Back in January, I wrote a post that highlighted the rising incidence of lost-and-stolen card fraud in the United Kingdom. I concluded that the decades-old PIN solution for the card-present environment is now showing signs of weakness. Results of a recent Minneapolis Fed survey of 283 financial institutions offer some validity to my conclusion: the survey found that losses on PIN-based debit increased by 50 percent from 2015 to 2016. In fact, 81 percent of the respondents reported fraud losses from PIN-based debit, compared to only 77 percent for credit cards.
The news wasn't all bad for PIN-based debit. Signature-based debit and credit cards still had more fraud attempts than any other payment instrument. At 63 percent, signature debit fraud actually had a higher increase in fraud losses from 2015 to 2016 than did PIN debit. The PIN is a far superior verification method for card payments, but I'm willing to bet that the PIN, much like the password, has become less effective.
Is this coming at a time when the PIN is about to become more prominent? In late January, the PCI Security Standards Council announced a new security standard for software-based PIN entry, also known as "PIN on glass." This standard specifies the security requirements for accepting a PIN on a mobile point-of-sale device such as a Square card reader.
As an aside, I am a bit surprised by this announcement. Apparently, mobile phones are safe enough for entering PINs, but when someone uses a pay wallet such as Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, the card's PAN, or primary account number, is tokenized for security purposes. I'll save a discussion of this inconsistency for another post.
People have been talking for years now about how the password has passed its prime as a standalone authentication solution. Yet it continues to live, and it's as difficult as ever to mitigate its vulnerabilities. In my opinion, attempts to do so have increased customer friction and had minimal impact. I think the PIN is following a similar path. It creates customer friction (especially for me as I now have different PINs for multiple cards that I struggle to keep straight) and is losing its effectiveness, according to the data I mentioned in the first paragraph. But it appears that, with the PCI's recent announcement, the PIN could become even more prevalent for cardholders. Is it time, in the name of security and customer friction, for us to replace PINs and passwords with more modern authentication technologies such as biometrics?
By Douglas A. King, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed