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Saturday, March 20, 2010

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Payment Cards Center

The Payment Cards Center provides meaningful insights into developments in consumer credit and payments that are of interest not only to the Federal Reserve but also to the industry, other businesses, academia, policymakers, and the public at large. The center carries out its work through an agenda of research and analysis as well as forums and conferences that encourage dialogue incorporating industry, academic, and public-sector perspectives.

What's new

February 2010

Achieving Sustainable Improvements in the Security of Retail Payments: Technologies, Standard-Setting, and Coordination (907 KB, 4 pages)

On February 16-17, 2010 the Payment Cards Center hosted a conference on Achieving Sustainable Improvements in the Security of Retail Payments: Technologies, Standard-Setting, and Coordination. This conference brought together technologists, banking and payment industry representatives, merchants, and policymakers to discuss the complex economic and technological issues that are presented when considering a robust data security standard. The conference also discussed what these technologies can and cannot do when it comes to protecting consumers' payment information and offered suggestions on how the invited groups might collaborate on data security issues.

A conference summary is forthcoming.

January 2010

Consumer Credit and Payments "Snapshots" added to PCC Website

The Payment Cards Center has created a section on its website aimed at providing easy access to a variety of statistics concerning consumer credit and consumer payments. The data collected by center staff come from a number of sources, including the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Census Bureau, and industry sources. The data are grouped into two "snapshots." Each snapshot includes subsections that present specific statistics, a description of the data, links to the data source, tables presenting the most recent data, and charts displaying longer-term trends.

Heartland Payment Systems: Lessons Learned from a Data Breach (439 KB, 20 pages)

In this discussion paper, Senior Industry Specialist Julia Cheney summarizes a workshop hosted by the Payment Cards Center on August 13, 2009. The workshop examined the changing nature of data security in consumer electronic payments. The center invited the chairman and CEO of Heartland Payment Systems (HPS), Robert Carr, to lead this discussion and to share his experiences stemming from the data breach at his company in late 2008 and, as important, to discuss lessons learned as a result of this event. The former director of the Payment Cards Center, Peter Burns, who is acting as a senior payments advisor to HPS, also joined the discussion to outline HPS's post-breach efforts aimed at improving information-sharing and data security within the consumer payments industry. In conclusion, Carr introduced three technology solutions — end-to-end encryption, tokenization, and chip technology — that are under discussion in payment security circles as ways to better secure payment card data as they move among the different parties in the card payment systems. While HPS has been very supportive of end-to-end encryption, each of these alternatives offers its own set of advantages and disadvantages.