Driving a Secure Cashless Ecosystem in Trinidad & Tobago

• Cashless payments are experiencing promising growth in Trinidad & Tobago, fuelled by the increasing adoption of digital technologies. With this surge towards digital, cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capitalising on vulnerabilities.
• While this is a global tendency, developing countries like Trinidad & Tobago are also facing a significant rise in phishing schemes, attacks targeting e-commerce, 'free gift' scams and ransomware, among others.
• Despite this challenge and in anticipation of a growing and evolving threat, Trinidad & Tobago has been making tremendous strides in securing the payments ecosystem.
• Recent milestones include the migration of the mag strip debit cards to a Visa Debit Card secured with EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) contactless technology; merchants' rapid transition to 3DS 2.0 secure (an advanced e-commerce authentication protocol pioneered by Visa); and local issuers working closely with Visa Advanced Authorization – a solution that analyses up to 500 unique risk factors to detect fraud faster, and other AI-enabled transactional scoring tools.
• However, more can be done to protect the integrity of payments, while also establishing the infrastructure to drive more innovation. This includes the implementation of tokens, a security technology that replaces sensitive account information with a unique digital identifier.
• In addition, merchants should consider incorporating a transactional risk scoring tool, like CyberSource's Decision Manager, which leverages AI technology to help merchants distinguish between fraudulent and legitimate payment transactions.

(Source: Trinidad Express Newspaper)