InComm Taps Tender Armor to Help Prevent Card Fraud

This week it was announced that InComm, a transaction solution and prepaid solution industry leader, will be piloting fraud prevention company Tender Armor’s CVV+ product in order to better protect cardholders against card fraud.

“When consumers shop online they have no idea what the merchant is doing with their card data,” says Tender Armor CEO Madeline Aufseeser, adding that consumers and American households have growing concerns regarding the security of the data they use to online shop and transact, as noted in this Department of Commerce study on household data.

Aufseeser likens the consumer relationship with online fraud security to auto insurance–consumers know that the banks will take care of the fraud, but are still left dealing with the residual hassles.

“Consumers don’t know how long they’re going to be without a plastic card, or how many other erroneous charges are going to show up ,” says Aufseeser. “The only way to support [consumers] is by implementing a prevention solution rather than a detection solution.”

Detection solutions are those which alert users or merchants of fraud after the fact, while prevention solutions well, should do what the name suggests.

This will be CVV+’s debut, and it will appear on one of InComm’s reloadable card products. Customers will be asked to enroll in the service and link their account — they can use the solution on multiple cards.

CVV+ generates a daily security code known only to that individual cardholder, which is then used in place of the static CVV code that is printed on the back of most plastic cards–according to Aufseeser, this is what is referred to as “dynamic dual factor out-of-band prevention.”

Customers will choose how to receive their code (via text, email or through Tender Armor’s own mobile app or through a bank’s mobile app, for example) as well as the frequency the code changes–the minimum frequency that one can choose being once a day.

The solution works through two or dual-factor authentication, allowing users to utilize fraud prevention wherever they pay with their attached card—whether they are paying online, over the phone, or even at the point of sale–as some retailers, such as Best Buy, are now beginning to ask for the CVV code as a point of additional security.

Moreover, the CVV+ solution will also benefit merchants, as unlike other card security measures the merchant does not have to change anything (yes, we mean EMV.)

“The [CVV+] solution will minimize the false positive declines based on detection solutions,” said Aufseeser on the merchant benefits. “This is because we are authenticating the person, not the device [being used].”

Fraud prevention, especially when dealing with online fraud or digital transactions, is an area that is of growing interest to consumers, according to the data; as previously reported by Bank Innovation, biometrics and like solutions–such as two-factor authentication–are being explored by more and more companies as fraud prevention becomes more and more of a top priority for financial consumers.

The new solution will become available for those cardholders using InComm products in early 2017, according to the companies.