A personal vlog by Christina Haftman describing her experience as a Navy Federal Credit Union member (favorite Vienna branch) and receiving an EMV chip replacement credit card. She argues chip cards are a security improvement, advocates moving toward dematerialized mobile payment apps (Apple Pay/Starbucks), and explains how fraud-detection systems baseline consumer behavior to detect anomalies and trigger alerts. She closes with practical safety advice for holiday shopping.
Chapters
Hey there. It's Christina. I am a member of Navy Federal Credit Union, and this is a really, really large credit union. It services all of the United States service members, every branch, Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, which includes the National Guard, all the service members and their families, and. And I think it even extends to government contractors. But anyway, I joined here several years ago at the Vienna location, which is the headquarters off of Fallen Lane. And I just have to say, this is a beautiful building. It is my favorite branch. And it kind of sits up on a hill, and it has, like, immaculate landscaping. The grass is beautiful. There's flowers, trees. There's even a nature trail that's preserved around the whole building. It encircles the entire building. There's like a gazebo and a wooden, you know, wooden deck. There's paved trails. There's honeysuckle, there's a stream. Deer live in this forest. They'll come right up to you. It's just beautiful. It's relaxing, it's serene. And I used to live in the neighborhood right behind there. So I would walk to the branch and the atm, and it's absolutely my favorite branch, and it's a great credit union. But anyway, I just got the mail and they sent me my replacement credit card. And this is the one with the embedded chip. As you know, the financial institutions are migrating to chip technology to be more secure. So this is still a physical card, but it replaces the old one. And I got my other one from PNC and I got my ones from Chase. So this is. I think I have them. This is the last one. I think I have them all now. It's really a good step in the right direction. But what would be even more secure is to dematerialize these physical cards into software and just make it an app. You can. That you could have on your phone, much like the Starbucks app or Apple Pay, where it just is a scannable barcode. It really would be the ultimate in security and wouldn't be subjected to loss or theft like the physical card, which there is a lot of financial crimes. There is identity theft, there is credit card fraud, particularly in restaurants, where you actually hand your card over and they kind of disappear behind the scenes with it. You've got to be careful. I've had that happen to me. I have a good friend. It just happened to recently here in 2016. So you have to be careful. I like the apps. I do like the mobile apps and the scannable payments. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look at the specifications and the detail and description for the Starbucks app, it's like something that you auto replenish. There's Apple Pay. It's just, it takes these credit card numbers and the unique identifiers and the different things that are embedded in that chip and that were previously embedded in that magnetic stripe and just puts it into software and it is managed that way. And if you want to learn even more about this, the concept really is to dematerialize it into software and replace physical things, collapse it into something that is much more manageable and has less overhead. And a thought leader in this aspect of security who I have been following, oh my gosh, since E Commerce, the beginning of E Commerce, like the very first E Commerce in the year 2000, which is Michael J. Saylor. He is the CEO of MicroStrategy. You can find out more about that on microstrategy.com and they have a lot of enterprise applications, particularly BI, which is business intelligence analytics. Enterprise analytics for a lot of different industries, a lot of different sectors. And one of my favorite things, they do cloud computing too, and mobile. One of my favorite things about MicroStrategy is the app Usher and that is a security app. And it is by far the most sophisticated thing out there right now. And I have a preference towards that. So I'll leave a link to these things in the description box below. But yeah, make sure your credit cards, at least for now, are the ones that have the chip inside them. And as you probably notice as you're out and about shopping at retail stores and restaurants and different things, there is a huge level of effort going on to replace the POS systems or enhance the existing POS systems with the chip reader. So you're not going to be swiping. Well, some of them, you still swipe your card, but they're slowly migrating to the thing where you just insert your card and it reads the chip. So you have to kind of like see if they have it or not because we're in the middle of transition right now. It's funny, when I go out shopping, if I think about my chip card, they have the swipeable kind. And if I'm not thinking about the chip card I try to swipe and they have, I have to insert it. So it's just like, it's so funny because we're in the midst of transition. But you know, in a little bit here, everything's going to be exclusively chip, which means you'll insert your card and you won't be swiping anymore. But it's so much habit. Like, I don't know, I've had credit cards since, for 30 years, since like 1986 or 88 when I was in college. So we're all so used to swiping, swiping, swiping, vertical swiping. But now we're going to insert the card. So new habits. Hopefully it's keeping us more secure. But I would really like to do away with these physical things and see it dematerialized into something software. It's much, much, much more efficient. Let me know what you think in the comment section below. Especially if you are tech savvy and like this kind of stuff, or if you're maybe you're into technology in the sense that you know a little bit about fraud detection systems. I used to work with that too. And it's all about algorithms and patterns, patterns and pattern recognition and baselining consumer behavior as far as the type of purchases that are purchased, the stores, the zip codes, the sort of dollar range, amount, average, all that stuff is, you know, as you're going about your normal natural buying behavior, it is profiling you explicitly and implicitly and kind of creating, you know, a usage pattern. And the fraud detection system will be triggered if you make a purchase that is like really more expensive than what's typical for you, or if it's outside of your certain zip codes that you shop, or if it's something different than anything you've ever bought, like if you're vegan and it's a steakhouse, or if you don't drink and it's a liquor store, or if you don't travel that much and it's out of the country or, you know, just all sorts of different, you know, anomalies. It looks for anomalies and then it sends you. Depending on how you have it configured, it'll send you a text alert or an email notification or they'll just call you and say, this looks like it's out of your normal behavior. What's going on? Was it you? Was it you? Did you do this? Did you make this purchase? And it's either yes or no. And then they can freeze the card and, you know, do all the other necessary steps. But yep, there's fraud detection systems at work behind the scenes and hopefully you never have to go through that. But there are financial crimes and you have to be safe. Okay? So switch out your credit cards and enjoy the chip readers when you're out and about shopping. And be careful this Christmas season because there will be a lot of shopping offline and online and try to do things where you don't actually have to part with your card and hand it off to anybody you want to stay in possession of it, okay?
