It’s been 18 months since the UK government introduced the Global Talent Visa (GTV), with the aim to attract the world’s brightest minds to fuel the country’s digital technology sector.

Designed for anyone who might be “a leader or potential leader” in three distinct areas – tech, academia and research, and culture and the arts – this immigration pathway replaced the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa in February 2020.

According to figures released at the end of August by Tech Nation, designated by the Home Office to endorse applications for this route, around 1,400 applications for the GTV were received in the previous 12 months.

The organisation also states it has endorsed more than 600 applications since 2018, which includes those under the visa’s previous guise.

But as the UK tech industry reportedly faces vacancies of up to 100,000 per month, amid a growing digital skills shortage some argue that the Global Talent Visa’s focus on exceptional individuals is too narrow.

Others, like founder of Tech London Advocates Russ Shaw, suggest some additional steps could be taken to improve the process. “The Global Talent Visa has been a welcome step to attract foreign tech talent and send a message that talented entrepreneurs from around the world are welcome in the UK; however, more needs to be done to remove barriers to accessing skills across industry,” Shaw says.

He adds: “In addition to now being capless, the process for Global Talent Visas has been made simpler with candidates now able to apply themselves without needing a sponsor, and to flexibly change roles after entering the UK without needing to inform the Home Office.

“However, fulfilling criteria for a Global Talent Visa can still seem daunting for those lacking confidence in English, administrative costs for visa applications are very high, and the process can be lengthy.”

A top-tier visa for top-tier skills

Open to over 18s, the GTV has been designed to benefit fields like fintech, gaming, cyber security and artificial intelligence (AI) with the visa lasting up to five years. Those with a wide range of skills face no language or minimum salary eligibility requirements and do not need a job offer to apply, but must instead gain an endorsement via Tech Nation.

However, Jonathan Beech, managing director of immigration law firm Migrate UK believes the scheme “has never really reached its potential”, explaining: “The main challenges are that those relying on technical or business experience within service/process delivery, outsourcing, consultancy, ERP consultancy, systems admin and larger organisations primarily serving larger corporate customers are generally excluded. The process is also still document heavy.”

The talent shortage in tech and digital is not new. Experts point to a wide combination of factors, including increasingly tough immigration rules and not enough young people coming through the UK education system with the right STEM subject qualifications.

Another way the government has moved to mitigate this is through the Skilled Worker category of visa where some tech roles, such as programmers and systems designers, are now classed as being in short supply meaning they attract fewer entry rules.

The Global Talent Visa does have plenty of support, including from Shawn Tan, CEO of AI ecosystem builder and investment firm Skymind, who says: “The visa scheme seems to benefit the kind of talent we are looking for – highly qualified and globally-minded digital workers that are hungry to make their mark in the world of AI and fintech.

“Government also appears to be willing to listen to businesses to understand what they want and how to make the application process better and a lot smoother for top talent to come in.”

But Talitha Degwa, an immigration and global mobility associate partner at international law firm Spencer West, suggests most applicants fail at the first stage of the GTV, the endorsement requirement, because while they have the relevant experience, they may not have all the right documented evidence to demonstrate their work.

Degwa, though, is hopeful of further change to the programme and other visa schemes, for example, in March 2021, holders of international prizes and winners of scholarships and programmes for early promise were allowed to automatically qualify for the GTV and bypass the endorsement requirement.

She adds: “The government intends to introduce the elite points-based visa, which would not require applicants to be sponsored, next year. I hope that this visa will be suitable for individuals who fall short of meeting the global talent criteria, allowing the tech sector to attract even more talent to the UK.”

Supporting UK tech in key areas of growth

Tech Nation does point to a number of key areas where the Global Talent Visa has played a role in boosting expertise, including app and software development, AI and machine learning, and enterprise software.

It says demand for the route increased by 28% between April 2019 and March 2020 (pre-pandemic) and April 2020 to March 2021. Across both life cycles of the visa’s name, the number of endorsed applications from founders has grown by 73% on average every year since 2018, the organisation says, with four in 10 (39%) of all endorsed applicants basing themselves outside London.

Visa Programme Manager Oli Monks adds: “The Global Talent Visa is open to highly-skilled tech employees and tech founders from across the world. The application process is competitive, and endorsements are carefully reviewed by independent judges to ensure that they are accepting the best and brightest talent from across the world who have the potential to drive the UK digital economy.”

He adds: “As tech continues to be a strong economic performer, delivering significant value to the nation through investments, jobs and innovation, certain tech skills will remain in great demand, and the visa plays a crucial role in filling those vacancies.”

Looking to the future, however, Edgardo Savoy, CTO at fintech start-up TransferGo, advocates a need to look more broadly. He explains: “The UK workforce is currently being encouraged to reskill and retrain in tech to prepare for the future of work, and yet migrants with similar aspirations and capabilities may be excluded from doing the same if blocked entry under the criteria of the Global Talent Visa.

“If the UK wants to continue to be Europe’s number one tech or fintech hub, we must find a way to look beyond a current skill set or occupation and accommodate those with a passion or willingness to work hard and drive real positive change in the industry.”

Visa has announced plans to acquire cross-border payments expert Currencycloud for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition builds on the companies’ existing partnership.

Currencycloud's cloud-based platform provides banks and financial services providers an all-inclusive set of APIs for managing foreign exchange transactions, multi-currency wallets, and virtual accounts. Additionally, customers are notified of transactions in real time.

Upon acquiring Currencycloud, Visa will enhance its existing foreign exchange capabilities and enable new use cases and payment flows for banks, financial institutions, and partners.

Currencycloud will also improve payment transparency and expedite time to market for clients seeking to offer digitally first and convenient international payment services.

“The acquisition of Currencycloud is another example of Visa executing on our network of networks strategy to facilitate global money movement,” said Colleen Ostrowski, global treasurer at Visa.

Ostrowski continued, “Consumers and businesses increasingly expect transparency, speed and simplicity when making or receiving international payments. With our acquisition of Currencycloud, we can support our clients and partners to further reduce the pain points of cross-border payments and develop great user experiences for their customers.”

The Visa-Currencycloud deal is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Currencycloud will retain its current management team and continue to operate from its London office.

“At Currencycloud, we’ve always strived to deliver a better tomorrow for all, from the smallest start-up to the global multi-nationals,” said Mike Laven, Currencycloud CEO.

“Re-imagining how money flows around the global economy just got more exciting as we join Visa, “The combination of Currencycloud’s fintech expertise and Visa’s network will enable us to deliver greater customer value to the businesses moving money across borders.”

This article originally appeared in Issue 11 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

Kate moved to the UK two years ago from the USA. Her employer, a tech startup based in the Silicon Valley, had given her the opportunity to move to London to lead a team there. Kate quickly fell in love with her new home and planned to settle down there. However, her dream was cut short when her entire team was let go at the height of the pandemic in May. If that had not been bad enough, the redundancy also meant that Kate could no longer stay in the UK, as she was living in the country on the basis of a Tier 2 general work visa sponsored by her company.

With approximately one in ten UK tech industry workers being immigrants, Kate is not alone in this predicament. While many have lost their jobs during the ongoing pandemic, being forced to leave your home is an additional blow that could be avoided.

Cooling-off

Naomi Hanrahan-Soar is a lawyer and managing associate at law firm Lewis Silkin specialising in UK immigration law. She explains that once the general work visa is terminated and sponsorship of employment ceases, a notification is sent to the Home Office, which will then curtail the visa to 60 days.

“In practice though, the Home Office often takes quite a long time to issue that curtailment, so people will often end up with more than 60 days. The idea is that the 60 days is there to either make a new application once you’ve found a new sponsor or a different type of visa that is open to you. Or to leave the UK,” she says.

In the first three weeks of March alone, worldwide IT job vacancies fell by more than a fifth (-21.7%). Fortunately, the UK has, to an extent, recovered from the lack of opportunities, with advertised roles jumping by 36% since June, according to data collected by Tech Nation. However, the three month period between March and June meant that a number of tech industry workers might have been forced to leave the UK and must stay outside the country’s borders for at least one year.

“The reason for that is that Tier 2 is the most common skilled worker visa,” says Hanrahan-Soar. “You’re effectively banned from applying for a new Tier 2 visa unless you fall into one of the exceptions, which would require you to be on a salary above £159,600 a year.”

Even for some of the most successful tech industry employees, this amount is out of the question. As a consequence, the UK loses a number of its workers for at least 12 months, which is particularly concerning for the perpetually understaffed UK tech industry.

A New Hope?

The country’s immigration laws could soon be changed for the better, however, according to industry body techUK. Since the beginning of the UK lockdown in March, the organisation has worked with the Home Office on the extension of general work visas, as a member of its Employers’ Advisory Group.

Nimmi Patel, techUK’s policy manager for Skills, Talent and Diversity, describes the current immigration system as “too cumbersome and clunky for employers and employees, with lots of pain points”. However she believes that the government is “doing its best” to streamline it, saying it “has been very keen to highlight that the immigration system should not undercut the UK labour market”.

“They have put forward a very technology-focused manifesto alongside their proposals for the immigration system so they're looking to do more to increase the number of people with STEM talent in the UK – and they’re getting rid of the cap on the tier two visas,” she tells IT Pro.

“There's a clear understanding that there's a lot to be done with the immigration system to ensure that the UK sort of remains at the forefront of innovation and tech,” she says, adding that she thinks that this could be a “once in a generation opportunity to examine the UK immigration system”.

The new proposed brief for the future immigration system, published on 22 October 2020, takes away the need for year-long cooling-off periods as well as allow visa applicants to switch visa routes without having to first leave the UK. The new system started accepting new applications from 1 December.

Unfortunately for some, the change has come a few months too late. Kate was forced to leave the UK in August to start her cooling-off period. She has found a similar job in Switzerland, where she now resides.

The US government has introduced policies for visa applicants which require them to hand over all of their social media details for inspection, as well as other personal information, according to a report from the Associated Press.

The change represents a massive increase in the scope of background checks designed to identify potential terrorists trying to gain entry to the US.

Individuals applying for visas will now be required to submit the usernames (but not passwords) for any social media accounts they operate, including volunteering the information for any social media services which are not specifically included on the list.

In addition, applicants will be forced to hand over any email addresses and phone numbers they have used in the past five years.

These extreme requirements were previously only imposed on individuals who were deemed to present an increased risk, such as those who had visited terrorist-controlled regions, but are now being rolled out to a vastly increased number of people.

The policy is set to affect an estimated 15 million visa applicants per year, including those who are travelling for business or educational purposes as well as immigrants. The only exemptions from these requirements are specific types of official and diplomatic visas.

The new policy is part of an executive order - titled 'Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States' - issued by President Trump back in 2017, which the State Department announced it would implement last year. However, the policy actually predates Trump - it was first proposed by the Department of Homeland Security in June 2016, prior to his election.

Privacy campaigners have objected to the new rules, with the American Civil Liberties Union questioning whether it is "effective or fair". Security experts have also raised the possibility that foreign intelligence services may be exploring ways to abuse the requirements.

Applications for visas to allow non-EU immigrant tech workers to work in the UK has increased in popularity post-Brexit.

According to Tech City UK, the government body responsible for processing tech talent visas, more than 300 applications since April, a huge increase compared to the same period last year, in which it received 20, The Telegraph reports.

The high number of applications comes after Tech City UK was allowed to hand out 200 visa applications a year for Exceptional Talent in digital technology in 2014.

While the programme had few applicants in the first few months of its existence, the number appears to have increased.

Between April 2015 and April this year Tech City UK received 100 applications, 79 of which endorsed for Exceptional Talent / Promise in digital technology.

In a statement, Tech City UK said: "between April and November 2016, we have received over 200 applications, maintaining an endorsement rate of 70%. On average this year, we're receiving over three times more applications per month than last year, with this November being a record high."

The applications appear to have increased after the introduction of new provisions in November 2015. These created the possibility of Exceptional Promise routes for applicants with specific scale-up skills, including both technical and business roles, individuals applying to one of the seven Northern cities and surrounding regions, and for those applying as part of a team of up to five individuals.

Carlos Espinal, a partner at Seedcamp, said that successful fast-growing companies can go from a couple of founders to well over hundreds of employees in a short order of time. "Attracting the best talent is the main job of an ambitious startup CEO," he said.

Espinal added: "Many of these employees will be coming from local talent, but where necessary to stay competitive globally, from abroad through initiatives including the Tech Nation Visa scheme. Hiring an expert can make a significant impact on a scaling business and we've been able to help a couple of our startups in attracting that talent both locally and internationally to grow their companies."

Gerald Grech, Tech City's chief executive, told The Telegraph that he would like to increase the cap for visas, which could be particularly crucial to maintaining EU migration after Brexit.

Visa has debuted a new contactless payment ring, which is scheduled for a test-run at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

The ring will contain a Gemalto-manufactured chip and an NFC antenna, and will be waterproof to a depth of 50 meters. Crucially, the ring also uses tokenisation, which uses a unique digital key for transactions, rather than any identifiable account details.

The technology will be initially trialed at this year's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where it will be used by 45 Visa-sponsored Olympians. If successful, the company will reportedly look at the possibility of a wider rollout at some point in the future.

The ring works like any other contactless payment technology - simply touch the ring to a contactless terminal, and the payment will be processed automatically. The rings are currently linked to prepaid contactless debit cards that can be loaded up via a website.

The announcement marks a general trend away from traditional payment methods, with Apple Pay, Android Pay and contactless cards all becoming increasingly prevalent.

However, a full deployment of Visa's contactless ring may face trouble, as reports suggest that similar technologies like Apple Pay have met with limited enthusiasm.

Reuters reports that outside of the US, adoption of Apple Pay has been slow, with local competitors in China freezing it out of the most lucrative global markets. Mobile payments in the country totalled around $1 trillion last year, according to data from iResearch.

"Visa's first payment ring puts smart payment technology right on the hands of our athletes for convenient and easy payments," said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa.

"As an Olympian, rings have a special meaning to me," said Missy Franklin, a four-time Olympic gold medalist and Team Visa athlete.

"The Visa ring is a great innovation that I know all the athletes competing in Rio will enjoy as it will be great to go from a competition to purchase without having to carry a wallet or card."

Mastercard and Visa are developing a new authentication solution that will end the need for pesky verification codes when making online payments.

At the moment, before the checkout for an online purchasing process is complete, you're asked to enter a Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode - usually random numbers and letters from a secondary password.

After taking onboard customer feedback, the companies decided to work on a solution that would end the need to remember an extra password in order to complete purchases.

Mastercard said it will use richer cardholder data, so although you may need to input more information in the first step, there's a possibility the second-level authentication will use biometric data or one-time passwords rather than everytime passwords. The company said biometric information could be facial or voice recognition.

The company will also trial wristbands that could authenticate your identity though your heart beat, making use of the power of wearables.

The new technology could roll out as soon as next year, although the new security solution has to go through testing to ensure it's as secure as the current 3D Secure protocol.

Ajay Bhalla, president of Enterprise Security Solutions, MasterCard said: "All of us want a payment experience that is safe as well as simple, not one or the other. We want to identify people for who they are, not what they remember. We have too many passwords to remember and this creates extra problems for consumers and businesses."

Mastercard said payments on mobile devices will be responsible for 30 per cent of all online sales by 2018, making the need for a simple and secure solution all the more urgent.

Apple is believed to have finalised deals with American Express and Mastercard, which will allow users to pay for good and services using the iPhone 6.

The two credit card companies follow in the footsteps of Visa, which was reported to be in talks with Apple in July. All three partnerships are expected to be unveiled at the launch of the iPhone 6 on 9 September, sources have confirmed to Recode and Bloomberg.

Specifics including the name of the payment system, where it will accepted and how it will work remain unknown. However, Apple's Touch ID fingerprint scanner is expected to play a key role in the authentication process and credit card information is expected to be stored on a specific piece of the hardware known as the "secure element".

Apple has so far resisted the temptation to build in Near Field Communication (NFC) into its products despite the technology being a standard inclusion in high-end Android and Windows Phone handsets.

Confirmation that an iPhone mobile payments systems exists means that NFC is now guaranteed to be featured in the next-generation handset.

Contactless payments have grown in popularity, with 19.7 million transactions happening in the UK in May 2014, according to Visa Europe.

With Apple arriving to challenge established vendors like PayPal and Google Wallet, analysts expect this to be a pivotal moment for the mobile payments landscape.

Apple and Visa could be joining together to offer mobile payments to iPhone 6 users, Pacific Crest Securities reported in a research note.

The move would put the resulting service in direct competition with eBay's PayPal. Visa recently launched Visa Checkout' to be used by customers online and via an app on mobile devices, as well as investing in startup LoopPay, another mobile payments service.

Predicting an imminent announcement of Apple and Visa's partnership, Pac Crest analyst Josh Beck said: "We expect the iPhone 6 to be launched with near-field communications (NFC) and secure element technologies, which would provide Apple with a broad technology portfolio to disrupt mobile payments.

"After analysing the payments, handset, enabling technology and internet landscape, we think a partnership between Apple and Visa would make strategic sense and believe an announcement could happen as early as this fall," he continued.

The joining together of Apple and Visa was previously predicted earlier in the year, would seem them entering a market that includes potential players like Amazon.com, Wal-Mart's MCX and AT&T, Verizon Communications and T-Mobile US's Isis.

"Visa's recent product announcements, most notably a new token service, could lower security hurdles that have hampered previous mobile payment projects. Visa's new tools provide a clearer path for Apple to become a major player in mobile payments, but we still see relatively little opportunity to generate profits that would be meaningful at Apple's scale," Beck added.

"For eBay, we see risk of increasing competition in e-commerce payments and think if Apple launches a mobile payment solution, it could hurt investor sentiment."

EE recently confirmed that commuters in London will now be able to use their smartphones to pay for buses via its contactless mobile payments system. Users will need to be signed up to EE's mobile network and own a Cash on Tap enabled smartphone.

The service will be rolled out to the London tube network, DLR and Overground train network from 16 September.

Contactless payment is quickly gaining popularity, with consumers using contactless card payments in 19.7 million transactions around the UK in May 2014, according to research from Visa Europe. It also revealed an 18 per cent rise in the number of people using their cards for contactless payments between April and May.

Mark Austin, director of contactless at Visa Europe, said: "[This is] driven by increased consumer awareness, the commitment of UK banks to issue Visa contactless cards and UK retailers activating contactless terminals."

Visa Europe will be the first company to benefit from an IBM and Monitise partnership that aims to better support mobile e-commerce payments via in the cloud.

Customers of Visa's member banks will be able to make payments on using their smartphones and a range of other mobile devices, in addition to connecting with retailers and taking advantage of enhanced money management functionality.

The deal will see Monitise use IBM's Smarter Commerce cloud service, while the firm will offer its Bank Anywhere, Pay Anyone and Buy Anything offerings to Visa. In addition, IBM will provide a broad range of software, technology services and consulting, including IBM Mobile First solutions.

Today, there are 466 million Visa accounts operational in Europe and, by 2020 more than half of its transactions will be carried out using a mobile device, according to the payments giant. It said the service would enable its 3,000-plus member banks across 36 countries to increase their share of the transactions carried out on a daily basis.

"Visa recognises the specialist nature of making mobile services intuitive, convenient and relevant to the consumer, as well as meeting the need for interoperability across the scale and diversity of Europe. We are excited about the value that this collaboration will deliver for our members," said Steve Chambers, Visa Europe's CIO.

"Visa is committed to making mobile commerce and payments ever easier by connecting consumers, member banks and retail businesses together through the globally trusted Visa network, and by working even more closely with a combined Monitise and IBM team, we are making this vision a reality."

The partnership with Visa Europe represents a "launch pad" for a wider multi-year agreement between IBM and Monitise to offer additional mobile services to businesses in the mobile payments market, the companies claim.

Craig Hayman, general manager at IBM Industry Solutions, said that Visa and its member banks would be able to respond and adapt to more quickly to customers by using the cloud.

"Our collaboration with Monitise will enable us to not only to help Visa and its member banks offer new mobile services but also transform the way that mobile commerce itself is done around the globe," he added.

"By deploying Smarter Commerce at Visa, we will accelerate the power of mobile commerce in new and innovative ways by bringing financial institutions, retailers and customers closer together than ever before."

A computer hacker who claimed to have acquired at least 50GB of customer information from credit card companies Visa and Mastercard has apparently backtracked over the source of the data.

As reported by IT Pro, a list of contact details for several hundred people from the US, UK and Austrailia were published on text-sharing website Pastebin yesterday by a computer hacker called Reckz0r.

In a series of posts on social networking site Twitter, he said the data belonged to Mastercard and Visa customers, an allegation both firms declined to confirm yesterday.

No credit card or account numbers were included in the data dump, but the hacker hinted that more information could be leaked in due course.

"I just leaked half [the] data of Visa and Mastercard," he tweeted. "The full one is about 50GB or bigger."

Since then, Reckz0r appears to have backtracked over the source of the data, tweeting that it was not acquired by hacking into Visa and Mastercard's systems after all.

"I hacked the banks," he tweeted. "I penetrated over 79 large banks, [and] I've been targeting these banks [for] 3 months."

At the time of writing, he had not revealed any details about the identity or location of the banks he claims to have hacked.

It is also unclear if the list of contact details released yesterday is legitimate and, if so, if they relate to bank employees or customers.

The tweets were backed up by a statement to IT Pro from Visa Europe this morning where the firm said it had found no evidence that its systems had been hacked.

"Following reports yesterday from a hacker claiming that he had breached Visa and MasterCard's systems, Visa and Visa Europe security teams quickly investigated and confirmed that there was no breach of our systems," said the statement.

"Please be assured that this claim was false and the hacker later corrected his claim on Twitter," it added.

A computer hacker has leaked a list of names, addresses and telephone numbers it claims belong to Visa and Mastercard customers.

In a series of posts on the social networking site Twitter, the hacker who goes by the name of Reckz0r - claims to have infiltrated both companies' systems and acquired their data.

"Guess what folks? Mastercard and Visa are pwned," the hacker wrote. "Don't believe me? Keep your patience, I'll provide a lovely demo for you soon."

The hacker then told followers to expect a "data dump" of the acquired information yesterday.

Since then, Reckz0r has posted a link to a file on the text sharing website Pastebin, which contains contact details of several hundred people from the United States, Australia and the UK.

"I just leaked a half data of Visa and Mastercard, the full one is about 50GB or bigger," the hacker added.

In a statement to IT Pro, Mastercard declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the data, adding that it doesn't comment on "rumours, threats or speculation."

Meanwhile, in a further statement to IT Pro, Visa confirmed that it was investigating the breach.

"Visa Europe takes data compromise very seriously," said the company. "Working closely with partners, including law enforcement, we are investigating this allegation."

Mastercard has become the latest credit card company to drop payment processor Global Payments from its list of approved service providers, following its data breach earlier this year.

As reported by IT Pro, Global Payments confirmed last month that up to 1.5 million credit card numbers had been stolen following a security attack on its systems in North America.

Up to seven million credit cards could have been affected by the breach.

Global Payments is responsible for processing payments for several credit card companies, including Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

The breach prompted Visa to remove the firm from its list of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant vendors, and now its rival Mastercard has followed suit.

Mastercard confirmed the move in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.

"As a result of the preliminary investigation findings regarding the [Global Payments] breach, MasterCard has removed Global Payments from our list of PCI compliant service providers," the statement said.

Earlier this week, Global Payments issued an update about the breach, stating that "some card brands" had withdrawn its PCI DSS compliant status.

"They have requested we re-validate our PCI status, which we will do following our current investigation," the statement said. "We anticipate that we will be reinstated to those lists."

The Wall Street Journal has also reported that many more card details may have been compromised than first thought.

Quoting sources familiar with the situation, it is claimed that up to seven million credit cards could have been affected by the breach.

Global Payments declined to comment on the claims, except to state that it was still investigating the cause of the breach.

"In any matter of this nature, the card brands cast a wide net to protect consumers and we supply as much information as possible to assist in the course of the investigation," said the company in a statement.

Global Payments has admitted that Visa's decision to drop the firm from its list of PCI compliant vendors was to be expected, after its recent data breach.

Global Payments was clearly vulnerable and other processing companies likely are as well.

The card payments processor released a statement late last week confirming that up to 1.5 million credit card numbers had been stolen following a security attack on one of its systems in North America.

The firm is responsible for processing payments for several credit card companies, including Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

In a conference call yesterday, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Global Payments' CEO, Paul Garcia, said it was unlikely that any customer names, addresses, bank details or social security information had been compromised by the breach.

"We are making significant progress in defining and rectifying the event," said Garcia. "Based on the forensic analysis to date, network monitoring and additional safety measures, we believe this incident is contained."

Even so, he confirmed that Visa has dropped Global Payments from its list of PCI compliant vendors. A situation the firm is working to get reversed.

"Visa has removed us from the PCI compliance list pending the results and resolution of our work," he said. "Upon reflection, this was not unexpected, and we are focused on the remediation measures necessary for full and timely PCI reinstatement."

The PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) regulations are designed to safeguard cardholder information and must be met by any company processing credit card details.

Garcia insisted that consumers would be protected if their details had been exposed by the breach.

"The card-issuing institutions have well-established and highly-effective procedures to protect their customers. Consumers, as always, are encouraged to be vigilant by reviewing their statements and reporting any suspicious activity," he added.

Speaking to IT Pro, Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst Quocirca, said it will be interesting to see if other credit card companies follow Visa's stance on Global Payments' PCI status.

"An organisation is either PCI DSS compliant or it is not. That being said the card brands will work with non-compliant organisations to rectify this situation because it is in their interests to ensure the on-going use of credit cards remains tenable [and] secure," said Tarzey. "[Then again] trying to fix the relationship [could] be more trouble than it is worth."

Meanwhile, Neil Roiter, research director at vendor Corero Network Security, told IT Pro that PCI DSS compliance is no protection against cyber attacks.

"Global Payments was clearly vulnerable and other processing companies likely are as well," said Roiter. "They all need to review continuously the security policies, practices and technology controls they have in place, including but not limited to encryption, access controls and authentication."

Vodafone has partnered with Visa to bring NFC payments using mobile phones to the UK.

The company's chief executive (CEO), Vittorio Colao, revealed the move during a keynote speech at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Our partnership with Vodafone represents a huge stride forward for mobile payments.

"We want to build more strategic partnerships with companies [and will begin] with Visa for NFC devices," said Colao.

"We need to create standards to deliver these services [and] with effective cooperation for standards and supportive regulation we can push [NFC payments] forward."

The roll-out will begin in the new 2012 financial year in the UK, Germany, Spain, Turkey and The Netherlands, but Vodafone plans to push the service to more than 30 countries across five continents.

The solution will be Vodafone-branded, but based on Visa's pre-payment technology, enabling users to top up their phones with cash and use them for touch payments in shops set up to carry out transactions in that way.

Once established, the platform will then become open, allowing businesses to host their services with Vodafone's mobile wallet. The mobile giant confirmed in its press statement that it is " in discussions with a large number of service providers - including banks, retailers, transport and utility companies, event organisers, smartphone application developers and advertisers - to host a broad range of services within an innovative new Vodafone "virtual" mobile wallet."

Visa is a popular choice of payment for many consumers, with some 445 million such debit, credit and commercial cards in operation in Europe. Of the overall consumer spending carried out in Europe each year, some 14 per cent is done via Visa, with 80 per cent of that coming from Visa debit cards, according to official statistics.

"Our partnership with Vodafone represents a huge stride forward for mobile payments," added Peter Ayliffe, CEO of Visa Europe. "Visa's future of payments initiative is more than just a promise: these services are real, tangible and coming to the mainstream consumer market in the very near future."

"Any Visa Issuer across these key markets will be able to work with Visa and Vodafone to enable mobile payments for their customers, backed by all the security, trust and global acceptance the Visa brand represents."

Every day, thousands of commuters use near field communications (NFC), although most may never realise it.

NFC is at the heart of London's Oyster card, is already built in to many Visa debit cards, and is being used to pay for small-value transactions from Spain to Hong Kong.

And recent developments, especially from the mobile phone manufacturers, are making NFC even more mainstream. Google Wallet, the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and the Google Nexus S all feature NFC. There are strong rumours that NFC might be built into the iPhone 5, when it comes out later this year. And NFC is set to be included into other devices, including tablets and even smart TVs. The market could be worth $670 billion - 420 billion by 2015.

The technology behind NFC is not actually that new. But the way that developers, manufacturers, enterprises and, importantly, marketing executives is changing.

At its core, NFC is about contactless data transfer to and from devices. This has a number of applications. The most common is payment, using a phone as a debit or credit card by touching it to NFC readers at tills or pay points. But it has wider uses.

"We've been talking about payment and transit but that's not the only thing NFC brings to the table," says Charles Dachs, director of product management for mobile transactions at NXP, a developer of NFC technology.

Cashing in on cashless

"Essentially we talk about NFC in three ways: replacing the cards in your wallet, discovering content using your phone as a content reader, and peer-to-peer a device-to-device exchange of information."

As an example, NFC could be used to link Bluetooth devices to peripherals like headsets. A phone could be synchronised to a headset just by physically "bumping" them together.

Certainly this kind of functionality would be very attractive for consumers, but businesses might need greater incentives to adopt NFC. Dachs believes this lies in the content reader and peer-to-peer elements of the technology.

"It's about more than just using your phone as a card, it can provide a much richer experience with targeted marketing and direct marketing," he says.

The most obvious marketing application is in digital coupons from purchases, or NFC readable posters. Vouchers would be redeemable on a consumer's phone.

According to Dachs, part of NFC's potential lies in making marketing methods more comfortable and less intrusive for the consumer and, in turn, making them more effective for businesses to deploy. No-one likes marketing emails and spam, but directly interacting with advertising in our daily lives might be more fruitful for both sides.

Another appeal for marketers is the low cost of deployment: "It doesn't need to be point of sale. Contactless tags and stickers cost literally pennies," says Dachs. Marketers could, he suggests, try mass deployments of interactive content in magazines and posters, and hope for a good return for a minimal investment.

NFC usage could also grow organically, with manufacturers such as RIM putting out NFC capable handsets and the relevant application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers. As NFC supports direct "bumping" of data between handsets, popular apps could spread "virally" between users. In turn, this could cement the appeal of NFC with marketers and developers.

More, though, needs to be done to make NFC a mainstream business tool.

According to Rob Bamforth, analyst for Quocirca NFC has potential as a payment method. But "doing something useful" with the technology in business processes and transactions will remain "one of the hardest parts."

"It's not so much the technology itself but how you get it to the right level of ubiquity and ensure that the commercial elements are lined up," he says. "Standardisation is a definite requirement."

The take up of NFC is also likely to grow, Bamforth believes, if the technology reducing the risk and operational costs of transactions is a major factor in Bamforth's view.

"It has to be lower transaction costs," he says. "It's no good if it's the same fees [as credit cards] to Visa or the banks and so on, it needs to have a reduced cost per transaction."

In recent years the average value of credit card transactions has fallen. Consumers are making lower-end purchases with their credit cards, and this is something merchants and banks would rather avoid. NFC payments could fill that gap, leaving credit cards for original use, as a way of paying for more expensive goods and services.

One positive aspect of NFC for retailers is support for automated audit and fraud components. Payment activity via NFC can be fully audited, managed and controlled digitally. Having an audit system that is more economical and accountable through automation will certainly appeal to businesses.

"NFC is only a way of connecting the end part of the process," says Bamforth. "What's important is how the technology interfaces with a business process and how it can alleviate the more costly and fiddly elements".

"It needs to be universal," he adds. "The last thing we want in NFC is separation into systems that don't worth with each other."

Counting the cost

In terms of investment, the upfront costs to businesses of NFC could be relatively small; more modern point-of-sale systems, for example, often already support NFC.

"The big [cost] element is the back-end systems, the IT processes and process handling," says Bamforth. "In reality the [financial] impact is more in the infrastructure network."

However, Dachs suggests much of the infrastructure groundwork had already been done.

"There's a legacy infrastructure for transit which is widely deployed," he says. "Banking is then the easiest one, the infrastructure deployed is completely standardised through Visa, Mastercard and so on, and NFC is established as part of that."

"Some merchants in the US, such as McDonalds, have contactless payment machines already and can use exactly the same models for NFC. The majority are hardware ready," he says.

Dachs points out that software upgrades might need some investment but overall, the costs for most businesses will be minimal.

Even so, the fringe nature of NFC could still act as a deterrent for businesses. To succeed, the component parts of NFC need to come together in a cohesive and usable way.

At Quocirca, Rob Bamforth believes that the different groups interested in NFC need to do more to move in step. "I must admit, I thought we'd be further on by now," he says.

Dachs agrees that for NFC to succeed, it still needs more effort. But he is optimistic about the current level of interest and investment in NFC technologies.

"First there are the manufacturers such as RIM, Nokia, Samsung, and Google. There is no manufacturer that is not looking at this technology," he says.

"With network operators it's the same thing." Orange, for example, has been promoting NFC across Europe including in the UK, as has Telefonica, the parent company of o2. O2 also has plans for the UK market.

"The UK NFC infrastructure is growing for payment," says Dachs. And he believes convincing end-users should not be a problem.

"It's very easy to educate the consumer to use their phones for payment," he suggests. But the longer-term success of NFC will depend on its adoption at the enterprise level.

Donations to WikiLeaks can now go through Visa and MasterCard, a partner of Julian Assange's enterprise has revealed.

On 7 December, DataCell's payment gateway, provided by a company called Teller A/S, blocked Visa and MasterCard payments on the request of the credit card companies.

Last month, DataCell, a WikiLeaks partner, announced it was planning to file a complaint with the EU Commission on the decision to block payments to WikiLeaks. It also planned to commence a lawsuit in Denmark to claim damages.

Without contacting DataCell, it appears Visa and MasterCard have allowed payments to WikiLeaks, albeit through a gateway provided by a different company, not Teller A/S.

"We have observed that an alternative payment processor that we have contracted with, has in fact opened the gateway for payments with Visa and Mastercard, and now also for American Express Card payments, which is an option we did not had before," explained DataCell chief executive (CEO), Andreas Fink.

"We choose to interpret this, as that Visa and Mastercard has in fact given in to our demand that the payment services was reinstated. In other words DataCell is happy to report that we are now able again to process donations to Wikileaks."

Despite the developments, DataCell said it would go ahead with the lawsuit in Denmark and most likely still lodge a complaint with the European Commission.

When Visa and MasterCard started blocking payments to WikiLeaks, hacking group Anonymous responded by targeting the two firms, taking down the latter's website.

Visa Europe is taking its lead from Amstrad creator Alan Sugar by searching for 12 apprentices to join its tech ranks.

The three-year training and development programmes will be spearheaded by Visa's Technology and Processing Services (TPS) arm, spread across its offices in Basingstoke, London and Reading.

It will offer candidates a blend of on-the-job and academic training, leading to a Foundation Degree.

"We are very excited about this IT Apprenticeship Programme and the opportunities it will provide hard working individuals who have a passion for technology and a love of people," said Adam Banks, Visa Europe's chief technology officer.

"As a business, we are committed to investing in our employees' skills. We recognise that IT professionals need to possess a mix of business, interpersonal and technical skills and through our Apprenticeship Programme we hope to nurture talent and equip them with these, which will in turn enhance our business."

As part of their placement, apprentices will work in a variety of business areas, which could see them getting involved with contactless payments, online security and more.

The ultimate aim of the programme, which starts in August, is to "develop future leaders." The closing date for applications is 6 May.

"With this programme Visa Europe aims to support the Government drive to make more apprenticeships readily available in UK companies, whilst at the same time providing young people with the training necessary to give them a head start," Banks added.

Samsung has become the latest mobile maker to jump on the Near Field Communications (NFC) bandwagon, the company confirmed this week.

It is set to launch a handset with an NFC-enabled SIM card for touch payments in time for the Olympic and Paralympic games in 2012.

The contactless payment technology will be provided by Visa. Both firms are sponsors of the games, taking place in London next year.

"Visa, like Samsung, shares the vision of leveraging our Olympic and Paralympic Games sponsorship to leave a lasting legacy in the market for banks, retailers, mobile operators and consumers," said Peter Ayliffe, chief executive (CEO) of Visa Europe.

"We are not only breaking new ground for Olympic partnerships, we are committed to enabling consumers to connect with mobile and contactless payments technology for 2012 and beyond."

Samsung has dabbled with contactless technology before, launching a year-long trial in Nice in 2010 to get 3,000 residents to use NFC-enabled mobile phones.

"Samsung is striving for long term change in the way we use mobile payments," said Seokpil Kim, CEO of Samsung Electronics Europe.

"In London next year, we regard the greatest show on earth as the perfect opportunity to showcase how this technology can make a positive difference to people's lives."

Details on the handset are scarce but Samsung confirmed in would launch in the UK first, before being rolled out across Europe, then the rest of the world, as more countries take on NFC technology.

Visa has introduced technology which it believes could save an extra $1.5 billion (968 million) in fraud losses.

A major update of the Visa Advanced Authentication, a real-time risk scoring technology, should improve overall fraud detection by around 29 per cent, the credit card giant said.

Detection of the riskiest transactions has been improved by a whopping 122 per cent, according to Visa.

In particular, the updates mean the detection systems can better identify "high-speed fraud" where criminals try to make numerous transactions in one fell swoop.

The enhancements come thanks to tweaks in fraud detection algorithms and better architecture to allow for wide-scale analysis of even highly complex transactions, all in real time, Visa said.

"The growth of digital currency has yielded vast benefits to consumers, merchants and entire economies around the world," said Jim McCarthy, global product executive at Visa.

"Continued success requires that every time a consumer uses their Visa card, there's confidence that the purchase will be convenient and secure."

The improvements should help reduce the fraud rate even further, which has been flat within the Visa system since historic lows were seen in recent months.

"Visa's continuous investments in the most sophisticated fraud-fighting systems have helped us to stay a step ahead of the criminals," McCarthy added.

Visa determines risk scores by looking at a global view of fraud and spending patterns across the company's entire network.

No doubt Visa will be hoping to prevent cyber criminals using the Zeus Trojan as well, which has caused havoc for financial institutions in recent times.

The prevalent Trojan was ranked third in our top 10 threats for 2010.

Tis the season to acquire

It seems some of the world's tech giants have decided to treat themselves this Christmas with a number of acquisitions.

First off, Google did a double buy, picking up Phonetics Arm and Widevine.

However, the search giant had an up and down week, after revealing Chrome OS laptops would not arrive before the end of the year.

Later in the week, Dell revealed it was in talks to acquire storage software company Compellent.

And then there was Salesforce.com's purchase of Ruby platform-as-a-service provider Heroku for a whopping $212 million.

The announcement was made at Dreamforce 2010, where IT PRO has been reporting from.

Tablet talk

Plenty of excitement surrounds the next iteration of the iPad as reports suggested it could be ready by February. As for new features, it appears a camera will be added.

RIM said it would be offering free tablets to developers who submit successful apps before the PlayBook's US release date.

Earlier in the week, the manufacturer said the software to feature on the PlayBook will soon find its way onto BlackBerry devices as well.

Intel, meanwhile, said it hopes its chips will feature in tablets next year.

When will WikiLeaks weeks end?

Of course, it was pretty difficult to stay away from any WikiLeaks news this week.

DataCell, a company which facilitates payments to WikiLeaks, said it would be taking legal action against Visa and MasterCard. DataCell claimed it had lost revenue as Visa and MasterCard suspended processing of donations to the whistle-blowing website.

WikiLeaks supporters have gone after companies such as MasterCard who have pulled services to Julian Assange's site, launching a number of DDoS attacks.

See IT PRO's analysis of the WikiLeaks threat to see whether your business could be affected by DDoS attacks.

The company which facilitates payments to WikiLeaks is taking on the big guns of the credit card industry in an attempt to open up payment processes once more.

DataCell has announced it will be taking "immediate legal actions" against Visa and MasterCard, who have both this week suspended processing donations to the whistle-blowing website.

The company claimed it was loosing revenue due to the payment suspension, as well as WikiLeaks losing donations.

"DataCell is only doing work for Wikileaks in helping them processing credit card payments," said Andreas Fink, chief executive (CEO) of DataCell. "We are helping an honourable organisation to get its funding it needs to sustain the load on their servers and deliver the messages the public wants to read."

He claimed the blocking of payments by Visa and MasterCard could severely damage the two companies' reputations and make them lose customers.

"This might be very well the end of the credit card business worldwide," he added.

The legal action is just the latest issue faced by the companies who have become targets of WikiLeaks supporters.

A hacker group calling themselves Anonymous' targeted MasterCard's website yesterday with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and successfully took the site down. Reports suggest Visa's website could be the next target.

WikiLeaks is responsible for leaking the contents of confidential US Embassy cable communications to a number of newspapers around the world, including The Guardian in the UK.

Founder of the website, Julian Assange, was this week arrested in London after he was accused of committing sexual assault in Sweden back in August. The Australian has been refused bail and is waiting to fight against an extradition order to send him back to Sweden.

Visa has been awarded an accolade by IBM in recognition of its leadership when it comes to information management and business analytics.

The card payments giant was given the Information on Demand 2010 Innovation Award this week at Big Blue's business analytics conference in Las Vegas.

Visa won the award for demonstrating innovation in the way it handles vast volumes of complex data there are more than 1.8 billion Visa cards in operation at present to prevent fraud, boost growth and enhance the payment experience for customers. More than 100 billion transactions, equating to more than $4.8 trillion in value, are powered each year by the company's VisaNet global network.

By analysing trends and gaining valuable insight into business data, Visa is able to look at each transaction and make decisions accordingly, claimed chief information officer (CIO) Mike Dreyer, who took to the stage to tell delegates how this theory works in practice.

"We think of ourselves as a payments technology company We continue to make technical innovations," he said.

"We apply innovation from an IT standpoint in a very disciplined and focused manner," he added before going on to cite an example where Visa used data analysis to deduce that the instances of fraud below $25 was very scarce. As a result, the company introduced a swipe and go functionality for transactions below that value.

"It's one of the best uses of information I've seen," Dreyer said. "It's a winner for everyone."

In another example, Dreyer said that Visa have ascertained that 92 per cent of transactions in India are still cash-based.

Given the country is more likely to invest in its mobile rather than fixed-line infrastructure going forward, Visa must respond to this with the services it offers and the form factors it targets, according to Dreyer.

Visa has released 10 commandments for vendors to follow to ensure their security best practices exceed basic compliance, ahead of new security requirements, set to be applied in the next few weeks.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI-SSC) outlined proposed changes to payment card industry regulations two weeks ago. Visa has teamed up with the SANS Institute to develop a list of pointers for acquirers, merchants and agents.

The tips promote stronger security processes that reach beyond the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) specified for software compliance and form a set of standards organisations should insist their payment application vendors, integrators and resellers adopt.

The SANS Institute is also partnering with Visa to provide further guidance on how to securely implement point-of-sale solutions through a series of training courses.

The PA-DSS regulations are updated at least every two years to respond to changing methods attackers use to access payment card details. Visa said the latest changes respond to inadvertent errors arising from payment application companies leaving systems and software improperly configured. It was found that many compromised merchants operated with those deficiencies for months, or even years, at a time, Visa explained.

The PCI DSS regulations were created in 2004 by Visa, MasterCard, Discover Card, JCB, and American Express to safeguard cardholder information and protect against theft and fraud. The regulations have to be met or exceeded by any company processing credit card details to a greater or lesser degree according to the number of transactions handled each year.

Any company that fails to implement the standards effectively are liable to pay heafty fines to the PCI-SSC and, in serious cases, can lose the right to process credit card transactions for the council members.

Visa's top 10

1. Perform background checks on new employees and contractors prior to hire.

2. Maintain an internal and external software security training and certification curriculum.

3. Follow a common software development lifecycle across payment applications.

4. Ensure newly released payment application versions are PA-DSS compliant.

5. Conduct application vulnerability detection tests and code reviews against common vulnerabilities and weaknesses prior to sale or distribution.

6. Actively identify payment application versions that store sensitive authentication data and/or retain critical security vulnerabilities, and notify all affected customers.

7. Maintain customer service level agreements stating that only PA-DSS compliant payment application versions will be sold and supported.

8. Implement an installer, integrator and reseller training and certification programme that enforces adequate data security processes when supporting customers.

9. Adhere to industry guidelines for data field encryption and tokenisation across payment applications that use these technologies.

10. Support capability of dynamic data solutions across payment applications.

Hackers have managed to copy the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode protection features in order to dupe customers at 15 top US banks, a security firm has warned.

Once a secure online banking session has been started on an infected computer, a Zeus Trojan will inject the credit card security program facsimiles into the customer's browser, Trusteer said.

The user will be asked to enter their social security number, credit card number as well as its expiration date and PIN or Card Security Value code.

The fake security programs will also attempt to trick people by claiming that new Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation rules require them to sign up to the Visa and Mastercard services.

This data is then sent back to the hackers who will use it to carry out card not present' transactions with retailers using the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode services.

By impersonating victims, the fraudsters are able to avoid detection.

"While some users may become suspicious when prompted to enter their credit/debit card information as part of the online banking login process, this attack uses the familiar Visa and MasterCard online fraud prevention programs to make the request appear legitimate," explained Amit Klein, chief technology officer of Trusteer and head of the company's research organisation.

The Zeus Trojan has been the cause of plenty of security worries in recent times.

One in every 100 computers is infected with Zeus, according to Trusteer, and earlier this year RSA Security warned that almost 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies in the US could have been affected by the malware.

Visa has warned its customers to be aware of the increased risk posed by key-logging trojans.

The credit card company claimed in recent weeks it had seen a rise in this technique, which obtains information from victims through software that captures and records their keystrokes.

The particular malware affecting Visa payment systems sends payment card data to a fixed IP address or email that the hacker can then access and use as he or she sees fit.

"In these instances, the hacker is able to install key logger malware on the point of sale (POS) system due to insecure remote access and poor network configuration," Visa said in a statement.

Visa admitted that key loggers can be difficult to detect but has recommended a list of security measures for retailers using the system to take on board as a precautionary measure.

These include removing unnecessary remote access, implementing a secure network configuration, regularly observing which software is installed and ensuring anti-virus is kept up-to-date.

Although Visa blames poor practice for the success of key logging, another security firm has put this rise down to the increase in Windows-based payment terminals, leaving systems open to the type of malware a home or office PC could get infected with.

"Trojan-driven keylogger attacks have been on the rise for home and office PC users for some time, but companies and home users are getting wise to the problem and are installing IT security software on their machines," said Mickey Boodaei, chief executive of Trusteer.

"For retailers, however, the problem is more complex, as many of their terminals are subject to leasing and maintenance contracts, meaning that they tend to rely on the supplier/maintained for their IT security protection."

Cambridge researchers have cast doubt on extra credit card security measures in a paper published this week.

Highlighting both MasterCard SecureCode and Verified by Visa, Ross Anderson and Steven Murdoch from the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University, claimed the 3-D Secure technology "breaks many established security rules" when purchasing online.

Firstly, the two researchers claim it confuses users who have become used to the traits of Transport Layer Security (TLS).

"Browsers have introduced measures to help customers, such as changing the colour of the address bar if TLS is enabled, and making it clearer who the domain name belongs to," the report claimed.

It added: "Because the 3DS form is an iframe or pop-up without an address bar, there is no easy way for a customer to verify who is asking for their password. This not only makes attacks against 3DS easier, but undermines other anti-phishing initiatives by contradicting previous advice."

The report also criticised how a user first establishes their password as rather than sending it to a registered address, it is done the first time a card is used online. It also means the user will be keen to get the purchase finished so often wont pay much attention to terms and conditions they are agreeing too, allowing banks to "shift liability to customers."

The researchers concluded from all of these points that "customers receive little benefit in security, while suffering a huge increase in their liability for fraud. They are also trained in unsafe behaviour online."

As a result, they are calling for banks to spend more on setting this system up to make it safer and urging new regulation from the likes of the EU to ensure people follow the rules.

"Circumventing security procedures is, as always, a focus for criminals and we value the input of academia in verifying the effectiveness of security features and systems," A Visa spokesperson said in a statement issued to IT PRO.

"Visa does not however, wholly agree with the premise and conclusions set out in the new paper by Cambridge researchers, which describes theoretical scenarios in which they believe Verified by Visa could be compromised."

We also contacted MasterCard for comment but the company had not responded to this request at the time of publication.

Visa is hoping to take the worry out of shopping by sending instant text messages to consumers whenever they make a purchase with a debit, credit or prepaid card.

The messages will include the time and amount spent - handy after a shopping binge or a night at the pub, so you know your transactions are for real.

Sandra Alzetta, senior vice president of innovation at Visa Europe, said the system means users know in real time how their card is being used.

"If something looks suspicious, this will give them the power to put a stop to any fraud taking place on their cards," she said in a statement.

The messages can be sent to a mobile phone via a text message, or via email and even using an iPhone or Android app.

The system is currently being trialled with Visa's own staff in the UK.

"Feedback from our current pilots indicates that consumers often receive the alerts before their cards are even handed back to them at the point of sale," added Alzetta.

The credit card giant has promised it's working with banks to make the tech available to consumers soon.

With mobile payments set to grow exponentially, mobile banking specialist Monitise has struck a five-year partnership with Visa worth some $13 million.

As part of the deal, Monitise will work with Visa International in a strategic development capacity, with the aim of supporting the payment giant's aims of ensuring its services reach a larger share of the four billion mobile devices on the planet.

"With the ever expanding growth in handsets coupled with increasing sophistication of mobile networks, mobile payments and services present significant opportunity for Visa as we continue to develop new ways to bring the benefits of Visa electronic payments to more people in more places," said Visa's head of global product innovation, Tim Attinger, in a statement.

Attinger, who will now sit on Monitise's advisory board, added: "In aligning with Monitise, we expect to expand the delivery of Visa mobile services to consumers around the globe, enabling them to seamlessly use their mobile phones to purchase goods and services, make payments, receive valuable information and offers, and transfer money between accounts, in a safe and secure manner."

In the same announcement, Monitise also confirmed that Visa International would gain control of 14.4 per of the company's shares while existing investors, UBS Global and Capital Group, will now up their involvement to take control of 12.9 per cent and 5.8 per cent of the available share base respectively.

"Visa is the world's most trusted, inclusive and innovative payments network. This alliance validates our unwavering commitment to building truly accessible, inclusive and reliable services over the past seven years," said Alastair Lukies, Monitise's chief executive in a statement.

"It is a landmark announcement in the mobile payment space and we are excited to collaborate with the world's foremost payments company to accelerate the convergence of payments services and mobile devices."

Just last month, analyst Gartner predicted that mobile payments will grow by 70 per cent this year, with numbers jumping to as high as 190 million by 2012.

Deloitte is trialling a new Barclaycard payment card that could cut down credit card fraud by adding an extra layer of security.

The Visa Corporate card has an embedded keypad and LCD screen powered by a battery, which allows users to enter their PIN and generate a one-time use passcode to identify themselves online or over the phone.

This could help secure online transactions without the need of a separate security token or device.

Stephen Ley, head of the UK payments team at Deloitte, said the card could also strike a blow against phishing attacks against banks.

"It will also allow you to check when you receive an email from your bank whether it has actually come from them," he said.

"You can enter the code from the email and it will tell you whether it is a proper email or not," he added.

The technology was developed with EMUE technologies.

The three-month pilot involves 500 Deloitte cardholders using the device to remotely access their company's IT system using a virtual private network (VPN), giving workers a corporate credit card and a secure way of accessing their company IT system within one card.

This could mean that workers would have a corporate credit card and a secure way of accessing an IT network within one device.

Ley said: "It saves us the cost of issuing a separate token. From our point of view it's convenient for our people, cost-saving and the future against fraud."

Visa trialled this technology with several other banks last year, while its chief risk officer recently highlighted the threat of card fraud in the economic downturn.

Heartland Payment Systems, the US payment processor that suffered a massive security breach leaving customer transactions exposed, lost $12.6 million (8.4 million) in costs directly related to the intrusion.

According to an earnings conference call transcript, chief executive Robert Carr said that more than 50 per cent of the expense related to a fine that Mastercard assessed against Heartland's sponsor banks.

"Obstensibly because of an alleged failure by Heartland to take appropriate action upon having learned that its computer system may have been breached," Carr said.

However, the chief executive claimed that Heartland responded properly to the possibility of a computer breach and took "immediate and extraordinary" action to address the breach.

Carr said that Heartland was going to "vigorously contest" the size of Mastercard's fine.

Heartland found out about the breach in January last year, notifying law enforcement as well as the card brands involved, with the data taken enough to have been used to duplicate cards.

However, there was good news for the beleaguered credit card processor, as earlier this month it returned to Visa's list of PCI DSS compliant service providers after being taken off in March.

Carr suggested that it could be a wake up call for other companies involved in securing card holder data, as Heartland would go beyond' the PCI standard and were on schedule to introduce a fully encrypted end-to-end terminal solution.

The dire world economy is one of the biggest threats to payment security, according to the chief enterprise risk officer for Visa.

Ellen Richey said at the Visa Security Summit in Washington, DC that it was common sense that a poor economy and bleak job market would increase the desperation and creativity of would-be data thieves.

She said: "Sure enough, security and law enforcement experts confirm that cyber attacks on consumers and businesses have intensified in recent months."

Although she said that Visa has made progress with the ongoing security battle, the reality was that the public perception of data security was shaped by the high profile examples of data being lost.

Richey had no sympathy for Heartland Payment Systems, which was taken off the PCI DSS compliant service provider list after its massive data breach last year.

She said that although Heartland was PCI validated, a lack of ongoing vigilance left the company vulnerable to attack.

She said: "Heartland will probably face fines and probationary terms proportionate to an event of this magnitude.

"While this situation is unfortunate, it does not make me question the tools we have at our disposal - in fact, it makes me resolved that we should all be redoubling our efforts to use every one of those tools effectively."

Richey said that identity theft incidents were increasing at a time when there was increasing pressures to cut costs, but said that data security cost cutting was short sighted and dangerous.

She continued: "But we may have to acknowledge that others in our organisations may not see things our way or feel that they have no choice."

In response, she called for a bigger presence from educators and other advocates of data security.

She said: "If we cannot convey the urgent need to maintain investments in payment security particularly in today's environment years of progress in building consumer trust could slip through our fingers."

Earlier in the week, Visa and the Merchant Risk Council joined McAfee's Cybercrime Fighting Initiative as advisory members.

A full transcript of the speech is available here.

Visa has taken the Royal Bank of Scotland Group's RBS Worldpay and US payments processor Heartland Payment Systems off its list of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant service providers.

It means the two companies are no longer considered compliant by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), created by Visa and other leading card issuers. These are the gold standard technical requirements created to help organisations that process card payments prevent credit card fraud, hacking and other security vulnerabilities.

It comes after Heartland Payment Systems fell victim to a massive security breach that potentially exposed customer information involving 100 million transactions. RBS Worldpay was hit by a hack, which the FBI said led to a million dollar ATM scam.

In a statement given to the Tech Herald, Visa said: "Based on compromise event findings, Visa has removed Heartland and RBS Worldpay from its list of PCI DSS compliant service providers."

RBS Worldpay replied in a statement to the Tech Herald that it received its last certification of compliance in June 2008, but that it was required to obtain a new one due to the data breach and was removed from the compliance list until it was complete.

It said: "There have been no material system changes that would have negatively altered this certification and we have in fact enhanced the security of our systems in the interim.

"Because of the criminal intrusion, we need to be recertified earlier than the normal schedule."

Heartland replied in a statement that it was cooperating fully with Visa and other card brands.

It said: "Heartland was certified as PCI-DSS compliant in April 2008 and expects to continue to be accessed as PCI-DSS compliant in the future.

"We're undergoing our 2009 PCI-DSS assessment now, which Heartland believes will be complete no longer than May 2009 and will result in Heartland, once again, being assessed as PCI-DSS compliant."

Companies which are found to be noncompliant with PCI rules face fines of up to $100,000 (70,600) a month or could see an end to their relationships with the big card firms. However, penalties are generally not openly discussed and the PCI had yet to respond for request for comment on the issue at the time of writing.

Click here to read why the PCI's Bob Russo thinks the damage to brand from a data breach is worse than a fine.

Online fraud has taken a bigger bite out of internet retail revenues in the last year, with 40 per cent of merchants seeing their rate of fraud loss increase.

This was according to figures from the fifth annual CyberSource UK Online Fraud report. One in eight businesses suffered fraud losses in excess of five per cent of their total online revenues, while rates of loss which were more than one per cent of revenue were increasingly common.

Overall the rate of fraud increased by 2.6 per cent, but the cost of fraud could not be measured in direct losses alone more than a fifth of merchants rejected over five per cent of orders on suspicion of fraud, with some of these orders likely to actually be valid.

Retailers also had to deal with the costs of various anti-fraud tools, as well as having to employ new staff or outsource new service providers.

Dr Akif Khan, co-author of the fraud report, said in a statement: "There are hopes for promising new anti-fraud developments coming from government.

"But even with this kind of support, the merchants' principle protection will for the most part, remain the tools and programmes they can assemble in their defence."

The report described some of the anti-fraud schemes that retailers had invested in to tackle the problem of fraud.

It showed that support for Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode had been the most popular, with 16 per cent of merchants integrating them in 2008.

Around 60 per cent of UK merchants employed these services. Surprisingly however, 10 per cent of merchants still used manual reviewers to identify fraud.

Dr Khan warned that manual reviewing was both expensive and inefficient, especially in the challenging economic conditions of today.

He said: "Merchants should be looking to improve the use of automated fraud screening processes so that they only need to review those orders that are flagged as suspicious."

Visa Europe has unveiled a pilot at four banks including the Bank of America in the UK to test a payment card with a built in security code function for online purchases.

An alpha-numeric display and keypad is built directly into the card. When making a transaction online, customers type their PIN into the card, which creates a one-time security code. That code is entered into the website for added security to battle card-not-present fraud.

Developed with EMUE Technologies, the card features a battery which lasts three years and is also being trialled at Corner Bank in Switzerland, Cal in Israel and IW Bank in Italy over the next few months.

Sandra Alzetta, head of innovation and new products at Visa Europe, said: "The interest in this solution in the industry has been overwhelming and we look forward to working with the banks involved in the pilots to gain greater insights into how effective this solution can be in the longer term."

Visa Europe and EMUE have two videos showing how the device works, available here and here.

As the company celebrates a decade of being alive, Symbian has issued a rallying call to developers to get out there and keep its code fresh.

Using his opening keynote at the Smartphone Show in London this morning, Nigel Clifford, the company's chief executive, talked about the how successful the platform has been in the last 10 years.

"[What you'll see at this show are] not just the technologies of today but also some of the inklings of what the technology of tomorrow will look like. In Spring we passed 200 million smartphones being shipped since Symbian opened its doors [and analysts are predicting that by the end of the year] a quarter of a billion smartphones [will have been shipped] since Symbian opened its doors with the Symbian OS inside," he said.

"So we're not letting up in the amount of innovation coming to market and there are dozens more products in the pipelines that you will see in the months ahead," he adding, referencing Samsung's announcement yesterday that it will be launching the i7110.

But Clifford was keen to stress that this success can only continue with the help of developers.

"We're going to be contributing code. But not just any code. Symbian code. It's been there from day one targeted at the mobile industry," he said.

"Compatibility is incredibly important. We've been extremely firm in Symbian about maintaining that compatibility commitment. The DNA of the foundation code is already with us; it's out in the halls [of this show]; it's in your pockets. Please have a look and see how you can handshake with that Symbian code right here [today]

"Code decays so we need to keep it fresh. We need to keep topping it up and developing it and that's what that the [Symbian] team are going to do."

Symbian has already made clear its intentions to make its OS free and to remove as many of the barriers to mobile development as possible, but what else does the future hold for the company and its community?

"We want to reduce that time to innovation. We want that idea to be linked to a handset and a consumer experience in double quick time," Clifford added.

"[We will be] taking the most popular OS, taking the most popular UIs and combining them to create brand new platform managed by a brand new entity. We hope we will be solving a conundrum. Up to now we lived in an either/or world. You can either have free code that's got a very small mobile pedigree. Or have [proven code like Symbian] but at a cost [We are] moving from that either or world [to one] which is proven/and. [Things are] going to be both proven in marketplace and free."

As part of all this, Symbian pledged to ensure it would beef up quality for developers to enable the ecosystem to continue to thrive both now and in the future.

"As we know every month millions and millions of devices are shipping with Symbian inside but also reputation[s] which also deliver really essential substantial - profits to the mobile industry. So, for me and my team, quality is the most important objective," he said.

"We've learned through working with the world's leading handset vendors and operators. So we have learned a lot of lessons along the way about how to build in quality from the ground up and not as an afterthought."

In a separate announcement at the show, Symbian revealed that several companies have joined its foundation in support of its open platform ethics. These new entrants include the likes of ARM, Huawei and Visa.

"Over the last two years, Visa has actively engaged with financial institutions, wireless operators, handset manufacturers and technology providers to develop and test mobile payments and services, ranging from payments, money transfer services, transaction alerts, merchant offers and an ATM and store locator service," said Tim Attinger, Visa's head of global product innovation and development.

"We believe that the Symbian Foundation platform has the potential to accelerate the delivery of those services to consumers around the globe."

Visa are looking to offer services to Google Android powered phones, including alerts when your credit card has been used.

The credit card network also said in October, the number one mobile phone maker Nokia would start selling the 6212 phone, which users could wave at an electronic reader to make payments and use for remote payments and money transfers.

Visa said it was still developing its application to allow in-store "contactless" payments by cell phone for Android.

But it said these services - already common in countries such as Japan - may not take off for years here as US stores would need to install new card readers and cell phones with the corresponding technology would need to be in wider use.

In the meantime, Visa said that it would offer transaction alerts and discount offers from merchants to Android users. The application will also work with Google maps and location technology to help users find nearby cash machines and stores where special offers are available.

Visa said that for the first few months, the application will be available just to Android phone users who also have Visa cards issued by JPMorgan Chase banks. It plans to open the application to other banks in 2009.

Earlier this week, Google unveiled the first Android-powered phone, which HTC is making and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile unit is selling.

But the initial Android device does not include hardware to support contactless credit card payments.

Tim Attinger, Visa's global head of product development, said that while mobile payment services have been slow to take off, the company sees mobile phones as key to adding new customers. Only 1.6 billion Visa cards are in use today, compared with more than 3 billion people with cell phones.

"We're absolutely going to start porting financial services into those," Attinger said.

Visa Europe has signed a five-year managed services contract with BT to migrate its transaction network onto the provider's 21st century (21CN) network for better service levels, support response times and security.

The agreement will move Visa Europe onto an internet protocol (IP) based network, so it can offer its 4,600 member banks in 36 countries more modern and efficient, future-proofed transactional network operational capabilities.

Visa Europe's card processing platform has been built specifically for the region, handling more than six billion transactions in 2007. It provides cross-border inter-bank switching, as well as primary domestic processor services in 16 European markets, where 11.4 per cent of consumers use a Visa card at point of sale.

Steve Chambers, Visa Europe chief information officer, said: "Visa Europe processed transactions worth 1.3 trillion [1 trillion] during 2007 so scalability and resilience go hand-in-hand for us. The trust of our customers is of paramount importance, and BT has given us the reliability, security and flexibility to successfully service our member banks and their customers going forward."

In October last year, it became independent of the global Visa corporation after gaining exclusive and perpetual financial licence in the region.

The deal also extends Visa Europe's seven-year relationship with BT. This latest commitment will see the payment processor use BT as its single supplier, to gain access to flexible network capabilities and facilitate more efficient technical upgrades and developments moving forward.

The announcement also comes only the day after BT announced it was investing 1.5 billion in its 21CN networks and two days after the first services were set to go live, following tests in Wales and Birmingham.