Kuala Lumpur, Friday, 5 April 2019 – With regard to recent news about reliability of point-of-sale (POS) devices at merchants, the payment card industry would like to clarify that there are established practices in place to protect against potential fraud.

The various stakeholders, including the banks and card schemes, are collaborating to keep payments secure and prevent fraud. The Association of Banks in Malaysia would like to highlight that all stakeholders in the commerce ecosystem, which comprise the card schemes, banks, consumers, merchants, policymakers and law enforcement agencies, have a shared responsibility to secure the commerce ecosystem and to maintain trust and confidence in the usage of digital payments. In this regard, among the steps that have been taken by the banks and card schemes are as follows:-

• Investments by card schemes in the development of a multi-layered digital security framework that protects consumers and merchants in the end-to-end transaction journey, including the security of customer card information and merchant POS terminals.
• Adoption of various risk initiatives by the banks and card schemes including the use of Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip for cards, development of chipenabled acceptance devices, secure authentication platforms for online transactions and compliance to data security standards.
• Conducting due diligence by banks on merchants before they can begin accepting digital payments. Banks also provide a variety of materials to educate and create awareness among merchants in support of fraud prevention, security and risk management.
• Implementing mechanisms to alert customers of suspicious payment transactions, adequately monitor merchant payment processing activity and to withhold payment, when necessary, to protect customers and the payments ecosystem until there is sufficient level of confidence to complete the payment transaction(s).

As technology advances and fraud moves to the weakest point in the payments ecosystem, the payment card industry has ensured that investments in innovations to maintain security have kept pace. This has kept fraud rates low, despite significant growth in electronic payments volume.

Collectively, the banks and card schemes remain vigilant to new threats and are continuously working with all stakeholders to secure the payments ecosystem.