It makes a welcome change these days for a senior UK government minister to be caught discussing a potentially constructive initiative – as opposed to squabbling with colleagues over leadership challenges to the prime minister.
Or the default strategy of how to make a potentially disastrous Brexit even more financially suicidal than it might be.
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And I write that more in sorrow than anger, having only ever voted for the current party in power.
Step forward Amber Rudd, home secretary, who has cottoned on to the fact that there is a problem with card fraud.
Perhaps she had got around to reading a report released in June published by the National Audit Office.
Answering questions from the Home Affairs Select Committee of MPs she suggested that ‘if we get it right (that is a big if, but let that go for a second), we could reduce the number of crimes by one million.”
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By GlobalDataA number of ideas to reduce card fraud were canvassed. Ms Rudd said she was ‘excited’ by the possibility of two-factor authentication being used for online shopping.
As if two-factor verification was some novel concept just dreamt up, but again let us let that pass.
I seem to have been reading and writing about this less than new concept for all of my time on this desk and that is 13 years and change.
“We need a set of developments,” concluded Ms Rudd.
Her department was the subject of a stinging rebuke from the NAO earlier this year; it reported that Rudd’s Home Office’s response to the threat posed by online fraud was “not proportionate, efficient or effective.”
The banks, card programmes, retailers and other stakeholders, not to mention consumers, have a vested interest in progress being made regarding the ‘exciting’ developments now on the Rudd radar.
Just some of the figures released relating to the year to end September 2016 ought to concentrate political minds: 1.9 million cyber-related crimes, some 16% of all crime; 623,000 fraud incidents, £10bn loss to individuals from fraud with 6% of all adults experiencing fraud.
And a 103% increase in online card not present fraud between 2011 and 2016, to 1.4 million cases.
The perennial dilmma faced by banks is that they want to maximise digital channel useage but customers will only do more business digitally if they feel secure.
The cost of security initiatives and what will be the effect on the customer experience are the other constant themes.
Do something/anything that makes life harder for the criminal fraternity and banking becomes harder for honest customers-so goes the argument.
Rudd has generally been on the sensible side of the arguments relating to Brexit and immigration; if she can bang heads together in her department, engage with the card issuers, banks, leading vendors and inevitably an army of consultants, it is just possible that eventually a modern successor may emerge to EMV and PCI DSS.
