Anyone Can Be A Retailer

Person-to-person (P2P) payments are transforming the merchant marketplace. With mobile apps like SHAZAM’s Pentagon, virtually anyone can become a retailer – and not just overnight, but instantly.

The worrisome part of this morphing payments marketplace is that this new kind of retailer may not be as savvy at spotting potential fraud as their more traditional merchant counterparts.

Take a farmers’ market vendor, for instance. Does the man who has grown a successful business based on a keen sense of soil pH and a superior harvesting skill have the same proficiency with PCI standards? Possible. . . not likely.

That’s why it’s incredibly important for PINs to stay in the game. It’s widely known that a PIN is one of the leading deterrents to payments fraud. Therefore, it’s imperative that mobile and P2P innovators give PINs a staring role in their emerging platforms. Without it, the new retailers of the world are vulnerable to seasoned fraudsters just waiting for the right time to pounce.

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