MarketScale’s Geoff Short sat down with Patrick Hodo, Red Maple CIO, at NRF 2020 for a conversation on cybersecurity, particularly in the retail industry and the ecommerce space.
Texas-based Red Maple provides solutions for retailers that help them fight fraud and online theft, areas that are growing alongside increased online transactions and expanding payment methods.
Forward-looking companies, Hodo said, are centralizing their goals on enabling credit card payments without actual credit card usage that increase ease of payment for the consumer.
However, that goal comes along with significant obstacles.
“One of the things that we’ve worked on is a patented solution where, instead of the entire credit card number … you take the first four and last four digits of the card with the customer-service person,” Hodo said. “Then you let the customer, on their own device or over a phone call, finish it off.”
The idea, Hodo said, is to minimize access to the consumer’s entire credit card number, then deliver a token to merchants to be used again and again without that complete access to the entire number.
Short and Hodo also touched on additional concerns on the security frontier beyond customer-facing and credit card concerns and solutions to those roadblocks moving forward, threat-level assessment, the global nature of retail and ecommerce, and more.
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