The Puzzle of Payments Security

Payments security is a forefront issue today: incessant cyber-attacks, large-scale data breaches that expose millions of consumers? sensitive information and billions of dollars of fraudulent payment transactions in a year. On June 25-26, 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosted its fifth international payments policy conference, ?The Puzzle of Payments Security: Fitting the Pieces Together to Protect the Retail Payments System.' More than 120 payments system participants...
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Payments security is a forefront issue today: incessant cyber-attacks, large-scale data breaches that expose millions of consumers? sensitive information and billions of dollars of fraudulent payment transactions in a year. On June 25-26, 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosted its fifth international payments policy conference, ?The Puzzle of Payments Security: Fitting the Pieces Together to Protect the Retail Payments System.' More than 120 payments system participants and observers met to exchange their thoughts and views on payments security and fraud as matters of importance for preserving public confidence in worldwide retail payment systems. Some of the questions that were addressed included: What economic principles underlie the determinants of payments security? What options are available to better align incentives of payments stakeholders? How best are resources allocated between preventing, detecting, and responding to payments security threats? How should the changing threat landscape affect the ways in which sensitive information is secured and used for retail payments? What roles should private players and public authorities play to solve the puzzle of retail payments security?