Credit Cards with Embedded Chip Technology

Hey there, it's Christina. And unfortunately, as you probably know, there are a lot of financial crimes and fraudulent activity going on out there in the world, both online and offline, that is compromising security and data privacy. And sometimes it's your personally identifying information that is at risk. That's your name, your address, your Social Security number, things like that. Your bank account information, your credit cards and your pci, which is your payment card information, and potentially your phi, which is your health information that you give when you're at the doctor's office, as far as your symptoms, your diagnoses, the prescription medicine that you're on, your X rays, your lab results, all sorts of things. And kind of focused on financial. Right now, as you know, the financial institutions are trying to counter this. They've been a little bit slow with their solutions and their speed of implementation. But what they're trying to do right now is replace all the conventional cards that had a magnetic stripe, you know, like the kind we used to swipe at the terminals, at the POS terminals, point of sale terminals, when we make purchases, when we're out and about shopping. They're replacing that with chip technology so that there is an embedded chip. A chip embedded in our credit cards or debit cards, both. And when you, you know, they're going through upgrades right now and, and transitioning to this so that when you check out, you just insert. You don't swipe your card anymore. We've been doing that for years and years and years, like 30 years. So it's habit. And sometimes we still try to do it, but the machines have a different mechanism now where you just insert the card, the kind with the chip in it, and there's a chip reader, and you just leave the card there until it beeps at you and authorizes, and then you can take it out. And sometimes it takes like, a little bit of time, which, you know, there's latency there, but it generates auto. Generates a unique alphanumeric code. It's a transaction code, unique for that transaction. And it's thought to be more secure. So I received my PNC business credit card today. It was a replacement card, so it has a chip in it. And I also have a couple of Chase credit cards now. They all have been replaced and they all have chips in them as well. But what I wanted to say about this, although this is a good step and it's, you know, it's headed in the right direction, what would be far more secure is if we took all of these physical cards, both the traditional Ones and the ones with chips in them and dematerialized them into software, just consolidated it all into a mobile app, much like Apple Pay and much like the Starbucks app so that you know that you would just have a barcode that you scan at the point of purchase at that POS terminal, point of sale, terminal, wherever you are, out and about shopping. So the good thing about that is there's a lot of benefits. One thing for the customer experience is that we take that business process and we reduce the friction and break it down into just one step, you know, and you don't have to wait. It's instantaneous. So it's really convenient and fast and we like that kind of efficiency. That's one good thing. And when it is on your phone versus a physical card, you know, a physical card is subject to loss or theft or even, I know there's like those sort of like, I can't remember those scanners that people can sort of be in, in your proximity in a certain radius around you and sort of lift like steal your credit card number. And I don't know if it captures the expiration date and the CVC code on the back, I'm not sure. But anyway, when you take these physical things and dematerialize them into software, you really enhance security even greater than these chip, these credit cards, physical credit cards still that have embedded chips. So I am going to say that we're probably going to see this go away also. And I have my privacy certification. It is the designation of CIPP here in the United States through iapp, which is the International association of Privacy Professionals. I take information assurance, security and data privacy very seriously. Don't like to see financial crimes or fraud or identity theft. All of these things are really, really bad. And there are ways in which we want to counter these activities and these individuals who are using their intelligence with adversarial intentions. I guess the other thing I wanted to say is one of my mentors is Michael J. Saylor. He's the CEO of MicroStrategy headquartered here in Tysons Corner and I have been following him for, since the year 2000. He is an exceptional thought leader in the IT field. He's been in the field forever and he has a unique ability to predict trends or I should say anticipate trends way ahead of time. He's a forward thinking person and he pre positions himself, he sort of knows what's going to be needed next and he pre positions himself there to satisfy those needs better than anybody else. Because the earlier you get there and the steps that you take and the investments that you make are compounding. So it's kind of hard for someone to catch up with you. But he is the author of Mobile Wave. It's a book on Amazon.com if you want to go check it out. And he does keynotes every year, sometimes at least once a year at the MicroStrategy Symposium Conference, but sometimes more frequently speaking engagements. If you ever have a chance to listen to him in person, definitely listen to one of his keynotes if you can't catch him in person, because I'm sure this video could potentially be seen by anybody on the planet. And MicroStrategy is a global brand for business intelligence, mobile BI. Listen to his keynotes on YouTube on the videos there he is exceptional engineer and an entrepreneur, a very unique combination and he's been a mentor of mine. And one of my most favorite products by MicroStrategy is Usher, and that's the security app and I'll leave a link for that in the description box below. A couple things for you to check out as you might be considering enhancing security and data privacy in your enterprise or even if you're a small business.