and merchants. Technology companies are able to leverage data to deliver targeted customer promotions based on spending and lifestyle data.
Banks, however, have been unable to consume much of the data generated by merchants because of inadequate security controls, leaving them unable to capitalize on their unparalleled access to data.
New security solutions protect the data flowing among consumers, merchants and banks, and deliver the security capabilities that banks demand. Now banks can deliver more value-added services, enabling merchants to grow traffic by using data to create personalized offers and incentives programs.
The PCI Security Council, a governing body charged with defining security protocols for the payments industry, has only recently announced a handful of leading security technology providers capable of fully protecting all data across the commerce value chain.
An emerging new breed of global security solutions uses the same security infrastructure and data standards that banks require for their own data. These PCI-validated third-party service providers are able to solve the merchant’s need for security at the point of sale, and also enable data to be consumed by financial institutions and technology partners on the back end, creating a virtual bridge among the consumer, the merchant and the bank.
Using PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE), the industry’s most secure standard, at the merchant level allows banks to access fully secured data from the point-of-sale system, offering more robust insight about who buys what, and when, for smarter marketing analytics.
The FreedomPay P2PE solution provides the security wrapper for transaction data, offering merchants, financial services partners and technology partners the assurance that the data can be passed among enterprises in the ecosystem.
The volume of data, the accessibility of data and the relevance of data are driving the global economy. “The payment space has become more of an information business,” says Colin Kerr, director of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft Corp. “Understanding who people are paying, what they are paying with, how frequently they are paying and how much they are paying is extremely valuable information. That’s really the key to unlocking value from payments in today’s world, and our bank partners are engaging in this area.”
With validated security as a backdrop, an emerging new world allows merchants and banks to monetize transaction data previously unavailable. Now that the technology to enable banks to consume transaction data has arrived, banks and their business intelligence (BI) partners across the globe are looking at new opportunities to provide services to merchants and customers.
Microsoft technology is driving innovation in the payments value chain and is a key enabler of FreedomPay solutions. Windows 8 Phone and tablet devices provide compelling payments acceptance and initiation experiences, and the Azure cloud platform enables new transaction integration and digital wallet infrastructures that connect banks and merchants to consumers. Both banks and merchants can unlock the value of the value of demographic data from spending transactions using the advanced analytics capabilities of Microsoft Power BI, a solution that integrates the capabilities of Excel in Office 365 with Azure.
New opportunities are being created at a rapid pace. Innovations in commerce technology, coupled with the new awareness of the importance of transaction data, have tied together point-of-sale systems, payment processors, financial institutions and third-party analytics engines, enabling enterprises to completely reinvent commerce for the future, with banks leading the charge.
Banks are uniquely positioned to create a secure payment ecosystem and data storage solution for their customers. With a growing set of audit and data-compliance requirements challenging merchants, new alliances between banks and merchants can provide a secure platform for incentives programs and data analysis. Both shoppers and merchants can trust banks and financial institutions with their data and begin to fully participate in the new world of commerce.
For more about FreedomPay and PCI-validated P2PE, please visit https://www.freedompay.com or email commerce@freedompay.com.